Some people look at graphs with blank faces. I happen to study them with a smile, like I did when I still had a cubicle job as a Quality Analyst. Ever since I discovered Google Analytics, I’ve used it religiously to increase traffic for a few niche blogs that I own with reasonable success. Google Analytics is a wonderful tool that gives you varied data to play with, and that you get all this sophistication free is just remarkable. However, data by itself won’t give you answers. Perhaps in a later evolution, GA will be able to generate action items in plain English, but that seems like a dream from a distant future. (more…)
Scout in Web | No Comments »
Tim O’Reilly said that in the age of Web 2.0, data is the next “Intel Inside”. With the ever increasing popularity of social networks, the volume of personalized user data is a virtual goldmine for Internet businesses. Facebook has been getting much press lately due to its tremendous growth, as well as emphasis on security and privacy. Interestingly, Dan Birdwhistell wrote an interesting guest post at TechCrunch, claiming to have a legal workaround to accessing and storing Facebook user data for 3rd party use. He says,
There’s one thing about Facebook that most people still seem to have wrong: that it’s a walled garden. Quite the contrary, the Platform allows for full data portability and has since its inception. It actually isn’t a walled garden at all.
(more…)
The saga continues. It’s been over a week since Google and Yahoo announced their advertising partnership, and the news is still sending ripples everywhere. New York Times admonished Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang for choosing to “become a pawn of the most dominant company on the Internet”, while Tim O’Reilly defended Yahoo!’s move as a smart way to lose deadweight and focus on what they do best. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington warned about the dangers of a Google monopoly and continues to note the ever-increasing number of top Yahoo! executives jumping ship (114 execs as of last count). (more…)
Whether you’re a pro-blogger, developer, or marketer, keeping an ear to the ground is always important. Of course, there are many ways to do this, and looking at web stats is one of them. Alexa, Comscore, Hitwise, Google Trends – there’s a lot of choices out there, but the last one, due to the sheer volume of data Google has, is something that has great potential. Lately, Google has made some announcements regarding new features of Trends, and though it’s far from perfect, I’m glad to note the active development in this tool.
Do you have a MySpace account? No? Let me guess why.
MySpace has been quite popular for some time, and some people have actually used it to successfully promote their sites/businesses. I, however, could never bring myself to create an account with them. The reason? MySpace is a sight for sore eyes. The pages are crammed with widgets at every nook and cranny, they take forever to load, loud thumping music shocks you into a heart attack, navigation makes you run in circles, and the blogs look like they were stuck in the 90s. Clearly, it’s in dire need of a major makeover, and that’s exactly what they’re promising. So, better late than never? (more…)
Hitwise, an Internet metrics company, has just released the latest statistics in search engine usage for the US and UK. The data was collected from a sizeable sample of 10 million users. As expected, Google is leading the pack, even posting slight increases that help it pull farther away from its main rivals. (more…)
Scout in Web, Website Promotion | No Comments »
Google Gears is aiming to change the online landscape, and there’s a good chance that it will. If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s a browser extension that primarily allows web application to work offline. If you use Google Docs, for example, Google Gears will create a database on your hard drive where it store your files, and these will always be synched with the Google Docs database when you go online. For people on the go who sometimes find themselves without an Internet access station, this add-on is heaven-sent.
There’s a buzz spreading through the web design community like a virus. It’s called sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement). What is sIFR? Essentially, it’s a technology that replaces short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in the typeface of your choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems.
It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. Here is the entire process:
JonGos in Design, JavaScript, Web | No Comments »
There’s been an explosion of resource, recruitment and tutorial sites, in Part 2 we continue our review of the biggest and the best of them, analyze their brands and make suggestions for their growth. Make sure you read Part 1 before continuing.
05. PSD Tuts (Tie)
Founder(s) - Unknown History - PSDTUTS is a blog/photoshop site made to house and showcase some of the best Photoshop tutorials around. We publish tutorials that not only produce great graphics and effects, but explain in a friendly, approachable manner. About the Brand - A strong thematic cohesiveness throughout their family of websites. Alexa.com Ranking - 14,664 Other Properties - audiojungle.com, flashden.com Ideas for Growth - Their team has successfully created a design and tutorial blog, the audio search engine and a monetized flash resource site. They should take the business model they used for Flashden.net and apply it to resources for AfterEffects or Premier. Alternatively they could create a portal for scripts like Hotscripts.com
JonGos in Content & Blogging, Design, General, Photoshop, Web | 9 Comments »
While recently experimenting with charting for web applications, and the various charting libraries popular among the PHP community, I came across the Google Chart API. I’ve since decided to outsource, as it were, all my charting needs to the API, a service provided by Google to generate just about any graph you could possibly need in your web application; after the jump, here’s why you should do the same. (more…)
Akash Mehta in Web | No Comments »
