I linked the other day to Graham and he only got a handful of traffic. Actually, what he’s hit is something interesting: not every link on a blog is the same. The attention swings are quite dramatic. John Furrier, when I linked to him, told me he got 10,000 visits. Why the difference? Because my readers are astute in picking up when I’ve linked to something really breakthrough and when I’m just linking cause something caught my eye.
I think this is the same reason why Riya got so noticed. The average Web 2.0 site just isn’t that interesting to most of us. So, a link to Zvents might get some buzz, but isn’t going to get really nuts. But everyone is looking for better photo management tools, and we’ve been promised face detection and recognition for so long that we’re hoping it comes around.
I would love it if my blog tool could tell me more about the things I link to. For instance, how much traffic did it send to that person? How many people linked to it after my link (that would tell me the viralness of an idea)? How many times have I linked to Graham? How does that compare to the number of times I’ve linked to Dori Smith or Dave Winer? What’s the reciprocity of a link? (Did Graham link back and continue the conversation?)
What else would you like to see your blog tool tell you?
Scobleizer 
When you link to my blog, you’ve done it twice, I got about 450+ hits, when i regularly struggle to break 20.
Commenting more on other peoples blogs also gets me hits as well.
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When you link to my blog, you’ve done it twice, I got about 450+ hits, when i regularly struggle to break 20.
Commenting more on other peoples blogs also gets me hits as well.
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Blog tools could certainly be programmed to have those features. I think most people just don’t care about them. The way things would work is instead of the HREF of a link tag saying “http://www.microsoft.com” it would say something like “http://www.scobleizer.com/redirect.php?url=http://www.microsoft.com”
Also, I think you should see big differences in moving traffic not just based on what you are linking to but how you link to it. For instance, many of your links are like this:
“Did you see what (link)The Grinch(link) said? He said he’s going to steal Christmas. He’s going to take everybody’s presents and destroy them.”
That I probably wouldn’t click on. However, this I might even though it says basically the same thing:
“We should all be careful this year because The Grinch is (link)going to steal Christmas(link). Check out his plans so that you can protect your presents.”
If you relate the contents of the link, I need not click. Plus, when a person’s name is the link, I tend to simply assume it goes to that person’s main site, not the entry on this particular topic. And in the second example, you aren’t just linking, but encouraging your users to look at it. So subtle and obvious differences in blogging style I think can lead to major differences in sent traffic.
p.s. I know those aren’t the best examples above, but this is a blog comment, not a doctoral dissertation, so forgive me 😉
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Blog tools could certainly be programmed to have those features. I think most people just don’t care about them. The way things would work is instead of the HREF of a link tag saying “http://www.microsoft.com” it would say something like “http://www.scobleizer.com/redirect.php?url=http://www.microsoft.com”
Also, I think you should see big differences in moving traffic not just based on what you are linking to but how you link to it. For instance, many of your links are like this:
“Did you see what (link)The Grinch(link) said? He said he’s going to steal Christmas. He’s going to take everybody’s presents and destroy them.”
That I probably wouldn’t click on. However, this I might even though it says basically the same thing:
“We should all be careful this year because The Grinch is (link)going to steal Christmas(link). Check out his plans so that you can protect your presents.”
If you relate the contents of the link, I need not click. Plus, when a person’s name is the link, I tend to simply assume it goes to that person’s main site, not the entry on this particular topic. And in the second example, you aren’t just linking, but encouraging your users to look at it. So subtle and obvious differences in blogging style I think can lead to major differences in sent traffic.
p.s. I know those aren’t the best examples above, but this is a blog comment, not a doctoral dissertation, so forgive me 😉
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Would like to see hyperlinks in blogs have all the metadata you describe, plus possibly a short author-defined text field describing the link.
Then I’d like that data to be able to pop up in a text bubble when my readers hover over the link with their mouse.
e.g. you have a list of favorites on the right of this page. I’d like to be able to hover over each along the lines of “Scoble says: I hit this one the moment a post is made. Great recipes for margueritas!”, perhaps annotated with a “N people followed this link in the past N days” or something like that.
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Would like to see hyperlinks in blogs have all the metadata you describe, plus possibly a short author-defined text field describing the link.
Then I’d like that data to be able to pop up in a text bubble when my readers hover over the link with their mouse.
e.g. you have a list of favorites on the right of this page. I’d like to be able to hover over each along the lines of “Scoble says: I hit this one the moment a post is made. Great recipes for margueritas!”, perhaps annotated with a “N people followed this link in the past N days” or something like that.
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When I insert pictures into a blog entry, I’d like the blogging tool to just figure out where they go and insert an appropriate href. It’s a pain to upload to URL, etc. It ought to be as easy to insert a picture into a blog entry as it is to insert a picture into a Word doc.
