Inside View

Big Data and Edchatie

Bernie Goldbach in LSAD Clonmel | Data from Hashify.me

BIG DATA INTERSECTS Irish educators in several places like the Monday evening #edchatie discussions.

Inspired by Simon Lewis, I looked at who is most influential during those recurring discussions. At least two of the most influential plan to attend the annual ICT in Education Conference in Thurles. With a little prodding, perhaps more than half of the most influential Irish Twitter voices in education will meet up in May on the campus of the Limerick Institute of Technology in Thurles.

In the meantime, I have 30 Web Analytics students drilling into the #edchatie transcripts to document the share of the voices, engagement and impact of embedded placement in the cross-talk. And the Irish government is interested in making these kinds of analyses more sophisticated as funding comes available for big data programmes.

Data Analytics

Key Words Point to Pen and Pixel

WE LAUNCHED PEN & PIXEL for our annual exhibition in the Limerick Institute of Technology and it immediately attracted more people on its first day (327) than I get on an average weekday (301).

The top three terms that attracted visitors to PenAndPixel.ie include all the high brow phrases (exhibition, creative work, 3D) that we hoped would represent a cross-section of graduate talent. It's still too early to draw any real conclusions from the analytics because it normally takes a few months and a few thousand visits to determine what's actually the big draw of a website. Plus the Pen&Pixel site is attracting a lot of ego surfers as they probe around and try to find samples of work.

During the same early February period, the top three terms referring people to my Inside View blog were people looking for the ugliest dog, real mermaid sightings in Ireland and pron.

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Information from Statcounter.com.

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My 100th Most Viewed Photo

REMINISCING TAKES ME into my personal archives once a week and part of that meandering uncovered the hundredth most-viewed image I have on Flickr. It's actually a shot of Ireland taken by the NASA Earth Observatory (hat tip to James Corbett) and two things are surprising about the image and the business intelligence about the views on my photostream at Flickr.com/photos/irisheyes. First, it's got fewer views than dozens of shots I've taken of Irish drivers doing stupid things. Second, it will remain thousands of views behind shots of gadgets because Flickr referrers prove that that people come looking for images of objects. They come from Google, Bing, and Yahoo! And they come in blocks of hundreds per week. I'll tuck the aerial view of Ireland away for Radio Kate, the woman in Audioboo Headquarters who hopes to get my Flickr view of Ireland while orbiting the earth.

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Image from the NASA Earth Observatory. My most-viewed image on Flickr is Sam the ugliest dog with 128,000 views. I didn't snap that shot. It has attracted the most comments of any shot I have on Flickr. The most popular image I shot for Flickr is a tampon chandelier with 80,114 views.

Previously: "100th most viewed" on May 28, 2005.

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Flatlining for a Reason

I THINK IT'S NORMAL to scrape back everything and look at the basics. We do that with paint on walls and carpet in halls when we put brute force to projects and strip things to the raw surface. I'm doing that with my blog now and doing it with live traffic. As a result, when I remove all Javascript from my pages, I lose traffic count just like the accompanying screenshot shows. In the background, Typepad's counters keep ticking over, telling me that more than 800 people per day on average have visited my blog since Typepad started counting in mid-2003. I'm Twitterised now, so it's rare that more than 500 people per day read my blog now. That's down from a breezy 2000 page views per day in mid-2007, before either Facebook or Twitter got toeholds in Ireland. I think it's important to look beyond the numbers and to focus on conversions. In my case, I want to start converting Google advertisements into baby formula. For that to happen, I need faster-loading pages so I'm killing nearly everything that loads as Javascript and pushing most of the page intelligence out to cloud services where clever servers and API calls do the work. In the meantime, I'm flatlining my blog's visitor count and playing with templates to see get stuck into CSS and HTML 5 over the summer months. You should check back in August to see the final look. In the meantime, do you have anything to suggest that I keep on my blog?

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I just noticed there are 4,230 instances of the word "analytics" on my blog. I should distill that knowledge into a more effective training course.

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Inside Google Autocomplete

IF YOU HAVE typing skills above 180 words for minute, you might have a future as a Google Autocompleter. In this clip, Michael the psychic explains why you should try to learn all the lyrics to all the songs on the planet.

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Direct link to clip.

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Paddy's Day Image Referrers

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I'M LOOKING AT the kinds of images people viewed when seeking Irish content on St Patrick's Day. The task is part of a module in Web Analytics taught by Tipperary Institute in the Absolute Hotel of Limerick. It's interesting that my most findable Irish pub is located in Berlin. Perhaps it's time for me to promote authentic Irish pubs.

Photo Referrers on Paddy's Day

 

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Case Study for Newsweaver

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AS A LONG-TIME FAN of Newsweaver, I've embarked on a 14-week living analysis of its capabilities. In fact, I'll be using Newsweaver to power part of both the retention and web analytics dimensions of the Web Promotion for Business course, a special purpose award being run by Limerick Institute of Technology and the Tipperary Institute. A small group of 18 ex-Dell employees will begin this training in late February. Behind the scenes, Newsweaver will power a weekly newsletter written and analysed by the students in the course. In Tipperary Institute, another group of students will use Newsweaver to stoke interest in the Pen and Pixel exhibition in Clonmel and the annual Schools Conference in Thurles. By May, we'll have a case study that shows how training graduates to enter the smart economy is well-served when learning to leverage Newsweaver.

Newsweaver

 

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Bonus Link: "What content to readers want" from Newsweaver's Denise Cox.

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Learned after 5m views

 

 

LATER THIS YEAR, I'll mark the 10th anniversary of actively blogging but before that day arrives, I'm drawing several conclusions about the effectiveness of my online writing. One of the first facts worth considering is the gradual decline in blog readership. As the screenshot from Statcounter shows, my blog readership has tanked. However, when considering actual engagement, I think my online presence remains as strong as ever. I've 3.3m recorded page views for my weblog and nearly two million more views or listens in other places. Here's the breakdown:

Google Instant Alphabet

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AS GOOGLE APPROACHES the zettabyte level of indexed pages, things just got faster when using the search engine to find info. A few months ago, after Caffeine improved Google's index, I noticed I could get to Facebook just by typing the letter F into Chrome's URL window. A whole host of single letter sites appears below the break. When using Google Instant as my search tool, things feel like magic. For advertisers, Instant should improve Click-Through Rates because viewers can see site summaries quickly--and there's no more "I Feel Lucky" option. I like being able to search as I type. It's dynamic, predictive, scrollable and (in my case) it incorporates results from my social network.

Google Instantboo

Clever Flickr Stats Package

FLICKR STATS IS DESKTOP software that downloads Flickr Stats data for Flickr Pro. When I use it, I can store Flickr data locally from more than 28 days in the past. Flickr Stats uses an API call to compile a single SQLite database file. I'm using the database in a third level web analytics module where I teach students how to effectively measure online activity. The Flickr Stats package also shows spark-lines charts of collected data (yearly, monthly, daily).