monitoring - TheWayoftheWeb

Bit of a round-up for a busy day…

September 8, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

It’s been a busy day at work, so rather than adding to my list of ‘things I should really blog about when I find time’ file, I thought I’d clear a few things out:

First up is the news that that two Australian girls stuck in an Australian storm drain decided to update Facebook for help rather than phoning for help. My first response channelled the spirit of Bill Hicks, but it certainly raises an issue about how younger generations wish to communicate, even in emergencies. Should emergency services monitor the main social networks as a necessity, just in case? What happens if you’re a user of a niche social site, rather than Facebook or Twitter? And no monitoring system to my knowledge is 100% accurate at picking up every message on a service…
‘Just’ 25% of women are influenced by social networks when making purchases. Firstly, the fact that 25% are conscious of the influence is pretty impressive considering how new social networking still is for many people. Secondly, they aren’t influenced by social networks – they’re influenced by other people – the social network just makes this less geographically limited. I’d agree with Matt Wise from Q Interactive, who conducted the survey, that “brands are failing to use social networks to effectively target women” (Except I’d use the words engage or serve women), but in a lot of cases, they’re also failing for men too. And I’m not going to mention the Brand Republic headline for the story…
Technorati appears to have given up on monitoring. I can understand that Technorati has lost direction, particularly given the plethora of real-time search services, plus Google blog search etc. But I’m surprised that rather than concentrating on making their core business better, they appear to be trying to emulate the big content sites – given the efforts of brands like AOL etc, I can’t see Technorati being a big draw for content consumers (although I could be wrong). And the fact that they’ve dropped blog roll links from their monitoring, whilst also producing a lacklustre monitoring nod to Twitter, really suggests that they’re in search of a plan. Because obviously as I write this, blogging is dead…

That’s probably enough for today – I’ll end on a more constructive note for Technorati – rather than throwing away the monitoring side of the business to jump on the blog content and real-time bandwagons, why not improve the core product, as people have asked for years, and perhaps also implement a decent alternative to Feedburner? Give me decent monitoring, monetisation and innovation in RSS delivery and I’ll be a lot happier, as my RSS readership continues to grow proportionally. There are a lot of issues with the real-time web at the moment, and the non-real-time web isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

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Filed Under: Blogging, monitoring, Real-Time Web Tagged With: australian, Blogging, emergency, facebook, girls, monitoring, purchases, ranking, Real-Time Web, social media, storm drain, Technorati

One response to the threat of big brother…

June 14, 2007 By Dan Thornton 2 Comments

I picked up an old-fashioned print copy of Wired the other day when I was at Stansted Airport. I quite enjoy reading about web topics in print, mainly because it gives my eyes a rest from the glow of the VDU. Strangely though, I find the American style of breaking up articles into two section, as Wired does, to really detract from the experience.

Anyway, one article caught my attention, in the current climate of internet ids and convergence between online personas and offline identities. Hasan Elahi was detained by the FBI after stepping off a U.S. flight due to suspicions he was a terrorist. Luckily, he’s actually a Rutgers professor and artist, but it led to a web-based project for him.

On TrackingTransience.net, Hasan details everything he does, and everywhere he goes. Meals, purchases, flights, it’s all there. And it allows him the perfect alibi, should anyone question his whereabouts and motives. And funnily enough, his server log shows hits from the Pentagon and the Secretary of Defense among others.

He predicts a day when so many people are posting so much online it puts Big Brother out of business.

it’s an interesting idea. Particularly when there is such a threat of identity theft and fraud online. But if your bank can see you’re in the newsagents in Cambridge when your card is being used online from a PC in New York, or in person in Manchester, it’ll make innocence easier to prove – if banks etc accept the evidence, which will take time for them to grasp the concept.

The only flaw is that it requires you to be absolutely honest. And that’s the case with all this convergence. If you’re in a relationship, for example, and you get approached by someone online who flirts, having all your info in one place could lead to huge problems. If you record anything that has broken any rules, then you’ve invited yourself to be caught. And what happens if you’re an attractive 17 year old girl rather than a 35-year-old male, and you try the same technique?

There will always be risks to every decision, and there will always be flaws. But Hasan has shown that rather than worrying about having your privacy invaded and spending your life paranoid and trying to cloak yourself, perhaps it’s more effective to just put everything on show and take what comes.

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Filed Under: monitoring Tagged With: convergence, hasan elahi, id theft, internet ids, monitoring, trackingtranscience.net, wired

I know more about you now…

June 8, 2007 By Dan Thornton 8 Comments

For ages I’ve relied on Feedburner and MyBlogLog stats for basic monitoring, as my audience figures aren’t big enough to really require much else.

But my basic curiousity has led me to trying , and so far it’s been great. In addition to incorporating Feedburner RSS stats, it also shows a variety of other interesting features, and it’s all in a clear, simply format which means I can actually understand what’s going on.

You get your visitors, their search terms, IP addresses, and their position on a world map. It also gives you an idea of what they’re doing while they’re visiting. And the Spy tool is a neat live realtime monitor of how people are interacting with a site.

At the moment, only thewayoftheweb is linked, but I suspect I’ll be registering my other sites tonight, as it’s nice and easy with a simple bit of click and insert code.

Depending on the size of your site, you may be required to make a small payment. From the registration info:

“Clicky offers free service for up to 3 web sites and 1,000 daily page views per day per site. We also have two levels of premium service which get you more sites, more features, and higher traffic levels – starting at less than $2/month. More information

When you first register, we give you 21 days of premium service for FREE! This gives you a chance to try it out with any web site and fall in love with some of the features we offer that you won’t find anywhere else (like Spy and RSS feeds). We’re certain you’ll love Clicky so much that you’ll want to support us by upgrading your account!”

And, as a bonus, there’s an affiliate scheme. And the funds can go towards upgrading my account once the first 21 days are over…So if you fancy trying it, and you also fancy helping me out on the back of it, use rather than a Google search!

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