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Robert, if you install Measuremap (still on beta) on your blog you’ll get such kind of stats.
I can see on mine the “links in” and the “links out” per date and per post.
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When I insert pictures into a blog entry, I’d like the blogging tool to just figure out where they go and insert an appropriate href. It’s a pain to upload to URL, etc. It ought to be as easy to insert a picture into a blog entry as it is to insert a picture into a Word doc.
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Robert, if you install Measuremap (still on beta) on your blog you’ll get such kind of stats.
I can see on mine the “links in” and the “links out” per date and per post.
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Yeah I quit reading your blog a few weeks ago except via RSS just becuase it seemed every other link was too memorandum. This might be one of the first posts I have actually read “ots” (on-the-site) in a few weeks. Well this and the dude that tracks himself with the GPS. The inner geek in my had to check that out.
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Yeah I quit reading your blog a few weeks ago except via RSS just becuase it seemed every other link was too memorandum. This might be one of the first posts I have actually read “ots” (on-the-site) in a few weeks. Well this and the dude that tracks himself with the GPS. The inner geek in my had to check that out.
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I suspect that the time of the week as well as the number of other posts are relevant. The MSDN information, while I thought was important to get out there, only resulted in a handful of hits on my blog. What was interesting to me was that the hits were spaced out over the weekend. With the total around 10. The post went up late on Friday, was long, and was the first of several posts you put up before leaving on your trip. It’s hard to say whether the Microsoft marketing department was correct in not providing technical details about the different MSDN subscriptions or if the problem was location and timing.
Personally I want to blame location and timing because if I’m going to spend a couple thousand bucks (of my own money) on a product I want and need better information to help me make the purchasing decision. I want to believe that Microsoft respects that and that other purchasers need the same information.
And while I’m making wishes…I would like a million dollars or two. Small unmarked bills…
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I suspect that the time of the week as well as the number of other posts are relevant. The MSDN information, while I thought was important to get out there, only resulted in a handful of hits on my blog. What was interesting to me was that the hits were spaced out over the weekend. With the total around 10. The post went up late on Friday, was long, and was the first of several posts you put up before leaving on your trip. It’s hard to say whether the Microsoft marketing department was correct in not providing technical details about the different MSDN subscriptions or if the problem was location and timing.
Personally I want to blame location and timing because if I’m going to spend a couple thousand bucks (of my own money) on a product I want and need better information to help me make the purchasing decision. I want to believe that Microsoft respects that and that other purchasers need the same information.
And while I’m making wishes…I would like a million dollars or two. Small unmarked bills…
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Sounds like a job for a WordPress plugin… Heck, you could even turn it into a 3rd party service. Wish I could find the time to explore such an idea, but there’s that whole ‘job’ thing holding me back…
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Sounds like a job for a WordPress plugin… Heck, you could even turn it into a 3rd party service. Wish I could find the time to explore such an idea, but there’s that whole ‘job’ thing holding me back…
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The first time you linked to me “Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing” I got over 3,000 hits. The story was about AltaVista and my blog had only been in existence for a few weeks. http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/09/28.html#a11287
Another time you linked to me on my Napster story and that got over 4,000 hits. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/10/napster_the_ins.html
Both were really interesting stories, but they probably would not have been found by the average blogger with links from you.
I just did a post on Riya that has generated lots of activity. I linked to your story and got decent traffic, but it was also on Tech Memeorandum so that generated traffic too. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/12/what_problem_do.html
BTW, the responses to my blog on the Riya story by actual people who are in the beta is quite interesting. Take a look at the comments section to the Riya post. One of my readers did an extensive test with controlled samples and Riya failed miserably. He included links to the actual photos and detailed his test process. Sounds like Riya has a lot of work to do.
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The first time you linked to me “Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing” I got over 3,000 hits. The story was about AltaVista and my blog had only been in existence for a few weeks. http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/09/28.html#a11287
Another time you linked to me on my Napster story and that got over 4,000 hits. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/10/napster_the_ins.html
Both were really interesting stories, but they probably would not have been found by the average blogger with links from you.
I just did a post on Riya that has generated lots of activity. I linked to your story and got decent traffic, but it was also on Tech Memeorandum so that generated traffic too. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/12/what_problem_do.html
BTW, the responses to my blog on the Riya story by actual people who are in the beta is quite interesting. Take a look at the comments section to the Riya post. One of my readers did an extensive test with controlled samples and Riya failed miserably. He included links to the actual photos and detailed his test process. Sounds like Riya has a lot of work to do.
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Cyanbane: I’ve tried to be a lot less concerned about Memeorandum lately. It still comes up, but only when there’s something really remarkable there.
