WIRED NextFest  is coming to NYC - a mini World Fair that sounds like it’s a must see event.

"WIRED’s vision of a new world’s fair, WIRED NextFest is a four-day festival of innovative products and technologies that are transforming our world. Patterned on the great World’s Fairs of the past, this year’s NextFest in New York features more than 130 interactive exhibits from leading scientists and researchers around the world. Experience the future of exploration, entertainment, transportation, health, communication, design, security, and green living. Visitors of all ages are welcome."

I’ll take my 13 year old son for sure on one of the days.

A new branch of Search Engine Optimization is taking shape in what is being called "SMO" or Search Marketing Optimization, according to Search Engine RoundTable.  You can read a thread on what SMO is all about and how it differs from SEO here.  In fact, one comment on SearchEngineWatch  was:

"Partly addressing this, Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations did a posting trying to define "Social Media Optimization (SMO)" :

"While I believe in the power of SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we call Social Media Optimization (SMO). The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs"

Rohit set forth to declare 5 Rules of SMO:

1. Increase your linkability (Rohit’s Rules 1-5)
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound links
4. Help your content travel
5. Encourage the mashup

Most of the conferences I have attended this year have been "buzzing" with talk of Social Media, letting your consumers control the conversation, etc.   I think we’re beginning to see that SEO also needs to take Social Media and merge it with Search Optimization and Search Marketing.  

I’ll be keeping my eyes open for more information about SMO as it becomes available.

Logic and Emotion has an update on Influence Ripples that incorporates the effects of other bloggers on each other.

Right now, there are very few Web Analytics blogs that are more than a 4 or 3, with the exception of HitWise, which calls itself a Web Analytics blog - which may qualify for being a 2 or a 1 on this diagram above.

But it’s different for Art Blogs, where there are several blogs that have more than 1000 backlinks in Technorati.

I posted earlier about Influence Ripples.

I have a hard time with all the measurements I get from different Market Research companies.  Data from Nielson NetRatings appears to be measuring audience while HitWise appears to be looking at total search volume (in the US mainly).   I think there’s a confusion with several sets of numbers - which one to use ….that’s the question.

Case in point - Nielsen NetRatings releases, on a weekly basis, the top ten search engines by Unique Visitors and Average Time spent on the search engine per visit.  Nielsen NetRatings numbers are often published in IMediaConnection, as they were today.

Meanwhile, a couple of weeks earlier, Bill Tancer released top search numbers for the week ending July 29th (two weeks earlier than the Nielsen numbers)

Below is a table showing the top three engines Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Search for the four weeks ending July 29, 2006.

It would be great if we could get both sets of numbers (which I bet don’t measure exactly the same thing - but look like they do) to be for the same exact time period.  According to Bill Tancer:

"As you can see, the top engines combined account for over 94% of all search volume in the US. Since we last released these numbers in June 2006, Google (www.google.com) has increased its share from 59.3% to 60.2%, Yahoo! Search (search.yahoo.com) has increased from 22.0% to 22.5% and MSN Search (search.msn.com) has decreased slightly from 12.1% to 11.8%."

Meanwhile, Danny Sullivan shows us the top search share numbers for July (similar to what Hitwise is showing) - but based on Nielsen Netratings data:

Share Of Searches: July 2006

The chart below shows the percentage of online searches done by US home and work web surfers in July 2006 that were performed at a particular search engine. Internal site searches, such as those to find material within a particular web site, are not counted in these totals. The activity at more than 60 search sites makes up the total search volume upon which percentages are based — 5.6 billion searches in this month.

When we look at Search Volume the charts give the impression that only the top 3 or 4 search engines matter while if we look at the top destinations by audience (first chart) FaceBook is the 10th destination (quite significant as Microsoft just formed a 3 year advertising deal with Facebook, as I reported earlier last week).  

Which set of charts do you think Microsoft looked at when they decided to approach Facebook?   One of the nice things about the Nielson data is it gives the average time spent on a search site and Facebook, while it had a lower volume of unique searchers - each spent at least 30 minutes (on average) at the site.   If one wanted to do an ad distribution deal it might be good to pick one where visitors tend to hang around longer.  Also, Microsoft could not have done a Advertising deal with the first 7 search destinations on the list - most already being in exclusive partnerships with Google (or being Microsoft Live - not going to do a deal with itself). 

So which set of data drives decisions?  How do they match up to each other?  They don’t.   You chose which one you want to look depending on what you care about. 

I think we need to find a way to compare the numbers from different research firms and come to a consensus on which one’s are better to consult and for what purpose.  Recently, Avinash Kaushik tried to do just this when he compared Comscore and HitWise in Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Why, What & How to Choose and then took that data and gave some ideas on how to use it in Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Metrics, Tips & Best Practices.  Avinash has been a voice in Web Analytics, in defining new definations of metrics such as Site and Cart Abandoment rates.

