May 14th, 2008, 2 Comments »
I’m just trying out this Scoutle silliness. Not sure about that name, by the way.
In order to activate the service, I’m obligated to post this widget to my site. That’s obviously a proven viral marketing strategy, but the requirement irks me.
I do like that their logo is two bare feet. That pleases me.
January 11th, 2008, 9 Comments »
When I need a brief distraction, I occasionally surf my incoming visitor stream on HitTail. With an emphasis on searchers, this service shows where your site visitors are coming from, in (more or less) real time. For example, in last two minutes, five visitors showed up at DB.com from these searches:
Each of these searchers is asking a question. That’s what every user of Google, Yahoo et al are doing–seeking answers to questions.
Sometimes the page they find on this site will help them, and sometimes it won’t. That’s also a universal experience.
There’s a person behind every website. Many times, they can answer a searcher’s query better than their website can. Wouldn’t it be cool to connect searchers and site owners in real time?
Imagine two widgets. If you’re a blogger or site publisher, you have the first one on your computer’s desktop. Like HitTail, it shows a real time stream of searchers and their search terms.
The other widget lives on every page of your website, probably in a sidebar. It looks like a little real time chat box (these have been around for a few years).
If you want to connect with a particular searcher, you click the particular search terms in your desktop widget and (using some Ajax magic) it automatically broadcasts a message to the widget on the page the searcher is currently viewing. For speed, there’s a default message that looks something like “You found this page by searching for friend has baby for gay couple–can I answer a question about that for you?” You can also type your own custom message.
Then you could have a quick chat with your searcher. Depending on what kind of site you have, this might result in a new RSS or newsletter subscriber, an ad click, a product sale or just some good karma.
It’s not really much different from the current live chat widgets, except that it’s specific to the searcher, talks to a desktop app and sets some very specific parameters for the ensuing conversation. This seems like a pretty obvious idea–maybe this thing exists already?
June 29th, 2007, 2 Comments »
We recently worked with the good people at Biro Creative to create an Apple desktop widget (and a Windows Vista gadget) for DeSmogBlog:
Our widget displays current DeSmogBlog news. Plus, it’s got a counter that shows the planet’s estimated accumulated carbon footprint since January 1, 2007.
To be honest, I didn’t think it’d be all that successful. The news is cool, but as for the counter, who wants a depressing reminder of planetary degradation on their desktop?
That shows how sound my instincts are. Yesterday I submitted it to Apple’s widget site, and today it’s the featured widget on the home page (screenshot for posterity). Sweet.
Of course, I’ll never be able to replicate that feat. Who knows why our widget got chosen? Maybe there’s a sandal-wearing environmentalist running Apple’s widget library? The odds favour it.
Speaking of environmentalism, check out this skewering of the US Senate’s absurd new ethanol legislation.
June 19th, 2007, 4 Comments »
I used to really obsess over my web stats. I’ve managed to reduce that obsession to a casual curiosity, focussed almost entirely on who’s linking to me. That makes it sound like a popularity contest. In truth, it’s more that I’ve just exhausted any interest in knowing how many people found this site by searching for “cheeses of nazareth” in the last month (13, in case you were curious).
I’m most interested in the linkers because they represent actual, knowable humans who have opinions and perspectives. So, the ’stats’ engine I check most regularly is Technorati, followed by occasional peaks at HitTail. I’ve emailed the folks at HitTail asking for a setting that enables me to filter out all of the search engine traffic from their results. But that’s basically the opposite of their messaging, so I doubt they’ll go for it.
Having recently upgraded to Mac OS 10.4 (I know, I know), I’ve been exploring the wonderful world of desktop widgets. I’m not using anything particularly out of the ordinary–currency converter, weather, FTP and so forth.
I’d like a widget that talks to Google Analytics or HitTail or whoever, and shows a real-time stream of visitors and their source URLs (and enables me to filter out all the search engine noise). Maybe one already exists, but I haven’t been able to find it.
Which widgets do you use regularly and love?
UPDATE: You know, I just looked at my web stats–specifically the most popular keywords that searchers used to find this site. I observed an interesting trend: comparing the top fifty keywords from May, 2006 to May, 2007, only one keyword appears in both lists. What can we attribute that to? My short attention span? The Google dance?