Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category
Posted on December 4, 2006 by Robbin Steif
So here I am, actually writing my post in the FeedBurner office. I figured that while I was here, I would learn about IE7 and Feedburner.
But first, let’s not forget what’s really important: The FeedBurner offices. Every bit as cool as the company. All the walls are different colors, and the tables are set up like industrial picnic fences. You can feel the energy in the air.
Anyway, John Z, my always-responsive correspondent, explained the issues to me.
The new IE 7 has the ability to subscribe to feeds (just click on the feed button.) But since it’s not a “standard FeedBurner thing,” I couldn’t understand why I was getting FeedBurner statistics showing me that I had IE7 subscribers.
The issue, John said, is about autodiscovery. Many blogs and podcasts have set feed preferences in their source code. That way, when someone goes to subscribe to a feed with IE7, if they have their autodiscovery set up as FeedBurner, they can track the subscription through FB. Blogger users like me are out of luck – Blogger doesn’t support autodiscovery.
So why do I still see IE7 subscribers? When someone clicks on a generic feed link on my blogsite, and they are using IE7 as their browser, IE7 knows that I have a feed (and knows that I have FeedBurner, since that’s the spot that the orange feed link usually goes to), formats it like a feed and serves up the opportunity to subscribe. Like this – see the Feedburner address in the address bar (with their flaming icon)?
Summary: If someone uses IE7 to subscribe to a feed with FeedBurner autodiscovery enabled, FeedBurner always measures it. If someone uses IE7 to subscribe to a feed like mine (no autodiscovery) they have to use the icons on my site, not merely the IE7 icons, for FeedBurner to notice it.
So for all you IE7 subscribers whom I don’t know about: hello out there! (And it is oh! so cold in Chicago.)
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
ps John Z gets all the credit for this post. I am just the journalist here and get credit for all the mistakes.
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Posted on November 26, 2006 by Robbin Steif
I consistently am reminded that not all website owners — even ecommerce website owners — have purely financial goals.
Usually, I see non-monetary goals that are about ego or competitiveness. However, I got onto the B&H website yesterday – Saturday – (because they have great prices) and was surprised to see that the shopping cart was closed, but would open at 5:45 pm.
I whipped out my calendar and saw that in New York City, where they are based, nightfall was at 5:08 PM last night. Then I went to Shimon Sandler’s site. He did a piece that I read a couple of weeks ago. At issue were Orthodox Jews who own e-commerce sites and wanted to turn off the sites on the Jewish Sabbath. (This time, I actually noticed that he linked to the B&H site as an example.)
B&H is not a small 10-page website. They have 424,000 pages according to Google. They sent me a 420 page catalog in the mail after I dropped $35 for a jumpdrive and a USB cable there. Online weekend shopping will continue to get stronger as just about everyone has broadband at home, and this is a big (private) company willing to forego plenty of Friday night and Saturday purchases in the name of their beliefs.
Read my other post on this topic: The Web, is it just about making money?
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
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Posted on November 2, 2006 by Robbin Steif
This just in: blogging is a genetic trait.
Well okay, the research report, done by podcaster Eric Mattson and professor Nora Ganim Barnes of the University of Massachusetts, didn’t really go there, or at least not that far. They wrote,
An overwhelming majority of the [80] bloggers [in the survey] believe the attitude and behavior associated with having an effective blog can be taught. The challenge, they say is teaching a business to speak in an “authentic voice” regardless of what communications tools it chooses to employ. These bloggers believe that if businesses practice open and honest communications consistently in all their activities, they will be successful, regardless of whether they blog or not.
In the final analysis, blogging is more than posts, links, comments and feeds. Instead, it represents an attitude for interacting with employees, customers and communities. Perhaps it is not so much about having a blog as it is about thinking like a blogger…
It’s true, they really don’t go anyway near the nature argument. But whether it’s nurture or nature, I think that the ability and inclination to write completely transparently and admit to being less than perfect doesn’t come naturally to some people.
Well, don’t take my word for it, check it out yourself. I was surprised to see that it is a $52 download, given that most academic papers are free. But then, I was also surprised to see that I was in the report. Now that I see my name there, I have this distant memory of answering a survey….
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
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Posted on October 20, 2006 by Robbin Steif
At the Summit, I heard Avinash Kaushik speak (or as Dylan says, How can you go to the Summit and not hear Eric Peterson and Avinash and Sam Decker?) And as usual, Avinash was wonderful, soon he will have groupies following him around. But I didn’t agree with one thing he said. I wish he were right – making more money for the company and more money for your boss is the road to success. Unfortunately, I feel like all anyone cares about is ego. (To be fair, he did touch on this.)
Customers say, “I don’t care what the right thing to do is, I want to do a better job of what my competitor is doing.” Or they say, at my last company we did it this way [five years ago, a million years in Internet time.] Or they say, my wife|husband doesn’t like it. It’s true, as Avi says, that the person with the largest income gets to decide, but my real issue here is, not only do they get to decide, but they too often decide based on what makes them feel important, not on what makes them and the company more money.
