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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 comment

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.

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

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.

FLCreatives Wiki, Hack Weekends August 26, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Orlando, Links, HowTo, Events, Wikipedia, Trends, Web Sites, floridacreatives , 1 comment so far

We have our own Wiki. It looks just like wikipedia (for now). It has 4 5 pages (for now).

http://wiki.floridacreatives.com/

  1. Main page
  2. Orlando networking
  3. Orlando resources
  4. Orlando wifi
  5. Orlando companies

If you’re going to add a new page, please preface it with Orlando or Jacksonville or Tampa, etc. if it is geo-specific, and almost every page should be.

I’m trying to keep the names extremely relevant and short and semantic, hence Orlando_networking, Orlando_resources, Orlando_wifi

If you don’t understand editing wiki pages, here are some not-so-nice guides that are way too nerdy.
Filling the page
Starting a new page

Please thank Geoff (SomaCow) and Larry (ORUG) for making me set this up. It’s a long time overdue.

Ideas for pages: schools, colleges, tutors, bands, galleries, theatres, radio shows on WPRK, cowking-ish spaces, neighborhoods friendly to creatives, sections of town, restaurants we want to support, things to blog about, blogrolls, skill directories, stuff…

I was so glad to see so many of you come out this month. If you haven’t brought anyone new in a while, please consider inviting 5 friends to September/October, about 20% of them should be able to show up! :)

Had some great talks with Mike G (CFPHP) and Larry about brown-bag lunch group discussions (tutoring) to start downtown once a week (or when we have something to discuss). Alex (Emurse) and Josh (BlogOrlando, Hyku) were I think the ones to mention this last week.

I am also definitely planning to go to Stardust next Saturday to make plans for a PHP/whatever mash-up and hack day sometime in the fall. The basic idea would be to set up a simple Linux server in someone’s living room and hack for several hours/days - we must launch the project at the end of the hack session, and we must document it and present it to people who weren’t at the weekend. Everything will get Creative Commons / GPL and version controlled so the next group of people can build on it or re-use resources as needed.

Ideas for hacks: downtown parking map, theme park attraction ratings/map/photos, wifi hotspots, things not involving maps.

Thanks for reading this long post. I’ve been awake for 21 hours today and going non-stop. Hope to catch up with all of you soon.

Forget Flex, Go OpenLaszlo August 24, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Links, Video, Wikipedia, Reviews, Browsers, Trends, Standards, interface, OpenLaszlo, flash , 3 comments

Note: Mike G. from Central Florida PHP is giving a talk about Flex this Saturday at DeVry @ Millenia.

A good friend of mine, Jake, recently visited Orlando raving about Adobe’s Flex, and how it was going to make Flash development for people who think in HTML and Object-Oriented programming much simpler and faster. I went looking into Flex and discovered OpenLaszlo. Laszlo used to be a Flash-only framework, but it can now publish DHTML just as easily, and with a few added bonuses you don’t get with Flash, like including an iFrame.

After watching the OpenLaszlo 4 Programming Tutorial Screencast, I’m convinced that Laszlo is more capable than Flex, and there is less proprietary code to learn since you use Javascript instead of Actionscript. It’s all ECMA, XML and xPath, so I guess at some point it becomes 6 vs. a half dozen, but I will mention one small caveat: iPhone compatible. Oh yes, I’ve seen the first iPhone app in Laszlo, and it’s pretty and touch-screen happy. (I think it goes without saying that if it works on iPhone, it can work with all major browsers)

Am I raving? I’m not allowed to rave, because I haven’t tried both systems, but from where I’m sitting this is another situation where an equal amount of training and no expensive development tools are going to get your job done in the same amount of time, and end up being more flexible, easily extended and powerful. You can convince any boss of that if you’ve got all the information.

Under the hood from Wikipedia:

Laszlo applications can be deployed as traditional Java servlets, which are compiled and returned to the browser dynamically. This method requires that the web server be running the OpenLaszlo server.

Alternatively, Laszlo applications can be compiled from LZX into a binary SWF file, and loaded statically into an existing web page. This method is known as SOLO deployment. Applications deployed in the manner lack some functionality of servlet-contained files, such as the ability to consume SOAP web services and XML remote procedure calls.

Hear that? Static! One score for Flex is the ability to run as a desktop app (using AIR/Apollo), but that requires a download, and that’s a no-no on the internet.

Do you know Pandora uses Laszlo? That’s a pretty app, and yes it runs in Flash, but I bet it doesn’t have to. The Behr ColorSmart app is pretty nice too, and no hand-keyframed Flash? Love it. Wikipedia says Yahoo!, Earthlink and the Internet Archive are known to use Laszlo as well. I like those websites too.

