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Did you get enough Fringe Crush? May 31, 2008

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This year I thought I’d employ a bit of science to my Blogging of Fringe - I was worried the site had turned into all Fringe Crush, all the time, and completely about local acts instead of National and International. I was mostly right.

Here are some handy graphs to point out why we suck:
Fringe Crush Wins
Here we see Text only posts at 10%
VoiceMail Reviews and audio at 13%
Any non-Fringe Crush videos at 37%
Fringe Crush takes it home with 41%

My second criticism is that we favored local, and the numbers don’t lie:
Local vs. Otherwise
International 6%
National Acts 13%
On the Fringe 38%
Local Artists 43%

This scale is even graded on a curve, because I counted Bric-a-Brac as national because they’re from Austin, but they all used to live here, and they were produced by Beth. And the only things in the “On the Fringe” category were folks who were not in shows, but many of them have been in the past.

That means we had a distribution like this:
Us and Them
I guess 19% isn’t bad for Long Tail content. I’d like to do better. It’s a mission of mine to keep that number above 20% all the time, so I guess we did pretty well this time.

The Videos and Audio did have some categories we threw them in:
Content Channels
The new Fringe Moments were 11%
The VoiceMail Reviews at only 13%
The favorite Fringe Crush with 41%
Everything else this year with 35%

Also, I was very proud of us when I found out Beth would be presenting a Fringe Crush award for the show with the most crushes. Denna counted up the results, and by no surprise, VarieTease won! I think that’s a challenge to the cast of Oral to do some more campaigning for next year.

One last statistic, of the 32 shows I saw, 55% of them were not local.
Local vs. Otherwise, tickets bought
Again, we’re counting Bric-A-Brac and Parlour Games as National, because they are… sortof.

The Second Click and Lijit Search Wijits February 11, 2008

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If 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.

One Grain of Rice for everyone in North and South America February 5, 2008

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Vlog: Mark Frauenfelder - Rice Demographics - Boing Boing TV

one grain of rice for every person in the Americas there, arranged in categorized piles: the number of people who eat at McDonalds every day; the number of millionaires in the United States; the number of Billionaires; the number of people in South America who live on less than $2 a day, etc..

It was an exhibit by the London-based theatre company Stan’s Cafe, called “Of All the People In The World: The Americas.” They created it to help people understand hard-to-visualize statistics, such as the number of people who live in gated communities in the United States, the number of people who have been killed by tasers, and the number of people with AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.

Use Yahoo Site Explorer to get Top 10 Pages for your Site November 21, 2007

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A while back I installed an excellent plugin for Firefox called SearchStatus. In addition to showing me the pagerank and compete score of any page I visit (I think it does Alexa, but I have a different plugin for that), it also gives you this handy right-click menu with lots of neat stuff in it. Most useful was a list of all the pages that Google, MSN and Yahoo! index on your site. For this blog, the list is interesting, but I’m not trying to make a living being me, so I checked out OrlandoScene.TV, my up-and-coming video podcast.

From Google, most of the top pages were wordpress archive lists - not very interesting, but it does prove that older pages get more juice in Google. Here’s Google’s top 10 OSTV category pages:

  1. coffee
  2. podcasts
  3. relayforlife
  4. maitland
  5. austinscoffee
  6. pandos
  7. michelle
  8. theatre
  9. rogers
  10. loch haven park

Here’s Yahoo’s top 10 pages for OSTV:

  1. Orlando Scene TV
  2. OSTV on B & S Daily Market at Orlando Scene TV
  3. OSTV 03: Taste Restaurant at Orlando Scene TV
  4. OSTV Still Getting Started at Orlando Scene TV
  5. OSTV 01: Relay For Life Concert at Orlando Scene TV
  6. OSTV 02: Enzian FILMSLAM at Orlando Scene TV
  7. 2007 Orlando Fringe Festival at Orlando Scene TV
  8. Orlando Video Blog Kicks it Off at Orlando Scene TV
  9. orlandoscene.tv/feed
  10. 2007 archive at Orlando Scene TV

The MSN top 15 pages for OSTV (MSN was the only one with an RSS feed) were interesting as well. Kind of neat was every so often they would publish a date that specified the last time they indexed it (I think).

