The Second Click and Lijit Search Wijits February 11, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Blogging, Links, Video, Wikipedia, Trends, Liberatr, statistics, Public Relations, OrlandoScene, interface, Second Click, Web Services, Google , add a commentIf you haven’t noticed the lovely Lijit search wijit on the left sidebar here, please leave your feed reader and come check it out. This is a very interesting concept to me - they’re taking the Google Personalized Search tools and providing a very user-friendly (and statistical) interface to the tool. A mash-up with a business model? Amazing. I’ve also read on their blog that they’re going to start tracking comments on your sites as well and I suppose integrating that with the other statistics and search metrics you’re already getting. Good times.
Also on the Lijit blog, I read about a new coined phrase, or meme, or whatever - The Second Click.
At Lijit we know from watching reader behavior on our publishers’ sites that a huge percentage (33%-50%) of readers come from horizontal search…
We also know that the normal behavior of one of these readers is to read the article that Google referenced and then hit the back button. Reader gone, moment lost, second click wasted.
This is precisely why the Lijit Re-Search feature was added to the Lijit Search Wijit. When you have this feature turned on, Lijit hooks the reader into staying for a third click and beyond. Bottom line, you only get one click to keep to your readers around – do the most you can to mine that opportunity.
The easiest way to see this re-search capability in action is to perform a search. Search for “Second Click” - you should come right back to this article. Also, there’s a fun tag-cloud view of the most popular search terms. This really helps - according to my stats, I’ve had 173 re-searches in the last week, and I the fact that the commonly searched links are right there is responsible.
In the “real world”, the Second Click has been coming up because of an announcement by Google to compete with Wikipedia. In the fallout from this announcement, there was some speculation and dot-connecting going on specifically about “The Fight For The Second Click”.
Wikipedia is clearly dominating Second Click traffic right now. There are also plenty of folks chasing down second click property - social networks, Mahalo, review sites, anything with the word “social” in the description, really. We’ve certainly reached the point to start developing the second click strategy at Petentials. Even my two biggest and most sellable ideas right now are all about the second click, but that’s not how I would have characterized them until I knew about this meme.
It’s not enough to just have the blog anymore - I’ve made a point to actively attract second clicks on sites like OrlandoScene.TV (home page, also on posts) and Orlando Video (also see a post), for example. The “most recent” only really helps if you’re on the 11th or earlier post, but there’s a nice wordpress plugin called related posts I’ve installed all over the place. It requires one line of database massaging, but it’s easy and worth it. I’m not positive of how often it works, but as i have several blogs to track, throwing in some click-tracking would be very much worth it.
(side note) For Lijit, I’ve suggested that instead of most popular searches, they should have options for most recent or recently popular, and I think they’re rolling it out soon. Lijit’s customer relations are amazing. I was personally greeted by Kevin Hawkins, who actually took a few minutes to read my blog and personalise my welcome letter. This was a huge ego boost, especially from a blogger’s perspective. I’m always saying - simply acknowledging someone’s work is the biggest compliment you can pay a media producer.
Drupal Easy January 23, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Career, Podcasts, HowTo, Drupal, Video, Liberatr, Web Sites, Facebook, Teaching, open source, Branding , add a commentA while ago, Charlie and I were talking about how we could share our love of Drupal with the rest of the world. Our natural desires to create original content and extend the reach Cervo Systems helped us develop the idea for a website, a podcast and a community around making Drupal accessible to people with no knowledge of programming.
Welcome Drupal Easy to our family.
Today, I answered the first question on the site, about pathauto aliases and XML Sitemaps. I hope we keep getting some mid-level questions like this, but also some much simpler questions.
I have a screencast planned for the near future that compares Drupal against industry standards for security. This will hopefully be the sort of thing PHP haters and team leads will be able to use to understand that Drupal is awesome.
One day in the future, I’d also like to come up with a coherent set of lessons we can sell in a video book format.
I also have a Facebook page which currently has 8 random fans attached, and that’s actually how I got the first question.
I think this is going to be lots of fun, and maybe help us make a little cash once we get that part of it going. Who knows?
