A week ago I setup a trial crazyegg account because I thought their ability to produce a heatmap based on visitor clicks was pretty cool. The trial is limited to 5000 visits, and unfortunately I don’t think that crazyegg is properly measuring/tracking actual clicks. In my 5000 visits for the homepage of Interference.com crazyegg reported that there were only 413 clicks — and that number is incredibly deficient of the actual number of clicks. Maybe once they get their shit together it could be a useful service, but until then I’ll save my money and stick with good ‘ol grep.

Technorati Tags: crazyegg, heatmap, clicks, tracking, visitors, grep

The scary/interesting thing thats happening in the online space is how much $ some of these low traffic (in relative terms) blogs are able to demand when peddling their advertising spots. And while they may have return readers, and some of the more tech saavy may have a few rss readers, the majority of these sites dont have newsletters, don’t have interactive communities (besides ‘comments’), and really only have a 1 page view per person per day exposure. I hate to bring up old Web 1.0 terms, but the simple fact is most of the blogs out there aren’t ’sticky’. Sticky is good. Sticky means repeat exposure, which means increased brand awareness. Increased brand awareness means more word of mouth, and ultimately more bang for the buck. I honestly can’t remember what ads I saw on any of the blogs I read today, of the ones I visit daily. I think it’s much easier for community based site’s to modify their appeal to attract to blog-hoppers then it is for a single blog to mass a loyal and addicted community. Think of it this way, blogs are to community sites as one warrior is to an entire army.

Technorati Tags: blogs, internet, business, advertising

Apparently Kiko has tanked and is now for sale on ebay. Guess they couldn’t compete the Goliath Google Calendar. I’m sure this is just the beginning of the falling dotBOMBS from sky, better known as the Internet Web 2.0 gold rush. Maybe I’ll start reading FuckedCompany again for daily bits of amusement.

Technorati Tags: kiko, google, calendar, web 2.0, dotbomb

This is the best news I’ve heard all day, all week even. There is some hope left for the United States of America. I’ve been pretty pesimistic about the longterm likelyhood of American freedoms remaining intact but this is welcome news. I love the ACLU and EFF (although not directly related to this article).

Wooo hoo!!!

Technorati Tags: nsa, spying, wiretapping, aclu, freedom

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes on TechCrunch about Bloglines suggesting a standard that basically allows people to opt-out their blog’s RSS feeds from being indexed in the search engines. This has got to be one of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard lately. People, if you don’t want your life, business, family, or other dealings public… do this, simply don’t post them in a public medium. Best suggestion is to use a username/password mechanism for those that you actually wish to read your ‘private’ crap. Even then, most people use stupid passwords, easily guessed, or heck.. if someone really wants to get at your information they could always find a way to hack into it. If you truly want something to be private, don’t post it online. It’s amazing to me how many people lack the most basic common sense.

Technorati Tags: blogging, rss, feeds, search engines, privacy

A friend of Robert Scoble’s, Josh Wolf, was apparently jailed for withholding evidence (video) of a burning of a San Francisco PD car from the Feds. I’m really shocked to see Scoble using phrases like ‘the government has scary powers and is using them’ when it comes to something like this. I’m 110% for journalists being able to shield their ’sources’, but come’on, give me a break, shooting video of people committing a crime IN PUBLIC is hardly a ’source’. Robert, if Josh shot a video of someone committing a crime in private would you have posted the same way? I believe, either way, this is simply ‘withholding evidence’, and while I’m no lawyer I’d also guess that by withholding the evidence he could actually be charged with something a bit more serious than contempt. There is no justice in protecting criminals.

Technorati Tags: blogs, video, journalism