  1. Orlando Scene TV
  2. orlandoscene.tv
  3. orlandoscene.tv/feed
  4. orlandoscene.tv/comments/feed
  5. OSTV on B & S Daily Market …
  6. OSTV 01: Relay For Life …
  7. OSTV 03: Taste Restaurant …
  8. OSTV 02: Enzian FILMSLAM …
  9. Orlando Video Blog Kicks …
  10. Join us at E.L.L.A Music …
  11. Subscribe at Orlando …

I didn’t make those linkable because those are mostly in the yahoo list as well. It’s interesting to see where MSN puts pages vs. Yahoo! I don’t know how their algorithms differ, but it’s worth looking in to…? Also, MSN repeated the first result… why?

I think Google’s results are the least useful here (until I start optimizing and theming my category pages). For now, I have a neat wordpress plugin called Landing Pages that helps out by showing the user something like this:

orlando video coffee

You came here from www.google.com searching for orlando video coffee. These posts might be of interest:

* OSTV on B & S Daily Market
* Join us at E.L.L.A Music Festival
* OSTV 01: Relay For Life Concert

But I think each category - like coffee, theatre, etc. should have a graphic and some related posts like this. That’s also a great place to do some contextual advertising. I think I might throw adsense on my archive pages - especially since google thinks they’re so important.

OrlandoScene.TV and BloggingFringe.com Video on Revver June 20, 2007

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I’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.

Sharing Some Stats June 9, 2007

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OK, now that the Fringe Festival is long over, and the spike in traffic for Blogging Fringe has come and gone, what do we have to show for it? Not as much as I’d like, really. The fact that lots of our content is spread across other sites (MySpace, YouTube) doesn’t really require anyone to use our site to get the content. With this audience, we don’t really need to worry about feeds taking away from our traffic.

fringe_may_stats.png
Note: As of today the daily average is 45 visitors.

The festival started on Friday, with a small event Thursday where I got to hand out some cards and meet some of the cast members and producers from shows. That’s where the traffic starts.When we reach the half-way point of the festival (Tuesday), the increase of traffic we were seeing just drops off, despite the fact that we had new and compelling content hitting the site, with myself and the street team pushing the site to everyone we met.

Here’s where I was stupid: Headline Animator. Feedburner tracks the stats for this dynamically-generated image, since they know you’re normally hosting it somewhere other than your site. You can even generate multiple headline animators and track them individually. A few months ago, I took the HA off of MySpace in favor of the more interactive SpringWidgets option. However, I’m now thinking that this kept people on MySpace more often.

What I should really do with headline animator (done now) is post one in the header of the MySpace Blog - the header appears at the top of every blog post and the blog home as well. A really great example of what to do with your blog header can be seen at the Six Characters MySpace Blog. They use an html image map with deep links to their site - so smart.

fringe_may_stats2.png

Last, here’s a breakdown of my visitors. It’s sad that Internet Explorer outnumbers Firefox 36 to 106 - maybe that’s a good cause to sprinkle some FireFox (or Flock, Songbird) banners around the site.

What’s the short list of things I’ve taken away from this experience? What am I going to aspire to for our next event (Orlando Puppet Festival)?

  1. Figure out how to get people coming before the event.
  2. Track MySpace views - Headline Animator will do nicely.
  3. Track MySpace Blog views with a second Headline Animator.
  4. Outfit the MySpace page and blog header with deep links to the site.
  5. Include links (and deep links) back to the main site in every MySpace blog.
  6. Try making a MySpace bulletin for every blog post on the main site.
  7. Consider including a “MySpace code” textbox in every post, a la YouTube.
  8. Invest in a Related Posts widget for the sidebar - who knows how much this could keep people on the site?
  9. Continue to seek out methods of Viral content like the Fringe Crush - people were hooked on new ones and were very eager to record one with us, though we didn’t see any user-generated videos this year.
  10. Push VoiceMail Reviews like nobody’s business - I waited too long to start pushing that idea, it could have worked out better.
  11. Consider posting Twitter inside the main blog chronology - after 24 hours, the posts don’t appear on the flash widget, but there was useful stuff going in there several times a day.
  12. Include more personality stuff (that’s normally my mantra), i.e. facetime. one of the most commented on video clips was a small part of the opening night video where I couldn’t get in to the VIP party.
  13. Form more artist relationships before the festival (coming back every year helps with this). Standing next to TJ Dawe and having him point out the podcast on my behalf was better (in context) than any marketing plan. Word of mouth was our #1 best campaign.
  14. Don’t forget to mention the day job and hand people cards when they ask about it. Blogging Fringe is also a portfolio piece, don’t forget to let it drive some business back to myself!

