Judah Phillips mentioned to me a post on SeoMoz about Bad Bots Confound Web Analytics By Executing Javascript Tags and I wondered just how far one could take this "bad bot" from hell thing?

Well, how about creating bots that inflate traffic for sites deliberately?  How far fetched is that in light of this post that Judah Phillips and the post he wrote last July.

Might we see pages that have stats like this one if we started to look for them more often?

The bots that can execute Javascript are not only becoming more numerous, but more sophisticated as well, mimicking human behavior in ways that make it harder to filter them out:

…we're seeing is some bots that are completely obvious (like the one that hits the same page over 1,000 times in rapid succession), and other cases that may well be bots, but it's hard to say. One can assume there is also more discrete bot activity mixed in there that isn't easily identifiable…

The motivations for creating bots that mimic human behavior and read Javascript tags are many:

….What if competitors and other unfriendlies decided to manipulate the system for their advantage? Or what if bored computer science students decided to mess with your web analytics rather than hack your root password? What if it became common for botnets to roam the Internet and toy with the analytics of random sites? And what if they were good at doing it – mimicking human behavior in relation to geolocation, browser type, time on site, pages crawled, etc?

In light of this post, one of the things I'd suggest doing .. become more conscious of strange patterns when they appear.

When you see behavior from "bad bots" on your sites, try to trace it back from where it came and figure out what the intent of the creator of the bot(s) is.

I don't know what else to say besides that about this behavior except that it's opened up my eyes to other possibilities of what makes up the traffic I may be looking at, in some case, in analytics packages. 

Recently, I got access to Techrigy's SM2 platform with the capacity to run anything I wanted on it – it came about as a result of attending the Social Media Roundtable in Toronto last week. 

I was live tweeting at the Roundtable (Social Media RoundTable Summary and WhitePaper ahead ) and when I mentioned that everyone seemed to want a Social Media Dashboard, I was contacted by Martin Edic of Techrigy about Techrigy's SM2, which is has a "Freemimum" account (anyone can try the product, the limit is how many terms you can monitor).

Above: Monitoring "Web Analyst"

You can look at the results against a term, similar to what you can do today in BlogPulse and IceRocket, etc – but you can do a lot more here – like put terms into "folders", generate a list of keywords against a folder (based on user generated tagging), categorize based on Sentiment, tag content manually based on Sentiment and Positive/Negative, and view a histogram of sorts on how topics interact with each other.

In terms of the "Web Analyst" term, the peak in the second week of May probably relates to many of us attending Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Francisco.  But what's also nice is being able to search blog citations on a physical map (see below):

To test my theory about the geography of blog posts, I refined my report to May 4th – 9th (when the Emetrics Conference was taking place in San Francisco) and was able to see the posts that were tied to the term "Web Analyst" based on location of the blogger. 

The Results below confirmed that I had been right in my hutches about Emetrics connecting with Web Analyst that week:

	Search results
on 603894	Published date: 5/9/2008 web analyst (ID 603894)  Edit Details  See Full Details  Spam  Delete  Technorati AutTechnorati http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/05/web-analyst-interview-jacques-warren.html Web Analyst Interview: Jacques Warren Continuing my series of interviews with Web Analysts, here is an interview with Jacques Warren.What isWarren.Whatnt position and the name of the company you work for.I am an infor.Ident consultant in Web Analyti…   SAnalytie… SM2 Authority (4 of 10):
on 736231	Pub lished date: 5/9/2008 web analyst (ID 736231)  Edit Details  See Full Details  Spam  Delete  Technorati Authority Technorati http://www.maianalytics.com/e-metrics/e-metrics-at-san-francisco/ E-metrics at San Francisco …g, much like Web 2.0, there is Web Analytics 2.0. The industry is adapting and changing rapidly. As web analysts, it is up to us to make our mark. The web analyst plays a very vital role to the growth of your bu…   Show More… SM2 Authority (0 of 10):
on 603915	Published date: 5/7/2008 web analyst (ID 603915)  Edit Details  See Full Details  Spam  Delete  Technorati Authority Technorati http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080507-192020 A Seat at the Table for Web Analytics … conversation I had with Marshall Sponder triggered this post. Marshall was bemoaning the fact that web analysts can't even get "a seat at the table" (i.e. serious consideration) within many companies….   Show More… SM2 Authority (10 of 10):
on 604090	Published date: 5/7/2008 web analyst (ID 604090)  Edit Details  See Full Details  Spam  Delete  Technorati Authority Technorati http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/sewblog/~3/285716087/080507-192020 A Seat at the Table for Web Analytics … conversation I had with Marshall Sponder triggered this post. Marshall was bemoaning the fact that web analysts can't even get "a seat at the table" (i.e. serious consideration) within many companies.   Show More… SM2 Authority (0 of 10):
on 736246	Published date: 5/5/2008 web analyst (ID 736246)  Edit Details  See Full Details  Spam  Delete  Technorati Authority Technorati http://hurolinan.com/index.php/2008/05/06/advanced-web-metrics-with-google-analytics-by-brian-clifto… Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton Brian Clifton’s Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics is a ‘must-read’ for all web analyst regardless of the platform they work with. It lays out possibilities in data capture, reporting and integration whi…   whi Show M

The results are good, and maybe one improvement I'd suggest – would be nicer if clicking on a map point brings up the blog posts associated with that location (or vice versa, looking at results).  