Still, no one really has come up with a way to match up different numbers and it’s really up to each person to chose - but they might not know which set of numbers are better - I think more work is needed to explain what each chart actually measures - because it’s often not the same things.

Micro Persuasion just published an article on the Three Ways to Ride the Long Tail.

 "Anderson does a wonderful job documenting the Long Tail’s impact on media and marketing. He makes plain how the blogosphere and online communities are creating an environment where a thousand points of light can outshine the largest of media. However, where the book falls short is in giving marketers a playbook. Here are three ways marketers can thrive in a Long Tail world."

The article looks interesting, esp funding Niches.

Danny Sullivan is leaving the Search Engine Strategies conference circuit according to Matt Cutts.

"Today, Danny Sullivan announced that he’s leaving the popular searchenginewatch.com site that he built and the Search Engine Strategies series of conferences that he ramped up. For the search industry, this is a nine on the Richter scale and has the potential to shake the whole industry for a few months. Danny has been covering the search industry for over a decade now, and the brands that he built in Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies are incredibly strong–although not as strong as the reputation that Danny built on a personal level. Anyone that’s had a chance to spend any time with Danny has a huge amount of respect for him. And no matter how you slice it, Danny counts as one of the “founding fathers” of the search industry.

Only time will tell how this will all shake out. My sense is that Danny will benefit from this–any company would be lucky to have Danny. I guess the one thing you can count on in the search industry is change. My spidey sense tells me that backchannels in search are probably lit up like Christmas trees talking about this."

I’m not surprised.  According to Danny:

"My contracts with their owners Incisive Media are expiring, and we’ve not been able to agree on new ones."

If you look at how much Incisive Media is milking SES and expanding the conferences to include many new venues- there’s now a conference almost every month - meaning that Danny Sullivan would be hosting a conference year round, once a month.  That’s too much.  By now, the guy has been it too long anyway - and it’s time for a change - both for him, and maybe for the industry he helped build up.   Maybe it’s just his time to move on to something else.

"Last year, Jupitermedia sold the site and the series to Incisive Media. I wasn’t unhappy with the sale and chose to let my contract be extended through the end of 2006 as part of it.

I was concerned about moving forward with Incisive, however. I’m far from the only reason behind the success of SEW and SES, but I’ve played a major role. I helped build both of those assets. Then I watched one company sell them to another without me having any formal capital stake in the sale. That left me wary of history repeating itself. I wasn’t going to help this new company grow the business out of the sheer kindness of my heart."

Sounds like Incisive Media, more or less, expected Sullivan would continue in his role as the face of Search Engine Strategies - but Danny wanted more - and Incisive did not want to pony up anything more (since these SES conferences are probably braking even anyway - the comments on the blogosphere all agree that was a stupid mistake for Incisive Media as Danny Sullivan is SES - lose him and you may lose much of the appeal of the conference). 

The increase in the number of conferences was a clue - they were milking the brand. 

Lets’ face it, there’s nothing much new discussed at Search Engine Strategies that requires a conference in so many major cities once a year - there’s no need to hold so many conferences - 3 or 4 a year are enough -   The speakers who go to these conferences are burnt out……

The other thing I noticed when I’ve attened SES Conferences - it’s mostly for networking - but most of the same speakers show up at conference after conference after conference - in many cases, using the same presentations!  The reason for the conference is to form a marketplace that facilitates buyer (new and current clients) and search providers together - it’s not longer about learning anything new.   And when it’s San Jose Conference - its’ all about going to the GooglePlex.

"As for SES, I’ll still be chairing the SES Multimedia & Mobile Edition show this October in Los Angeles, then the SES Chicago show in December. After that, I’d say there’s another extremely slim chance that I might do SES events on a case-by-case basis (again so slim that I’m not expecting it will happen). At the moment, I’m not contracted for any thing beyond those named (I’m currently listed as chairing the SES NY 2007 event, and I’ve asked that I be removed from the site)."

Good move…..it’s time for Danny to move to the next level.

Ten years of this is enough for anyone.  Can you name one well known conference held as often as Search Engine Strategies?   How about Ad-Tech - that’s a much bigger conference even than SES - but would you want 10 AD-TECH’s a year?  When is enough enough? 

I know many people want to see Danny Sullivan stay around and do SES forever -but he must be burnt out by now. My advice is for Danny Sullivan to go write a book on Search, as you suggested you might want to do:

"I’m also thinking a lot about doing a book these days. I’d always wanted to do a book on search, indeed the exact type of history that John Battelle did a fantastic job with in The Search."

Others think Danny should go after the big $$$$$ (Web 2.0 dollars - so I’m told)…sure, why not?