Caling out Vocus PR June 7, 2007

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Hello Vocus, On-Demand Software for Public Relations and Government Relations, who are you? You guys have me on some sort of an internal news reader or some such, because I keep getting hits from your site! I don’t want to be removed, I’d just like to know who my admirer is so I can shake their hand (physically or virtually). It always seems to be something to do with Fringe, so a Fringe fan, perhaps?

Hello? Anybody home?

Love ya, mean it!

Twitterholic - Top 100 Twitter Users March 19, 2007

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I doubt me if I’ll ever make it on this list, but I wanted to give props to Alex and Gavin for creating yet another popularity contest/time waster that seems to be a bit worthwhile… Twitterholic.com

What I mean by worthwhile is, well, now Calacanis knows who to pay for twittering. This is like the top 100 Digg or Reddit users, whose time he bought to post news to Netscape. Welcome to the beginning of the moentization of Twitter. It either warms the blood or boils it, depending on your relationship with microblogging/status/open IM/bulletin… stuff.

Also, interesting move by the PostGorillans to rename themselves Humidity Labs.

Also, props to 30 boxes for Twapper (WAP-enabled twitter) and Dave Troy for Twittervision. Very cool stuff.

How does iTunes popularity work? March 4, 2007

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Dear iTunes:
Will you please tell me how many people clicked Subscribe inside of iTunes? I know you know, and since you know I know you know, you appear to tease me with the information. Why?

Is my podcast popular in relation to other Alternative Health shows, or simply compared to the other shows I searched for? Is it popular today, this week, this month, since the beginning of the year, or since Hallowe’en? Is there any way to find out? Please, please, please help me.

Footprint Podcast is Popular on iTunesFootprint Podcast is Popular on iTunes Hosted on Zooomr
iTunes OCDiTunes OCD Hosted on Zooomr

Your podcast catching platform is regrettably the only software that works well for audio and video across 2 major platforms and also manages to keep people inside the program for hours a day, with a little number next to the “Podcasts” source that lets the OCD people know they have unfinished business with their podcast hosts. If someone else captured attention as well as iTunes, I would scream it from the rooftops. If all I do is video, Democracy Player is great! I wish Democracy did audio, or someone would write a hip, open-source podcatching/ music listening platform.

Wait a second… what about Songbird? Is their user experience too general? I can subscribe to a webpage with mp3 links, but not to a feed. Or if I can, they don’t make it obvious. Since they are still on version 0.2.5, does this mean I’m going to have to wait a few years for them to get it right, like I’m doing with Flock? Only you, iTunes, have the power to help me in my quest. How do I compare?

People don’t want to visit Podcast Alley, and they especially don’t want to be NPR’d to death with “Please vote for our podcast, so we can beat the Harry Potter kids!” all the live-long day. They just don’t. Most of them only tune in to about half an hour’s worth of material anyway, so unless we plug it at the beginning, which no self-respecting podcaster would do, there’s almost no way to get a decent comparison.

iTunes Related SubscriptionsiTunes Related Subscriptions Hosted on Zooomr

When I first saw these little gray bars, I was very excited - my podcast is popular! Hell, people even have related subscriptions… I think. Is this like the Amazon store, where they say “People who bought this product also bought…” because if it is, where are the comments from those kids? This large number of related podcasts leads me to believe that you are just pulling the stats from Alternative Health in general, or one very eco-friendly person’s list.

Gosh, iTunes. Even your screenshots look good in a blog post. I wish you weren’t the only major player. I guess all I can do now is start writing XUL plugins for Songbird, create BitTorrent friendly feeds for Democracy TV, and keep doing my shameless self promotions for Liberatr, Liberatr, Liberatr.net!

Thanks for… something, Uncle Steve.

Peace,
Ryan Price
iTunes User
Orlando, FL