Reading Feeds

Bob PageLeave a comment

RSS 2.0 RSS XML Feed RSS Valid Atom Feed
According to this NYT article,

Visitors to nytimes.com via R.S.S. feeds has soared from about 500,000 a month at the end of 2003, to 7.3 million last April, said Toby Usnik, the New York Times Company’s director of public relations.

Note it’s the PR director. All companies should make company news available via RSS — clearly there’s a market for it. With the next version of Windows supporting RSS and Atom natively, even the technology laggards will have reading capabilities. This popularity is one of the reasons so many firms are trying to capitalize on RSS and Atom (with ads in feeds, etc.).

It’s a shame companies like Apple and Microsoft say “RSS” when they mean “RSS and Atom” but nobody has really come together on a decent name, so one is better than two (or three, if you count Rdf). And for dawg’s sake, get rid of the ugly orange XML buttons. I think the Firefox ‘feed available’ button Feed has promise, except for the color. Maybe something like iTunes 4.9 new Podcast podcast button (but obviously not a microphone).

My name and color gripes aside (I guess I need my coffee fix), I’m surprised we haven’t seen more web analytics vendors announcing RSS features (analyzing the feeds, or making the results available via RSS), like we did when we saw everyone pile on other trends like Linux and mobile devices.

All the branding buttons — sheesh.

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Reading Feeds

My Head Is Buzzing

Bob Page2 Comments

Yahoo! Buzz OK, I admit it. I’ve never understood how Yahoo! Buzz works. I’ve just decided it’s one of those things I’m not supposed to understand, like financial accounting. I think my math skills should transfer, but they don’t. Maybe Swaroop C H can explain it to me (Buzz, not accounting).

Given that, Buzz did something with blogs. I think. So “Fark” gets the top spot on Y! Search, but it’s only #5 on Technorati?

I’m sure there’s something cool and insightful I can glean from this. Maybe about the different demographic profiles of Yahoo! Search and Technorati users. I’ll think of it, I swear.

My Head Is Buzzing

Would Dr. Atkins Delete Cookies?

Bob PageLeave a comment

I haven’t seen it discussed anywhere, but Jupiter did a follow-up survey to their report on cookie deletion. The goal was to give some context around the profile of the cookie deleter. While the summary from the report is that the longer you’ve been on-line, the more likely you are to delete cookies, there’s a table in the report that clearly shows a need for education on cookies:
Jupiter Cookie Deleter Demographic Survey
The trend that emerges indicates that older you are (in years, not in tenure on-line), the more you pay attention to stories about cookies, and the more you consider cookies an invasion of privacy. Coincidence? I doubt it. I think the doom and gloom reporting by the popular media actually feeds this. (Also note the general trend that while older Web users pay more attention to the stories, they report a lower understanding of how cookies work and what they are good for).

The education/advocacy sounds like something Safecount is up to.

Source: Jupiter Research Concept Report

Would Dr. Atkins Delete Cookies?

I’m a Million-air

Bob Page2 Comments

American Airlines
I’ve been a frequent flyer on American Airlines for many years. I didn’t know it at the time, but while I was flying back to San Jose from the east coast last month, I had accumulated over a million miles on American since I joined the program. Last week I got a letter from them, depositing additional upgrades into my account, and new luggage tags and frequent flyer card with a “1 Million” logo on them. The kicker is that regardless of how many miles I fly on American ever again, I’ll always be guaranteed to be at least in their Gold program.

I had heard that some airlines had special recognition awards for their million miles club members – now I know.

I’m a Million-air

The Matrix

Bob Page2 Comments

Today’s the day for talking about things in two dimensions, it seems.

A co-worker and I were discussing a work situation (not here, fortunately) where things are getting heated and personal. I made the statement “this is what happens when really smart people jump in” and he corrected me: “this is what happens when really political people jump in.” We agreed there are two dimensions to organizational trouble. For illustrative purposes, I threw together a matrix, and put some rather arbitrary labels on the quadrants:

Trouble Matrix

Later, I was in a discussion about how many of the people who provide huge amounts of value to the company go relatively unnoticed. They key is that perceived value to the company is a product of both your contribution and your visibility. So a work value matrix might look like:

Work Value Matrix

So I figured that was that, but then had a third discussion about how SDS can best provide value (we’re doing some planning at the moment). We have lots of systems in place that crunch data and provide a quantitative view, and we have business-savvy analysts to provide a qualitative view, but there’s always room for improvement both ways – and one view holds that combining the two allows you to add qualitative business rules to your analytics to build a self-running, decision-making optimization engine. That’s either web analytics nirvana or shades of a self-aware “HAL 9000”-like infrastructure, depending on how you look at it:

Analytic Value Matrix

Suddenly I’m thinking we need a matrix-building web site to crank these out. 🙂

The Matrix

Sponsored Links

Bob Page3 Comments

I was reading SEOChat’s How Your Search Data Can Make You Look Like a Star (as opposed to, say, a parallelogram) when I noticed something interesting. There are a number of links that have heavy underlining — heavier lines than for your average link. Hovering over the link with the mouse causes a “sponsor” pop-up to show, like a tooltip:

Seotooltip

This is like an interstitial, but it’s not intrusive. Fortunately there’s a “what’s this?” link within the pop-up box, and that takes you to an explanation: this is Vibrant Media’s IntelliTXT technology, which uses some JavaScript and CSS to provide the effect.

I don’t have time to dig into the technology that underlies this, nor what the analytics and privacy issues are, but it looks consumer-friendly, and provides ample opportunity for advertisers. Talk about in-product placement.

Sponsored Links