New Year’s Reflection January 7, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Site News, Podcasts, Orlando, Liberatr, Web Sites, floridacreatives, Entrepreneurship, Contributors, PodCamp , 1 comment so farLast night, I talked to (more like was interviewed by) Stephen McKenney Steck, the President Emeritus of the local PBS and NPR affiliates here in town. He was very interested in what I’ve done and what I’m doing, and he asked me several times to send him links to everything I talked about. While composing the email, I noticed a pattern. I would talk about the project and then I felt compelled to say “but this is what it’s really supposed to accomplish”. This gets me thinking…
It’s no secret that I’m making most of my bread and butter working for a local startup, but there’s a catch: I can’t keep myself stocked too well with bread and butter this month. This is no slight to Darren, Michael and Kia, it just happens that I need to find some additional sources of income.
I actually had a decent amount of inquiry about my person and my skills pre-holidays, but then the holidays happened and I don’t know the status of any of these requests. I’m thinking it’s time for a little of Plan A, a lot of Plan B. More on Plan B in the future, I promise.
For now, here’s how I described my past work to Mr. Public Broadcasting Himself:
Florida Creatives Happy Hour
The Florida Creatives is a networking group that meets every Third Monday of the month in downtown Orlando. I was inspired to form this group by several usergroups and meetups I’ve participated in the past - we meet in bars, because the best friendships and conversations are often had in the hallways after an event or in the bar across the street. In addition to our standalone after-work events, we’ve also hosted Happy Hours after the Enzian Film Slam and the Orlando Fringe Festival. I’d really like to have a program that lets us get in touch with students, both college and high school, and a long-term goal would be to have a summer camp for High School students to encourage them to pursue creative careers and programs of study.
Our Email Announcement List
Blogging Fringe
A community site built around the Orlando Fringe Festival. The Fringe is arguably the best 2 weeks of the year in Orlando, and I thought it deserved a fan site. I always try to get multiple people involved in writing reviews, posting updates or making videos, and in 2007 we were given the “Fringe of the Fringe” Award, which is exactly what we try to be. I was always hoping that my work on this website would get me some paying jobs, but artists don’t have any money, so it’s mostly a labor of love.
Ryan Price vs. the Media
My personal blog. I talk about media, technology, local happenings and whatever is on my mind.
Orlando Scene TV
The evolution of the Blogging Fringe concept, applied to Central Florida, with the caveat that all the posts would be video-centric, and another collaboration-heavy project. My friend Rebekah Lane is an actress, so she and I produce most of the videos together. We have also had other contributors, each with varying degrees of acting and production experience. I had always hoped this could be an open channel for anyone to submit video, and I hope we can get to that point as a city some day.
Pop Means Cuddle
A show “just for fun” I record with my friend Marc. He runs a music and media review site, and we get some music and interviews with musicians, and we’ve also interviewed the creators of an Internet TV show. So far, it appears we have a little Internet and a little music, which makes lots of sense if you look at the two people who host the show
Liberatr.net
This is the home of any podcast or blog I have produced myself, and those of a few friends. Many of the shows are co-hosted by friends, and 4 of them were produced solely by other authors, while I provided technical support. I had hoped that by having multiple “channels” we could attract a larger audience and become more attractive to advertisers. Now I am seeing the podcasts and blogs as a great way to support a larger content network and vice versa.
I realize as I read these descriptions back to myself that I always state a goal that is very far in the future or very much unrealized. I don’t doubt that if I could quit my job and apply 40+ hours a week to any one of these projects, I could reach said goals.
I have now come up with an even bigger, better project that is a real sink or swim scenario. I must either quit my job and start making money at this idea or decide that I’m still not ready and continue freelancing and consulting for a few years until I come up with another crazy scheme. I suppose this is the same dilemma all entrepreneurs face. The real kicker is the fact that there’s no easy answer to this question: When do you take the plunge?
OSTV ELLA Music Fest Teaser November 18, 2007
Posted by Ryan in : Podcasts, Music, Events, Video, Travel, Liberatr, Contributors, OrlandoScene, Arts , add a commentThe first ever ELLA Music Festival took place at the Rogers Building in downtown Orlando in October 2007. The festival was a celebration of female singer/songwriters and female fronted bands.
