Taking a look at Disqus

The Bivings Report is built in WordPress, which comes with a robust commenting system out of the box. Due to this, I’ve very rarely looked at third party commenting systems like Haloscan. I haven’t really had a comment problem so there was no need to experiment with these third party tools.

But I recently set up a personal blog on Tumblr, which does not have commenting built in due to its reliance on reblogging instead (which is cool). I wanted people to be able to comment on my blog so I spent the ten minutes it takes to integrate Tumblr with the third-party tool Disqus. (Check out Fred Wilson (A VC) or Dave Winer’s blog for good examples of the tool in action).

Here is a quick breakdown of what I see as the pros and cons of Disqus after playing with it for a few months: Continue reading “Taking a look at Disqus” »

“Ted”: Not Just the Name of that Dumb Guy in Your History Class

"Ideas worth spreading" is the motto of a growing annual convention that is held in Monterey, California.  The Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference covers a wide range of topics, from science to the arts, and nearly everything in between.  My fraternity brother, Chris, recently made me aware of this conference, which has been conducted since 1984.

There is an annual membership fee of $6000, however, this fee not only covers attendance to the events, but also attendance for other special gatherings and DVDs of the presentations.  Since not everyone can afford to be this enlightened, the official website was created in response, providing the highlights and best speeches from the conference.

Continue reading ““Ted”: Not Just the Name of that Dumb Guy in Your History Class” »

Technologies that will Impact the 2008 Elections (Follow Up Post)

A little over a year ago I wrote a post that guessed which emerging technologies would have an impact on the 2008 election cycle. I figured I’d take a quick look back and grade my predictions, as well as list a few new technologies that have emerged since I last covered this ground.

Here are the grades I would give my predictions (original post is here for background):

(1) Ning (Niche Social Networks)

I’d give myself a C on this one. Many of the major Presidential candidates launched niche social networks on their campaign sites, hoping to encourage connections among volunteers. However, none of these niche networks really got that much traction except for Barack Obama’s. And no campaign used the specific service I recommended, Ning (which I think is still worth trying). Ron Paul supporters took the novel approach of trying to turn the entire Internet into a niche social network about Ron Paul, which is another thing entirely. I think there is still something to the idea of niche social networks around campaigns, but most of the action has been taking place on the more established networks (Facebook, MySpace, etc.).

(2) Mozes (Broadcast Text Messaging)

I’d go with a B for this one. The Obama campaign launched a quite aggressive text messaging effort where users are encouraged to text the message “Hope” to 62262 to subscribe to text alerts alerts. Other campaigns have experimented with similar programs. The Obama campaign program works pretty much the exact same way as I described in my post, but no one is using Mozes specifically. It is also really hard to measure the impact of these programs without getting access to subscriber figures.

Continue reading “Technologies that will Impact the 2008 Elections (Follow Up Post)” »

Lying with web traffic figures

<Cross post from our ImpactWatch blog> 

Most people want to boil the success or failure of a website down to two easy-to-digest statistics. How many people came to my site? How many pages did those folks look at? Take those two numbers. Draw a line over time. If they go up, we’re doing good. If they go down, we’re not.

As the web has gotten bigger, these broad eyeball-based metrics have become less and less useful. Sure, eyeballs are still extremely relevant for websites that are selling online advertising. But for most websites, the total number of visitors really isn’t that important except in giving you very broad strokes. More important is whether your website is reaching its target audience.

Let me give you a couple of examples from our own blog, The Bivings Report.

(1) A while back this article of ours made it on to the homepage of the social news site, Digg. For those of you not familiar, this means we got thousands of visitors coming to our site all at once (this phenomenon is actually called the Slashdot Effect). To this day that is still the day we got the most visitors to our blog.

But to what end? As you’ll see, being on Digg didn’t lead to some great discussion in the comments on our site. In looking at usage patterns before and after being on Digg, we didn’t see a long term bump in users or RSS subscribers. Basically, being on Digg was (1) a nice ego boost for us and (2) a fun way to run an ad hoc stress test on our servers. Beyond that, it really didn’t accomplish much.

(2) Similarly, we wrote an off-point blog post a while back on HD-DVD vs Bluray. Based on our site stats, I’d a lot of people are researching which to buy as hundreds of people are visiting our blog each day after finding our article on Google. Like with Digg, this traffic is doing us very little good. We’re not a consumer electronics blog and the people coming from Google on that particular search aren’t being converted from visitors into readers.

If you boil our bottom line for this blog down to a line chart showing visitors over time, these two events make us look great. Our trend line is going up. Hurray. But in both these cases, the people we attracted aren’t really interested in what we write about on our blog and aren’t members of our target audience.

The overall traffic numbers don’t really tell us whether our blog has been truly effective or not. To know that, you’ve got to look a lot deeper than visitors and page views.

The Web and the Race For the White House

Now more than ever, presidential candidates are making their respective presences felt online. Mediums such as blogs, YouTube, and social networks like MySpace and Facebook are giving candidates a new platform to utilize. Inspired by TechPresident and the Social Media Index concept, we decided to take an aggregate snapshot at how much buzz the candidates are getting in advance of Super Tuesday. Those making the biggest splashes on the web aren’t necessarily the same ones leading the polls. While pollsters employed by the likes of ABC News and CNN show Hillary Clinton and John McCain as favorites to square-off for the White House in November, the two aren’t their own party’s most popular candidates online.

With over 12,000 links to his official website from Google Blog Search, 350,000 Facebook supporters and more than 15,000,000 people viewing his YouTube channel daily, Barack Obama seems to have the internet race won among Democrats. Compare those numbers to Hillary’s less than 9,000 Google Blog Search links, less than 88,000 Facebook supporters and only 5,693,448 in daily YouTube viewership. Obama also enjoys more support on MySpace, with over 252,000 friends to Clinton’s 171,761, all according to the latest techPresident stats.

As for Republicans, the most popular man online is ironically the same one sitting next to last in the polls. Ron Paul has 14,215 Google Blog Search links to his official site, more Facebook (81,639) and MySpace (125,733) support, and more daily YouTube viewers (12,104,767) than anyone else competing for the Grand Old Party’s ticket. No other Republican comes close to Paul’s online celebrity. Mitt Romney is second on Google Blog Search with 5,905 links. Mike Huckabee has the second most YouTube viewers a day with just over 5,000,000. John McCain is second on MySpace with 44,689 friends, and Huckabee is currently second among Republicans with 47,510 Facebook supporters.