Seth Godin thinks it’s safe to care about Pluto.  I posted about Pluto the other day - I care about it and posted last week on Pluto is a Planet.  I’m not sure I’d go for Seth’s solution:

"People for Pluto

My humble contribution: instead of demoting Pluto, they ought to promote a whole bunch of smaller planettes. And they should sell the naming rights to various marketers (Goofy being the first easy sale) and use the millions they would earn to fund actual science education on a planet desperately in need of it. If it’s okay to sponsor the US Open, why isn’t it okay to sponsor UB313? I’m also selling the naming rights to my car."

Maybe.   I think the space probe that was launched a couple of months ago will still make it to Pluto - maybe by the time it arrives (around 2020?) Pluto will be a planet again.

Can’t stop writing tonight - it’s just flowing out of me, so I’ll go with it.  I don’t post often about politics but a post that came out tonight about Joe Lieberman and the GOP reminds me a lot of my earlier posts on Smartmobbing the US Elections and Howard Rheingold’s post on Votewatch:Smartmobbing To Keep Elections Honest  and a post I wrote on SmartMobs last night about SMS and the March 2004 Spanish general elections -Cuba Tourism -  I do write about politics.  Let’s hope that mobile technology and basic human goodness will win out and the end of all of this.

The  Joe Lieberman gradual defection to the Republicans reminds me of the Dead Zone season finale I saw last night called THE HUNTING PARTY  -"In the season finale, Johnny is witness to Janus’ secret plot to assassinate the Vice President in order to move Stillson one step closer to the White House."

So what does this have to do with Joe Lieberman?  The ePluribus Media Community has published an interesting timeline of events- with the possibility that Lieberman would be moving over to the Republicans before the CT Primary took place (see the data from epluribusmedia.org below):

But before I go into that - and I want to make sure this still ties into metrics and measurement.  IP Address is one way we can track visits and the source of traffic.  epluribusmedia published the following chart that I found very revealing - a bunch of sites having the same IP address ……IP Addresses are traceable.

I don’t doubt that there are other spins to this information and what’s in the epluribusmedia.org post - what’s eerie is how much Joe Lieberman reminds me of one of characters out of the Dead Zone - and not one of the good guys.  

Credit given where Credit is due - The Web Analytics Digest on Yahoo Groups that Eric Peterson started has supplied me with a lot of good information, including reference to an article from ClickZ on how to measure Blog Influence.  Kelly Abbott is  Dandelife’s CEO and writes on how to measure the influence of a blog.

"….it is possible to hold a ruler up to the blogosphere and calculate just how much chatter is being generated around your brand." (Dandelife can chart the "chatter" and I covered that in an earlier Webmetricsguru post).

Any decent Web Analytics package will do - be it Google Analytics or HBX, or a bunch of others I can rattle off.  Personally, I see no advantage with HBX but Kelly does.  It seems to me that Kelly Abbott is pretty much pulling the data the rest of us gather - PageViews (obsolete according to my last two posts),  visitors, repeat visitors, and referrals from search engines, directly from other sites (such as blogs) and from bookmarks/emails (i.e. not linking from any other site at all).   ("use the example of iMedia Connection, which itself has some excellent chatter surrounding it. See for yourself. There are two numbers we’re going to be pulling from that page.

• 1)The first is the links. Those are the number of specific citations to the iMedia site have been made by other sites linking directly to iMedia Connection and any of its pages.
• 2)The other number is the number of blogs that are doing the linking. The number of links is always greater than the number of blogs.

1                         2

Rank: 686 (3,653 links from 1,400 blogs)

URL: http://www.imediaconnection.com

Kelly Abbott says that a search on Bloglines for citations should be close to the first Technorati number (3653), which it is (~4000) http://bloglines.com/search?q=Bcite:imediaconnection.com&ql=en&s=f&pop=l&news=m

Now that we have the two numbers (links and blogs) we chart them over time to see how much they increase which shows the amount of "chatter" around your site/brand.

"Alexa: Amazon’s "non-scientific" consumer internet monitoring service. iMedia Connection Alexa rank is not what you want. That will measure your performance against other sites.