As a consultant, this is a hard place to be. (It is probably even harder as an employee!) I always feel ethically obligated to point out once to the customer that if we do it our way, they will make more money. Then when they say, “I don’t care,” I can say, “OK, we will do it your way.” But sometimes I wonder what they are paying for, doing it their way or achieving success.
I guess it is all in the definition of “success.”
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
ps I promise that I will do Regular Expressions Part VIII soon.
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Posted on October 12, 2006 by Robbin Steif
I really do love FeedBurner, and it’s such an appropriate gift – I just found out that I am speaking about feeds and blogging in November.
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
ps I promise that I will write Part 7 of my RegEx series, maybe even today.
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Posted on August 10, 2006 by Robbin Steif
Podcasters can consider this unpaid user testing: I usually write from the client’s side of the aisle, but tonight I want to be a customer. Specifically, I am a very avid listener of podcasts, yet podcasts and podcasters can drive me a little crazy sometimes — enough to make me stop downloading them (bad) or stop listening to them (arguably worse, since they don’t have my share of mind but their analytics can’t tell that. )
Mistake #1: Your website makes it really hard for me to subscribe to your podcast. If you already know what the feed address is, why can’t you tell me instead of asking me to click on a link that brings up my Quicktime and insists that I sit at my computer to listen to you?
Mistake #2: Your website doesn’t have links to sites/software that you/your guest discussed during the podcast. I know that you think I am sitting at my computer and listening to you, but in fact, I am driving, and I just can’t write down the name of a suggested destination, no matter how carefully you spell it, while switching gears and accelerating. For example, I listened to a wonderful (albeit too long) podcast today on design, with someone on Good Karma/Webmaster Radio. The speaker gave out a number of sites that might have been interesting to look at, but I was exercising and then driving.
Mistake #3: You think I am paying attention to you all the time. and Mistake #4: You think that I listen to you from beginning to end in one sitting Here’s the problem: You may ask a guest a question or start in on a news item that I already know or am not interested in. By the time I notice that you’ve moved on to a new, more interesting topic or question, you’ve already announced the topic name. This means that I get to hear the item but I never hear the subject or the subject name. If, for example, you are talking about a new pay per click feature, I can probably figure out whether the subject was Google or MSN or Yahoo. But if you are talking about some cool feature that a new, little-known website introduced, I won’t know what the site name was unless you find a way to close the news item or question with a reference to the site again. This same issue rears its head when I listen to only part of a podcast, get to my destination and turn off my iPod, only to pick up the next day without a clue as to what the specific subject was.
Mistake #5: Your equipment is lousy and that of your guests is worse. I am somewhat more sympathetic to this topic than the others because when I did my podcast with Eric Mattson, we used Skype. The sound was crystal clear yet the technology burped in the middle and we didn’t know it until listening. I was amazed that people listened to the end (and I know they did, because they sent me comments about this issue). I just find it too painful to listen to anything that is not mission critical when the equipment makes the voices hard to hear.
Mistake #6: You think I already know who you are and how your show works. For months, I listened to Danny Sullivan talk about “the chat room” on the Daily Searchcast and assumed that it was something you participated in if you were one of his subscribers. Eventually I figured out that the chat room he was referring to is a function of Webmaster Radio. I think.
Mistake #7: You spend too much time joking and wasting time and not enough giving me really hard information or important thoughts. Enough said.
Mistake #8: You work too hard to be funny even though you aren’t a funny guy because you think that’s the way it works. Well, maybe others will disagree, but I think podcasting is like blogging: your audience has to love you for who you are and not who you think you should be. (Or maybe that’s Bridget Jones.) I can’t even give you any examples for this one anymore because all those podcasters have long since been deleted from my iTunes.
Mistake #9: You allocate an hour for your podcast when 20 or 25 minutes would be just great. See Mistake #4.
Mistake #10: The name of each cast is not descriptive enough for me to know if I’m interested in the download.
Having said all that — I still love podcasts (at least, the ones that I haven’t deleted from my iTunes.) They enable me to multi-process, i.e. learn while I am doing a second activity at the same time.
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
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Posted on July 20, 2006 by Robbin Steif
Here’s the link to my interview with podcaster Eric Mattson of MarketingMonger. Eric is on a quest to reach 1000 interviews with Internet marketing executives and entrepreneurs.
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
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Posted on July 15, 2006 by Robbin Steif
I spent 25 hours in Portland, Oregon. Not only is it a jewel of a city, but everywhere you go, you meet web analysts.
I finally got to meet Brent Hieggelke, my Web Analytics Association co-chair. Brent used to be CMO at WebTrends but is now CMO at a London-based start-up, TouchClarity. TouchClarity uses neural networks (and probably genetic algorithms) to look at each visitor’s click stream and dynamically change the layout of the screen. That way, for example, the individual who is always clicking on sports stories will get served up ads for Sports Illustrated, and the person who is clicking through on beauty stories will get fashion ads. Although this might sound vaguely like split path testing, whereby different people see different options, it’s not the same at all: the goal of split path testing is to determine which one design works the best for everyone, whereas the goal of TouchClarity is to always customize the website for every individual.