On the other hand, Techrigy SM2 is a pretty new platform and they are trying something different than everyone else – the "free" approach they are taking and "community building" of category definitions, sorta a "crowdsourcing" approach – which should come into play more as the platform matures and more people use SM2.  

The fact you can sign up and start using it for free – and have almost the full power of the platform (but only 10 terms you can track) is very generous offer by them.

The community defination building idea is appealing, if it actually takes off, because it's tedious to go and create definitions for everything you want to track  and building on the work of the community by  quickly throwing together Social Media Monitoring (sort of the way Linux is built, opensourced – which many people writing the software – and now Linux is pretty much .. Unix, whereas the prioportry versions of Unix have all but dissipeared – I know, I used to make my living on HP-UX at one time).

For me, the most useful feature of Techrigy SM2, at this point, is the "Author Categories" – for example, in the "Web Analyst" folder I could build a "cloud" map and a list of the keywords in it hyperlinked to the blog posts or sites they referenced – this could be useful in coming up with a keyword list.  

I will point out one annoying feature was the same post referenced twice, once by it's feedburner url and then the actual blog post -feedburner, but Turhrigy will work the kinks out in time.

Summary – on the Pro side, Techrigy SM2 Social Media Monitoring Platform is free and offers more than you can get with Blogpulse, Talkdigger, and the rest.  You can also categorize terms by putting them into folders and this reminds me of Web Analytics – categorization is all important – and you can do it here as you can in most high end Analytics platforms.  

But, on the other hand, you can't do all the other things with the data here that you can do with Web Analytics platforms - you can't do pathing, you can't determine time spent, bounce rate, pathing etc – those things don't apply – yet one wishes for them, based on how the data is organized.  In other words, perhaps the structure and features of SM2 remind me of Web Analytics more than they should – as they suggest functionaity the package can't really deliver – but then, neither can any other social media monitoring package.

The other thing is not so much an issue for SM2, its a problem with Social Media – it's still too new – and packages like Techrigy SM2 have no clearly defined space in Corporations -  often there's no Stakeholders – there's no one to sell it to …. because it's hard to find "owners" in organizations who believe Social Media Monitoring is their job.  I know that is a fact.   While SEO and SEM are now part of many organizations, as their worth is clearly defined, as is their ROI, the same can not yet be said for Social Media – and we're probably 2 to 5 years away from that happening.

And, from what I saw in a call with Techrigy, SM2 needs a bit of time to really set up to it's full advantage – it's not something you want to do in your sleep and you get out of it what you put into it. In fact, itt might take hours a day

of someone's time to effectively use and monitor a site for Social Media using Technigy SM2 … and it's not yet clear most businesses are ready to assign those resources or that they even need to (I think they do, but it's only as Social Media matures will business adopt it as they have Search Engine Marketing and Web Analytics).

So where Techrigy SM2 will end up, down the line, depends on how it's sold to the people who would potentially use it. 

You can purchase an Enterprise version – with unlimited amount of searches and terms – but most people won't need that much power – and can get by with the free version; and, often large corporations do need a full enterprise platform -  it's there for them, from Techrigy, at an attractive price.

So far, I liked the features of Techrigy SM2 that I've seen and I made suggestions on the new ones I'd like them to develop. 

On a closing note here, SM2 reminds me of Nielsen Buzzmetrics – in that you can define search terms, product terms, competitor names, in a very controlled manner – and that seems to suggest inexpensive Social Media platforms are becoming as powerful as their more expensive and upscale brothers;that doesn't spell a good future for Nielsen Buzzmetrics, by the future, but that's fine with me – not shedding any tears for Nielsen, the more power that's in the hands of content creators, the better.

I attended a Tweetup at 41 First Avenue, D.B.A. – for a few hours tonight and it was great!

Just wish they had some food there – ended up ordering Pizza – and I try to avoid eating Pizza but I could not resist.

Love New York – there is just so much, so much happening here – every day, every afternoon, every evening of the week – there is something …. something that, in this case, was very good attend.

Anyway, here's the YouTube Video I made which has a lot of good footage in it.