Really, all you want to do is to see how many visitors to your site Alexa is recording. Grab the weekly "reach per million" metric. The higher the number, the better. A number like 100 means, of 1 million internet users, 100 visited your site. Sites like Yahoo!, Google, Amazon and MySpace garner most of the attention. Have a look at the iMedia Connection weekly reach to see how they compare. For your Alexa rank, the weekly reach is good in and of itself. You’ll want to chart its change over time as well, but its freshness is not a concern here. You’ve addressed freshness by narrowing your metric to the past week. "

Here’s what Kelly is proposing as basic Buzz Monitoring Scorecard:

On a weekly basis, however, you’ll want to create a simple spreadsheet of fields that help you chart your site’s buzz over time. Here what I recommend:

• Technorati: Blogs linking to your site     (easy to get)
• Technorati: Total incoming links to your site  (easy to get)
• Bloglines: Citation search total (easy to get)
• Analytics: Pageviews  (easy if you have access to analytics)
• Analytics: New Visitors  (easy if you have access to analytics)
• Analytics: Repeat visitors (easy if you have access to analytics)
• Analytics: Referrals (easy if you have access to analytics)
• Analytics: Organic (easy if you have access to analytics)
• Analytics: Direct (easy if you have access to analytics)
• Datasource: New Members/Subscribers/Customers  (if applicable)
• Datasource: Revenues from (direct sales/affiliates/partners/resellers/etc.)  (if applicable)
• Alexa: Weekly rank                                     (if applicable)
• Email: Opens                                              (if applicable)
• Email: Clickthroughs                                 (if applicable)
• Email: Forwards                                         (if applicable)

Most of this looks to be pretty easy to collect - not all of it will be part of every site - but I could easily collect it for most of my clients.  Some of my Artist friends, one in particular, could benefit by doing the parts of this list that apply to her site.  I would easily do this for some of my newer clients such TheNewsMarket and GCS.

Kelly Abbott suggests you collect this data on a weekly basis and look at it over time and you can chart what makes sense for your site, including other KPI’s (ie: number of house plans sold, number of cart submissions, etc) to see the relationship of Buzz about your site and the other KPI’s your already collecting (or should be collecting) data on.

It’s kinda weird that I just posted on Death of PageViews as a web analytics measurement, earlier today , (maybe I ought to do a painting about it) when Xeni Jardin over at Boing Boing almost wrote the same post, but used different source data! 

"Evan Williams (Odeo CEO and Pyra/Blogger co-founder) has an interesting post up about the fading significance of pageview and hit counts in determining the reach and influence of websites. Ajax, RSS and widgets have something to do with it, argues Ev — but so does crappy design that effectively forces the user to clickclickclick many times to accomplish a task that leaner design would permit in just a single click. Crappy design like you’ll find on MySpace. Snip: "

That’s a interesting point (one that I did not make because it was not in the MediaPost article I quoted from earlier).  If your site has crappy design (and Evan Williams is kinda saying MySpace has crappy coding) which causes their pageviews to be inflated because you need to click a lot more to get something done that if it were done, say, in Ajax - than your site sucks and you can’t trust the PageViews as a measurement of interest or site usage.  

What’s weird is that Wall Street is rewarding the crappy design because some might have looked at MySpace’s PageViews a measure of visitor demand (and eyeballs, to some extent) which it’s not. It’s always strange to reward lousy coding with more money - but I hear it happens(happened) a lot, esp in the late 90’s.

"Pageview counts are as susceptible as hit counts to site design decisions that have nothing to do with actual usage. As Mike Davidson brilliantly analyzed in April, part of the reason MySpace drives such an amazing number of pageviews is because their site design is so terrible. As Mike writes: "Here’s a sobering thought: If the operators of MySpace cleaned up the site and followed modern interface and web application principles tomorrow, here’s what the graph would look like:

Read Ev’s entire post here. "

Hmm, that Alexa chart would be very disturbing if I were the owner of MySpace and my, new, redesigned site generated only 25% of the pageviews it did before.  I guess quality over quanity.  Except it’s not quality that your getting on MySpace, according to Sean Bonner when he posted about MySpace can eat a bag of dick.

"Yesterday I was reading about how the completely shit-ass design of MySpace is what gives them so much traffic (people need to click through 97 pages to do something they could do in one click on another site) and today I’ve added another reason to puke at the thought of that site. I keep getting e-mails from them that some skank named Jennifer has invited me to join her group "Hot Videos" but since I can’t do anything with the e-mail I have to go to the site to take action on it. Except even though I was on the site hours ago it’s forgotten my cookie and I have to login again. Except it says "you need to login to do that!" I need to login to login? OK, now, 3 pages later I’m logged in. And then I have to go home. And then I have to go to the mailbox. And then I have to go to the message. 6 pages later I finally get to this message and hit deny, to which I’m treated to a "sorry, you can’t do this because we suck and are having errors or the Atari 2600 box this whole site is running on just got unplugged or something" bullshit error message. Basically it won’t let me deny the message. I try again and again. I’ve now given MySpace about 20 page views trying to delete this spam. Finally I decide to just report it as spam instead, except I can’t do that either because of the same error that says they can’t deny the request. Worst. Site. Ever.

I think I know who Jennifer is …. the woman with 1 million "friends" on MySpace.  Actually, I had it confused with Christine Dolce - nicknamed "Forbidden" - She’s the lady with one million friends.  Same thing.