On a visit to Yahoo!’s Burbank offices for a presentation and some planning meetings I got the opportunity to go to the NHL playoff game between the Detroit Red Wings and the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. I’d never been to a hockey
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Hockey Really Is Cool Live
Liveblogging Web 2.0 Expo: Transitional Media 2.0
I posted a liveblogging entry over on the Right Media Blog about the Traditional Media 2.0 session. The session was kind of all over the place with what was discussed, but check it out if you’re curious.
Liveblogging Web 2.0 Expo: Starting Up 2.0
My first session here at Web 2.0 Expo is “Starting Up 2.0: Strategies for Pitching, Financing & Growing Your Web 2.0 Startup” with Jeff Clavier of SoftTechVC and Rob Hayes of First Round Capital.
Rob started up by asking how many people in the room had started a company in the last 5 years, and about 80% of people raised their hands. He then asked how many people would be starting one soon, and I think teh other 20% raised their hands.
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Ducks Squeak through the First Round
Not the best game in the world, but a win is a win. Winthrop is up next.
Go Ducks With Soda Boxes
It’s been a while since I posted about the Oregon Ducks. To celebrate their successful completion of the regular basketball season at 23-7, I snapped a camera phone shot of some soda boxes at the new Ray’s grocery store in Eugene.
As a side note, this new grocery store actually has a rentable conference space for group or office gatherings. I instantly had a thought that I could make like Michael Scott and rent out the space for an off site “field trip” for my team at Right Media. “Who wants to take a trip to Ray’s!”
In case you’re wondering, those are Squirt cases intermingled with Sprite cases.
Speaking at SXSW in Austin on March 10th
On March 10th in Austin I’ll be on the Online Publishers and Ad Networks panel at SXSW.
The panel will be moderated by publisher Jonathan Weber of NewWest.net, and will have me representing Right Media and the ad exchange market, Cody Simms of the Yahoo Publisher Network representing the contextual network market, Larry Allen of Tacoda covering behavioral targeting and ad networks, and Justin Ward from Feedburner covering RSS advertising.
Hopefully it will be educational and worthwhile, I know I’m looking forward to it. I’ve never been to SXSW, so I’m anxious to check out many of the other sessions and speakers as well.
Cracked the 1000 RSS Subscriber Mark
As you can see in the Feedburner chicklet to the right, this blog has now cracked the 1000 subscriber mark. A big help was the 300 subscriber jump that occurred when Google Reader and Google Personalized Home Page numbers were added to Feedburner’s count.
Either way, I’m happy to achieve the somewhat meaningless mark, but what’s more interesting is that the way publishing has changed as I’m pretty sure now that those RSS subscribers probably provide more attention and readership on this blog than actual on page viewing. Obviously this means RSS tools and advertising should just continue to grow in the future, even though there has been a lot of hype about RSS for years now, we’re still ahead of the mass user adoption curve.
Fox Interactive Acquires Strategic Data Corp
Interesting news on the ad optimization front as Fox Interactive acquired ad optimization company Strategic Data Corp. I admittedly don’t know much about Strategic Data Corp. but I aim to find out more. From all the articles it appears that they plan on building in their optimization technologies to help monetize Fox’s massive amount of advertising across their network of sites including MySpace.
One thing I should note though, in the Techcrunch article Marshall Kirkpatrick writes:
For a related example of a large content network taking control of an outside ad optimization service, see our coverage of the Yahoo! deal with Right Media in October.
Just to clarify, Yahoo! didn’t “take control” of Right Media, they purchased a non-controlling minority stake of 20%. It’s important to note the difference as Yahoo! behaves as a client of the exchange and has no control or special rights in the buying and selling of advertising on the Right Media Exchange.
ClickTracks Has Free Classes with Avinash Kaushik
ClickTracks has announced a couple of free online classes coming up this next week on February 26th and 27th with web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik.
The class is about “Unleashing the Power of Web Analytics” where you can get some advice from Avinash on how to make a difference in your business with web analytics. It sounds pretty worthwhile, but I’ll be in New York on business and won’t be able to virtually attend.
There’s also an interesting story behind the class where Avinash asked for more free features in ClickTracks Appetizer product, and they’re going to use web analytics to test the results and decide if they keep the additional features. In the process, they asked Avinash to teach a class.
I’ve always enjoyed how ClickTracks has made themselves different from the rest of the web analytics vendors out there. Their product has always had a different feel and workflow (although I must admit that I used ClickTracks twice in the past and didn’t stick with it), and they seem to behave differently by doing things like these free classes.
Now You Can Track Your Videos With Vidmeter Tracker’s Video Analytics
Vidmeter is a site I’ve found useful lately as the best way to find good/hot videos on the web as it tracks videos across all the major video sites and shows interesting data about them as well.
They’ve taken it one step further and now have a free service called Vidmeter Tracker that allows anyone to track their own videos or videos that they’re interested in and see statistics on these videos across 23 different video sites.
It works by entering in the URL of where the video is located on the various video sites, and then Tracker starts compiling data for you and updating it daily. You can get the data by logging in to Tracker, subscribing to an RSS feed for the video’s stats, or having it email you and your colleagues email reports.
What does it track?
- All-time views and comments combined
- All-time views and comments on each video site
- Graph and chart of traffic trends for the last 20 days
- Shows the video in a flash player within their interface
Screenshots
Click the thumbnails to view screenshots of the Tracker interface:
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What sites can you track on?
- Atom Films
- Bolt
- Clip Shack
- Break.com
- my.break.com
- Brightcove
- Daily Motion
- Google Video
- Guba
- Grouper
- Hi5
- iFilm
- Game Trailers
- Kill Some Time
- Live Video
- Metacafe
- Myspace
- Revver
- Veoh
- Vimeo
- vMix
- vSocial
- Yahoo
- Youtube
- Zippy
What’s also really cool about Tracker is that you don’t have to be the person who submitted the video to the video sites. So it’s a great way to track videos of your competition or just track videos you may be interested in to see how much traffic they’re getting and from where.
Overall, Tracker is very easy to use and well done. It feels like a surefire winner to me for all the new video content producers to have their own version of web analytics. Let the Video Analytics era begin.
