Performancing Metrics: A Solid Start

I have tried a slew of blog metrics tools, including MeasureMap (my fave), Blogflux (my former choice, which just stopped updating one day), BuddyMap, SiteMetrics, and I don’t know how many others over the years. Now Performancing has entered the fray with its newly announced metrics tool.

So, I tried it, and it failed for me immediately. My blog is “/message”, but it keeps resolving to “http://www.stoweboyd.com”, ignoring the “message”. Ok, but then I am getting no metrics, despite putting the javascript into my templates.

No one else seems to be complaining, so I will ping them.

This is just another example of how things don’t fit together in the blogosphere. Here’s another recent annoying example. I wanted to take the most popular post RSS feed from my Measuremap account. The RSS is secured by password, but they allow your to embed the password in the URL like this —
http://stowe.boyd%40gmail.com:password@alpha.measuremap.com/syndicate/1271/popular_posts
— with the word password replaced with my real password. So I tried to paste that URL into the Typepad feed capability so I would be able to display the most popular posts in the margin of /Message: it barfed, without an error message. I pasted a Feedburner feed into the Typepad feed, and that worked, so I tried passing the Measuremap feed into Feedburner: their parser barfed. (They say they will tweak it to accept this form of URL, sometime in the future.) I tried to pass the Measuremap feed to Feedigest, and it did not barf! However, I was unable to get any sort of useful output from Feedigest’s various options, since the Measuremap RSS doesn’t look exactly like the typical blog RSS, although it is apparently well-formed.

What I would really like is for Measuremap to just give me a javascript I can plug in to display the 10 most popular posts at /Message, today. Theoretically, RSS is supposed to be really simple, isn’t it? But none of these commercial companies — these aren’t kids fooling around in their garages — can get this stuff to work consistently.

Good luck to Performancing, though, and all the others. There is clearly a long way to go before all this stabilizes and maturity shows up in the tools we are all relying on on a daily basis.

16 March 2006 Permalink

On The Conference Thing: Etech, SXSW, Unconferences and Monocultures

ETech has turned into one of those events — like many others — where the real value for me is coming from the myriad conversations in the hallways. Not to detract from the presentations, per se, but that’s seems to be where the real deal is for me, here.

A few highlights from 8 March 2006:

• At a press lunch dedicated to the upcoming Where 2.0 — now on my calendar — I met Di-Ann Eisnor, one of the founders of Platial. Several members of the fifth estate seemed intent on trying to rip her guts out because there are stalkers in the world, and they might decide to use a geolocational tool like Platial, so what is she doing about that? Wow, was that over the top, or what. Nat Torkington, the conference chair who was trying to steer the lunch discussion, finally stepped in and shut down the idiots that seemed to be clamoring for editorial review of all user content at Platial. Oh sure. Tim O’Reilly made some insightful visionary statements, but the feeding frenzy of a few self-appointed protectors of the greater geosphere really dominated the whole lunch.
• Tom Coates of Plasticbag.org and Yahoo gave a great talk on the Web of Data, laying out principles not only of design but a higher order goal of participation in the edge-based infrastructure of Web 2.0. Nice.
• Clay Shirky spoke, which I have already posted about (see Social Software is the Experimental Wing of Political Philosophy). Very cool.
• Jon Udell presnted on Attention Focusing Strategies, which helped me focus my attention on the topic, at least so long as he was on the podium.
• The Data Dump session, subtitlted Fun with Graphs and Charts, was real fun. Speakers included
  
  • Marc Hedlund, Entrepreneur-in-residence, O’Reilly Media — I came late, so if he presented something I missed it.
  • David Hornik, General Partner, August Capital — when the world’s funniest (and most insightful) VC looks at six months of his email content, what do we learn? VCs are lazy bastards who do nothing but talk about wine, vacations, and the occasional IPO.
  • Ian Kallen, Architect, Technorati, Inc — There’s a lot of splogs out there, but thank god they don’t cover their trails very well.
  • Eric Lunt, Co-founder and CTO, FeedBurner — Really cool visualization (with audio!) about the rise of feeds, culminating in 200,000 feeds under management at Feedburner.
  • Roger Magoulas, Director Market Research, O’Reilly Media, Inc. — what we can learn about tech trends from book sales and job postings? Ajax and Ruby are really, really hot.
  • Adam Messinger, VP, Product, Gauntlet Systems — As we always suspected, 80% of the work is done by 20% of the programmers, based on his analysis of a bunch of open source projects.
  • David L. Sifry, Founder and CEO, Technorati, Inc. — An update of his State of the Blogosphere preso, showing that, yes, the blogosphere continues to double in size every five months. Most interestingly, he answered a few questions that I sent along recently. 28% of blog posts now have tags using the rel=”tag” microformat. What he didn’t answer — he hasn’t dug out the data — are these questions:
    
    1. What is the average number (or distribution) of tags per tagged post?
    2. How many posts reference the average tag?

I found refuge in the hallways, since the ETech format is highly structured, and the sessions were all jammed. Most of the sessions had people sitting in the aisles and leaning against the walls. I was also surprised — it’s my first ETech — at the depressing ratio of women to men. Perhaps its inevitable that a conference that is constantly referring to its audience as the “alpha geeks” would be so skewed, but it’s still annoying to me. I am not suggesting some nefarious scheme here, to marginalize women or something, just that the whole tone of the show is hyper geeky. As a complement to that — because geeks are as conservative as cats — the structure is a series of parallel tracks just crammed with techno-goodness: technologists with a never-ending parade of powerpoints. Very little organized socialization — not even a defined IRC backchannel! My recommendation would be to go single track, and drop 2/3 of the sessions, and open up the schedule for more loose stuff: but O’Reilly is probably delivering exactly what the alpha geeks want.

9 March 2006 1 Permalink