I finally got to meet Loren Hadley from L.Hadley & Associates. Loren also works with Brent and me on the WAA Marketing Committee. At lunch, the talk turned to Google Analytics and I pointed out that the new invitation wait time is down now to about three weeks. Loren then told everyone that he had purchased an invitation from China for $.99 on eBay and received it instantly.
After corresponding with him for over six months, I then finally got to meet fellow analytics blogger Eric Butler. We went out for dinner with two of his colleagues from WebTrends, Kevin and Clay. Kevin gets all the credit for the title of this post (although just about everyone I met in Portland is in love with it. Brent practically dragged me over to a window to see Mt. Hood.) And then Greg Drew, CEO of WebTrends, magically appeared in the restaurant so that he and I could finish our WAA business. (I use the word “magic” because he had no idea where I had gone to dinner or that I was going out with Eric. Or that I even knew Eric. Am still not quite sure how he figured it out.)
I even got to meet with my friend Andrea Hadley (no relation to Loren, but they both like meeting other Hadleys) of NetSetGo from Vancouver, who offered up the observation that the WAA is like Canada — multicultural. (I think Switzerland and “neutral” would have been a better analogy, but hey, she’s Canadian, let’s give it to her.)
Finally, if there are any WAA types out there who would like to be on the Marketing Committee – send me email, steif at lunametrics.
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
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Posted on June 30, 2006 by Robbin Steif
Earlier this week, I wrote about subscribing to a blog or webzine via feeds (sometimes referred to as RSS, although it comes in other flavors as well.) One commentor, Steve, disagreed with my analysis that the subscriber is anonymous.
So let me pull apart the pieces of the issue.
1) Is your IP address anonymous when you subscribe to a feed? Technically, not at all. If you subscribe using a web service like Bloglines, your IP address comes through to the web analytics as a “referral” from Bloglines every time you engage with the blog. If you read feeds with software like Thunderbird, the blog or ezine owner can always put a picture in the feed which your computer has to go out and pull off his server and when he evaluates his server logs, there is your IP address. (I always think this is the reason that Avinash starts every post with a picture of a flower. It is his tracking beacon. But I am just speculating.)
2) Just because someone has your IP address, do they have your identity? Sometimes, it’s not that hard to figure out. Lots of times, it is very hard (and I would venture, sometimes impossible. But the commenter, Steve, has done forensic web analytics and I never work to figure out who someone is because I’m not part of the CSI team. Notice that even he said, “It depends.”)
3) Does it matter if someone has your IP address?Probably not in the context I was setting up. Remember, I was pointing out that you don’t have to give out your email address when you subscribe via a feed (still true and still a nice benefit.) And you can unsubscribe without hurting the author’s feeling (still true, because the author won’t notice that your IP address doesn’t show up the way he would if you send in a “Please unsubscribe me from this email list” request.)
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
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Posted on June 27, 2006 by Robbin Steif
A subscription — be it an email subscription or a feed subscription — is often how blogs, webzines and other content sites define conversion. After I wrote my post to Joel, talking about things he wasn’t doing right in his effort to to convert his readers to be RSS subscribers, a couple of people asked me, “How would you write an explanation of what RSS is?” So here goes.
What is RSS? Well, you really don’t care, do you now? All that matters is what it can do for you and how to make it work for you.
RSS Features. We’re going to refer to RSS by the more generic term, “feeds,” since RSS and its cousins will feed information to your desktop, much like a subscription to an email marketing newsletter feeds information to your inbox. Feeds bear another similarity to email: you need a place to read them, like Outlook, Eudora, your gmail account. Ditto for feeds: you can read them in software (that’s one of the reasons I like Thunderbird, I can read both my email and my feeds in one place) or you can establish a free account with the many webservices for reading feeds, such as Bloglines.
So it’s just like email, right? No, there are many differences.
- Your feeds will never be subject to your corporate spam filter.
- When you subscribe, you don’t have to give out your email address and fear that it will be abused.
- If you subscribe to an email newsletter, the publisher always knows about you, and you have to work to be anonymous. But when you subscribe to a feed, you really are anonymous.
- Being anonymous also means you can unsubscribe from feeds published by your friends without hurting their feelings.
- I haven’t been staying on top of the “charge to charge” for email by AOL and Yahoo! but I hear it is coming. Feeds won’t be part of that financial project.
So how does someone make it happen? Remember that you need a place to read your feeds, just like you need a place to read your email. (see RSS Features, above.) Once you’ve got that set up, find a feed you are interested in. You will usually see an icon (often orange) with the words, Subscribe, or XML or RSS or just Get The Feed. Click on it, copy the Internet address bar of the next screen you get, paste that into wherever your feed reader wants it, and you are in business.
Usually.
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
View Comments (4 Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous
The new IE 7 has the ability to subscribe to feeds (just click on the feed button.) But since it’s not a “standard FeedBurner thing,” I couldn’t understand why I was getting FeedBurner statistics showing me that I had IE7 subscribers.
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