Andrea Olivato’s Blog

As the most important thing both for professionsts and companies on the net is “being talked about“, find and monitor buzzes is essential too. Professional analytics applications like Trackset Conversionlab help a lot, crawling the net and finding news, reviews, forum messages and more, containing the website, the brand or some specific keywords chosen by the interested company.

Bloggers usually can not afford such a professional tool and have to find other ways by their own. Google blog search is very useful in this case but it is quite limited and do not give a complete idea of what the net people think about you/your service.

In my opinion the best low-cost (I mean without-any-cost, but it sound worse) way to find people actually talking about you is using Twitter Search.  If your brand/name is not such common it is very easy to obtain a good result with no stress. The following url is what I used to retrieve informations about LangID,the new web service I created some days ago.

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=langid.net+OR+%40langid+-from%3Alangid&rpp=50

Let’s see what those parameters mean:

• http://search.twitter.com/search : that’s the base url, you should have understood that
• langid.net+OR+ %40langid : this means I’m looking for people talking about my website (langid.net) or even my twitter account (@langid as %40=@)
• +-from%3Alangid : I used this to exlude myself from the results (my @langid twitter account)
• &rpp=50 : this just means to show me the first 50 results

The result is great, you can see people insulting the service, or even liking it or just spreading the address. But that’s not over.

As twitter search apis are very easy to use you can use that result to create a funny, real-time and real-people made ‘talking about us’ page. This is langid talking about us page.

To obtain a similar result you can simply change the url I previously suggested you from search?parameters to search.atom?parameters. Here’s my example :

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=langid.net+OR+%40langid+-from%3Alangid&rpp=5

This would cause twitter server to return a Json file instead of a web document. You can use those data together with a Php/Java parser to obtain a page similar to the LangId one.

This is fascinating in my opinion… anyway as bloggers always have to criticize I will do it too… As you can see from the advanced search webform, it is possible to look for tweets with positive/negative attitude. Unfortunately for twitter guys this just means looking for happy or sad faces ( or   ) inside the tweets. I really (really really really ) would like to see something semantically achieved here…

I have been using koego since its alpha version and as today it reached the beta status I decided to write something about it.

Koego is not just a web analytics tool with some gadgets for bloggers. It was conceived, designed and realized just for blogs. Even if it is still in development it is clear that it’s going to be a complete platform to supervise a blogger activity in all its aspects.

The layout is very minimalistic, simple and clear with few and relaxing colors. The homepage resumes some reports, pointing out the ‘ego‘ of your site. As the name suggests the ego is a kind of score assigned to your site based on many parameters (i don’t know them exactly I think it’s based on visits, visitors, kind of referres, comments and something like that). The ego score is shown in any report you see in the homepage, so that you can understand which referrer/keyword or generic activity is increasing your score the most.

Inside the platform there are a couple of reports that really impressed me. First of all the referrers (sources of traffic) report is very useful. Different kinds of referrers are grouped in a logical order. After the common ‘direct access’, ’search engines’ and ‘direct link’ you can find Social network, Social bookmarks and Blog Related groups. Social network and Social bookmarks are obviously the respective categories of websites and my favourite Blog related consists in websites which are commonly used by bloggers to improve their blogging experience. So in this category you can find wordpress, mybloglog, various aggregators etc. On the right image you can see grouped referrers and complete referring links. Below the complete referrer report, grouped in the categories I described.

Other interesting reports are the System related ones. Particulary I appreciated the attention paid to categorize and version all the most common operative system. So if you have a visitor coming to your blog with a Mac you will be able to know if he has the latest X version or the previous ones. Linux OS are divided in their most famous distributions, so you can have the detail of Gentoo users (probably if you find someone on your blog from gentoo it’s just me ), Ubuntu ones and so on… Windows is divided by versions too.

The resolutions report is very uncommon too. Insted of giving the single resolution data, it is grouped by types. So you got datas for mobiles, smartphones, small, standard, wide and large screens and finally TVs. You can have a look to OS report on the left image while below you can see the resolutions report for my account.

The latest thing I want to point out is that Koego does not use any flash for charts. Everything is realized by Javascript, drawing in canvas. This makes the page load so much more fluid and quick than in flash based analytics platforms. Also using JS allows users to interact directly with the chart, hiding or showing some datas. Below two lines charts where it is possible to interact.

If you want to use Koego you can ask for an invite to the beta using the form in their sign up page.

Just wanted to deny myself about my previous article about Who’s Amung stat service.

Since one month all the stats provided from who’s service have been perfect, without any downtimes. Congrats to the staff, for resolving stability problem and returned to offer a great stat service.

I always liked who’s amoung service, and I personally congratulated their staff about their brand new web site style. However in the last week I noticed lots of ‘black holes’ in their tracking system.

As you can see from the above image, for each day of the week I got one ore more hours of 0 visitors while the other web analytics tools I do use, reveal a normal activity of the site. I checked some other websites and they seems to have problems located on the same (italian) hour so I believe this can be a generalized problem.

I really hope they are in troubles for having received so many new sign up requests after the new release, and that this is going to be solved soon!

Yes that’s what I mean by : ‘LinuxFeed is growing fast‘

Future Whish List :

• English Version
• Offering a blogging host ( Wordpress Based )
• Owning an in-server built OpenId service