Last but not least, it’s open source! Published under IBM’s Common Public License, which is a less-lawsuit inspiring type of GPL. Flex is supposed to be published under the Mozilla licensing, but that version is still in beta. Laszlo has been open source for 3 years now. Eat it, Adobe. I’m not giving you guys another penny.

I’ll be very proud to integrate some Laszlo apps into Petentials, which is built entirely on open source software - Drupal, PHP, MySQL, Apache and Linux.

Finally Using My French Press for Coffee October 25, 2006

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Coffee, Wikipedia, Reviews , add a comment

Really, this blog post is an experiment to see how many Gevalia Coffee ads I pull and how much comment spam I get by tomorrow, but just for fun:
French Presses
Wikipedia answers the age-old question: What is a French Press?

I used my French Press (Webster Flea Market, $4) for the first time today and I must say I am pleased. Now I have one method of obtaining hot water for all my beverages, and that’s the tea pot. Instead of having to load grounds in the Mr. Coffee, measure out the water, wash the carafe, load the beans in the filter, pour the water, all that junk, I just have one vessel for my coffee, and one way to heat it. My roommate has been talking about getting a single-cup or pod coffee maker like a Senseo, but I remembered my French Press and I must say I like it. Now I’m not wasting money on a fancy machine.

If you are in town, come over and I’ll make you a cup. Decaf or regular? I even have hazelnut CoffeeMate in the fridge.

Like, the last two games July 7, 2006

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, News, Wikipedia, TV , add a comment



final_bracket.jpg

Originally uploaded by Thick Mints.

OK, now that the dust is beginning to settle on the madness of the past few week’s events with the World Cup, who stands tall and proud, ready to snatch it all from the competing armies?

Why France and Italy of course! Germany and Portugal both put up good fights, and the US made it to the final 16 (not picutred), but was beat by Germany, who made it to the top 4. That is important.

Saturday morning, Germany and Portugal face off for bragging rights, and Sunday is the big day.

May I say Wikipedia rocks for having someone who made this snappy bracket graphic? I dig. Wikipedia Rocks. GO TEAM WIKI!!

UPDATE 07/09: Italy takes it home! Germany is 3rd! Headbutts all around.

Apple releases iPod Video October 12, 2005

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, News, Podcasts, Links, Video, Mac OS, Wikipedia , add a comment

People have been saying this was coming for years, and now it has arrived. The iPod Video is no longer an iPod with a color display, but a full-blown video player. The new iPod is thinner with a larger screen; 320 x 240 vs. the old 220 x 176 pixel screen. The physical device has actually grown in height and width, but shrunk in thickness. iPod Video also comes in two sizes in every sense of the word: the standard 30GB model ($299) claims 14 hours of music playback, 3 hours of photo slideshow playback, and 2 hours of video playback, while the fatter 60GB model ($399) has 20 hours of music playback, 4 hours of slideshow playback, and 3 hours of video playback.

Even though we all knew this was coming, what will now happen to the thousands of existing iPods with color screen? Will they be marked down for quick selling? Apple has pretty much cut them out of the store and all the advertising as though they no longer existed. Sure, this happens every time they release a new device, but geez… At least the higher capacity video models are priced the same as their older cousins. That will help them sell ten thousand units before the christmas season.

H.264 video: up to 768 Kbps, 320 x 240, 30 frames per sec., Baseline Profile up to Level 1.3 with AAC-LC up to 160 Kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats

MPEG-4 video: up to 2.5 mbps, 480 x 480, 30 frames per sec., Simple Profile with AAC-LC up to 160 Kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats

Also announced are two new official Apple accessories: the Universal Dock and the Apple Remote. The Universal Dock fits all shapes and sizes of iPods with Dock Connectors, has A/V and S-Video output, and the most interesting feature, the IR port for the Apple Remote, which looks a lot like a Shuffle, with just 6 simple buttons for play/pause, menu, forward/backward, and volume control buttons. The cool thing is your Apple Remote can also control your iMac home-theater style.

That was another announcement from today: the new iMac. The iMac is slimmer with a faster processor, more memory standard, a SuperDrive (now burns DVDs instead of just reading them), and a built in iSight webcam. The Apple remote is intended mostly as a control for the iMac, which is Apple’s version of a Media Center PC. I guess this could be OK if you have a desk near your entertainment center, but an iMac is not the kind of toy I would want to use just for music, photos, home movies and DVDs. It is a full-fledged PC with a 64-bit processor, not an appliance. It would be a shame to hook it up to an HDTV and waste the built-in display. A crying shame. Still, I like the direction you’re going in. Give me the entire digital lifestyle in a one-stop shop. Now that Sony is starting to open retail stores, Apple may have some competition in that market.

Pretty cool Apple: you finally caught up with the rest of the market by offering video. Now what kind of content will you have? What will it cost? Who will be the first company to sell me a movie to play back at tiny resolutions? Wait and see.

Some facts taken from Wikipedia’s iPod listing.