In this video, one of the performers, Rachel Goodrich, turns the tables and interviews our host Becky for a change! We also get a sample of Rachel’s musical stylings in the background, recorded upstairs just minutes earlier.
This is just a tiny sample of what happened at the ELLA Fest. Subscribe to OrlandoScene.TV to get updated when new videos are posted.
More videos coming out every week on Miro and iTunes. If you’d like to get involved by suggesting an event or venue for us to highlight, get in touch with us at OrlandoScene.TV - thanks for watching.
PodCamp Orlando October 20, 2007
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Podcasts, Orlando, Links, Events, Video, Trends, Travel, Liberatr, Facebook, Teaching, PodCamp , 2 comments
Orlando has at least 4 healthy podcasting networks, as well as hundreds of travel shows, religious shows and whatever else you get from the regular podcast crowd. It’s high time that we get an event together.
We had a BarCamp in September with 170+ attendees, but there was only one podcast session, led by myself. I realized we could take some of the geekery out of it and turn it into a media convention, akin to the BlogOrlando unconference held by social media guru Josh Hallet - instead of focusing on techniques, we can talk about what it means to podcast and what this medium is doing for the world.
I’m really hoping to get a wide sample of the community, not just geeks - arts groups, university professionals as well as other institutions and corporations as well.
I’ve contacted a few people directly and created a PodCamp Orlando Facebook group to get us started.
We have a great local networking group here called Florida Creatives - we get together once a month for a Happy Hour downtown - and we have a wiki where a lot of the organization will be going down. I own the domain OrlandoPodcasters.com and PodCampOrlando.com - the community is mostly organized, we just need to make the event happen.
This group seems to have great support internationally. I’m excited to become a part of it.
Flock Blogging with Photos September 14, 2007
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Blogging, Podcasts, HowTo, Events, Video, Browsers, Fringe, MySpace, Liberatr, Web Sites, photos, interface, Teaching , 1 comment so farPart II, Electric Boogaloo!
This screencast demonstrates how to use Flickr photosharing and the Flock browser to add photos to a WordPress blog (or any blog or web page, really). Flock makes it dead-simple to upload, tag, and post photos. You can probably download the browser, sign up for Flickr and post photos to you blog faster than you can watch this video (about 7 minutes). Let me know what you think or if there are any tough spots.
Download the Screencast (in stunning 480×320 optimized for iPhone!)
There was a time when I was thinking of doing lots of screencasts and trying to build a whole site around it. Mike G of CFPHP and I were talking about something along these lines today - he’s the reason why you have an iPod-sized ‘cast. If you want to see anything else demonstrated, like if you want to teach your boss how to subscribe to RSS feeds, I would be happy to oblige. I am just sort of doing these as they come up until we come up with some cirricula.
What a Week! August 31, 2007
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Career, Blogging, Podcasts, Orlando, Cervo, Links, Drupal, Events, Coworking, Wikipedia, Trends, Earth, Liberatr, Web Sites, floridacreatives, Entrepreneurship, Teaching , add a comment- The Florida Creatives Wiki and the group in general is going so well (recent changes & feed)
- Petentials is getting ever closer to launch, we have a bunch of new features coming out really soon (email me if you want in)
- The Orlando Fringe site is (buit in Drupal and) looking better all the time. We have something very neat planned for this, but just wait until we unveil it.
- For the curious, I love my girlfriend very much. We’re working out how we’re going to last another 10 months on just phone contact and a few weeks of visits. She’s awesome.
- I’m excited about getting my very own apartment soon, but not excited about going deeper into debt. No sir.
- A really interesting development on the Orlando Coworking front (and not just because of blog posts). Some people who I was sure I’d told about the idea heard about Coworking the other day and got their gears a-spinning… I love the sound of the wheels of progress when they’re made by indie, hippie, planet-loving types. If anyone can bring us closer to a “green” and fun coworking space, it will be Mandy and Jim.
- Things are going really well with Cervo Systems too. We’re in the midst of designing a major marketing campaign for a friend of Charlie’s that should prove to be our first serious opportunity to grow as a company. It’s exciting.
- Charlie will also be starting an Illinois Creatives sometime very soon in Chicago, so check out their page in a few weeks to see when the event is happening.