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Cyanbane: I’ve tried to be a lot less concerned about Memeorandum lately. It still comes up, but only when there’s something really remarkable there.
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I also like kim’s idea of all that data being shown to users in the hover popup. overLIB would be quite handy for displaying this data, and writing a WordPress plugin to parse out all the links you put in a post (pre-posting) wouldn’t be too terribly difficult.
You’d need to edit the link tag to include the overLIB code to display the popup onmouseover, and change the link so that it passed through a redirection page so that stats could be gathered (or possibly an Ajaxy javascript onclick event would work?).
Arg, curse you Scoble (and your comment authors!)… You’re killing me here with good ideas I don’t have the time to implement!!
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I also like kim’s idea of all that data being shown to users in the hover popup. overLIB would be quite handy for displaying this data, and writing a WordPress plugin to parse out all the links you put in a post (pre-posting) wouldn’t be too terribly difficult.
You’d need to edit the link tag to include the overLIB code to display the popup onmouseover, and change the link so that it passed through a redirection page so that stats could be gathered (or possibly an Ajaxy javascript onclick event would work?).
Arg, curse you Scoble (and your comment authors!)… You’re killing me here with good ideas I don’t have the time to implement!!
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Cyanbane: I’ve tried to be a lot less concerned about Memeorandum lately. It still comes up, but only when there’s something really remarkable there.
It is a decent service (I think more relevant (and soon to be less spam filled) than the Digg/Digg clones of the world when it comes to tech (and much less of a bitching festival than /.) but it just seemed like you were dropping it all the time. I still keep an eye on the feed for your good stuff though.
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Cyanbane: I’ve tried to be a lot less concerned about Memeorandum lately. It still comes up, but only when there’s something really remarkable there.
It is a decent service (I think more relevant (and soon to be less spam filled) than the Digg/Digg clones of the world when it comes to tech (and much less of a bitching festival than /.) but it just seemed like you were dropping it all the time. I still keep an eye on the feed for your good stuff though.
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Cyanbane: yeah, I get overly excited about things sometimes and write about them too much. Oh, well, at least you can tell I’m passionate!
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Cyanbane: yeah, I get overly excited about things sometimes and write about them too much. Oh, well, at least you can tell I’m passionate!
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Either that or psychotic and addicted… 🙂
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Either that or psychotic and addicted… 🙂
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Chris: that too! 🙂
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Chris: that too! 🙂
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Don, the problem is that Scoble is a liar.
He wants you to buy the idea of the kitchen sink instead of just considering a free plugin that would be added to Windows Explorer thumbnails, Picasa or even Photoshop.
More problems for Riya coming since they keep insisting that “they have solved the problem”. I wonder how putting the burden of users can make one claim that. Like XP SP2 bombarding users with popups is an evidence that the OS is much easier to use than previous versions. BS peaks all time high.
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Don, the problem is that Scoble is a liar.
He wants you to buy the idea of the kitchen sink instead of just considering a free plugin that would be added to Windows Explorer thumbnails, Picasa or even Photoshop.
More problems for Riya coming since they keep insisting that “they have solved the problem”. I wonder how putting the burden of users can make one claim that. Like XP SP2 bombarding users with popups is an evidence that the OS is much easier to use than previous versions. BS peaks all time high.
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Thanks for another link, we’ll see what happens.
The social effects are quite interesting. People clearly link to your site because they are interested in something they think you represent or can provide them. It would be ‘interesting’ for each of us to know what that thing is.
We can know quite clearly things that they aren’t looking for (knitting, cooking, etc.) but actually nailing down our online persona now that would be interesting, if a little scary. Imagine that you found out that people only wanted to read your site because they liked to laugh at how many mistakes you made or how terrible your english was; that would not be nice.
There is a fine line between an awareness of our readers and being a slave to them.
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Thanks for another link, we’ll see what happens.
The social effects are quite interesting. People clearly link to your site because they are interested in something they think you represent or can provide them. It would be ‘interesting’ for each of us to know what that thing is.
We can know quite clearly things that they aren’t looking for (knitting, cooking, etc.) but actually nailing down our online persona now that would be interesting, if a little scary. Imagine that you found out that people only wanted to read your site because they liked to laugh at how many mistakes you made or how terrible your english was; that would not be nice.
There is a fine line between an awareness of our readers and being a slave to them.
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You are the enabler 🙂
Since then I now get millions of downloads a month… You a king maker 🙂
I am so excited by what is happening with the social net. You will go down in history.
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You are the enabler 🙂
Since then I now get millions of downloads a month… You a king maker 🙂
I am so excited by what is happening with the social net. You will go down in history.
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