- Anything I’m forgetting? Well, obviously one can’t forget a super-cool talk about Podcasting I’ll be giving at BlogOrlando, or the awesome stuff that will be going down at BarCamp Orlando as well. I think I’ll be talking Drupal, since I know and love it so well.
Exciting stuff, and I’m sure there’s more, like new podcasts with awesome interviews and awesome Internet TV too. There must be more getting tangled up in all the excitement. If you’d like to hear more about any of these endeavors, I’d be happy to chat. There are a dozen ways to contact me mentioned on my blog, so just pick one.
OrlandoScene.TV and BloggingFringe.com Video on Revver June 20, 2007
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Podcasts, Orlando, Video, Film, Trends, Fringe, Liberatr, Restaurants, Entrepreneurship, itunes, statistics, Revver, Contributors, OrlandoScene , 1 comment so farI’m posting this because there should be an 8th video in this widget by the time you see it. I wish this thing would show the videos in reverse order, and perhaps it will - the first video should be OrlandoScene.TV 03 Taste, the second Heart of Coal, etc.
I’ve learned through the very useful and very pretty Revver statistics that about 5% of people who see my video play it to the end, and of those about 8% click on the ad. I think 8.16% ain’t half bad at all - what I wonder is if the “views” includes people who see the player and don’t push play. I don’t think it does.
If you haven’t seen all 8 of these videos yet, they are more than worth watching. If you’re using a feedreader right now, I’m not sure if you can see the player because of JavaScript. You can find my videos on the web at Revver.
OrlandoScene.TV, BloggingFringe.com - that’s where these videos live.
Florida Creatives Happy Hour 6/18 June 15, 2007
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Markteting, Podcasts, Orlando, Events, Beer, Coworking, Coffee, Trends, MySpace, Liberatr, floridacreatives, Likemind.orl, Facebook, Virb , add a commentThird week of the month, the two events we host come around, and I blog/email/post the hell out of it! First of all is likemind.orl at Lake Eola Panera Bread, that happened already this morning, but it happens every month. Alex Rudloff and Ryan Price (that’s me) host this event for… well… anyone in Orlando! The likemind.us fellas in New York got a very nice company named Anomaly to send us some coffee/bagel money, so come for free coffee and good conversation.
Now, for the big news - Florida Creatives Happy Hour is turning 7 months old! Officially our baby is 27 weeks along in its development (but been drinking since day 1? ouch!). I’m really hoping we will be able to get some presence in the local schools once the next year gets started, so I’d like to have a short directed discussion about that, maybe record it, when we feel like we’ve got “quorum” (enough people to make decisions). John Rife is supposed to be returning from his trip this week, so I’m sure he’ll have stories to share. I’ve also spent the last 2 months on a big recruiting push, and just sent a couple of fresh emails today to local illustrators/podcasters. Not to mention the social networking groups and doing lots of outreach there too. If you’re on Upcoming (meaning you have a Yahoo ID), Facebook, VIRB or MySpace, join the groups. Don’t forget the mailing list.
Event Page & RSVP
Monday, June 18, 2007
6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
crooked bayou
50 E Central Blvd # D
Orlando, Florida 32801
If you’ve never been to a happy hour, all you need to know is BE YOURSELF. We have a very casual atmosphere at Florida Creatives, and we are mostly made up of people who want to make some friends who are passionate about the same things they are. In addition to likeminded friends, we are most of us interested in learning about other disciplines, so we are here to learn as well. Last but not least, there are some of us who want to see this community thrive, and what we can accomplish by getting organized. Admission is free, business cards are plentiful, discussion is honest and friendly. Check us out.
Fringe Discussion Drama June 12, 2007
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Blogging, Podcasts, Orlando, Music, Links, Quotes, Events, Video, Reviews, Trends, Fringe, Liberatr, Web Sites, Contributors, Public Relations , add a commentMichael Black, a blogger/webmaster with over a decade of history writing about Montreal Fringe online has decided to lay a verbal smackdown on us at BloggingFringe.com - and I respond in a big way.
Please go read and comment yourself, but for bulletin’s sake, here’s part I of the transcript:
