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Some Conclusions About Stats . . .

January 17, 2007 by Liz

Stats and Analytics . . .

This week on Tuesday Open Comments Night we talked about crazy stats, spikes, keyphrases, trends, ratios, traffic, backlinks, pageranks, SERPs, splog sites, algorithyms, RSS subscribers, patterns, plugins, goals, and search terms.

There was also mention of weather, grammar, punctuation, spelling, Mark Twain, Ferraris, a story in six words, full moons, reading tea leaves, gypsies, movies, The View, 24 Hours, Z-list meme, Alice in Wonderland, MyBlogLog meme, weird statistical stuff, workloads of small-business owners, and The Long Tail.

We shared hellos, grins, jokes, laughs, congratulations, poetry, advice, questions, recommendations, addictions (to stats), and goodnights. There was even something about measuring traffic and feet? (I didn’t see any food though.)

Anyway, a thought is that blogging for stats is not the answer. Writing about your passion is.

Sounds like many people use more than one tool to measure stats. Here are some of the tools and sites we mentioned that you may want to check out:

103bees
Alexa
Amibook
Askimet
Awstats
blo.gs
Blogbeat
Crazy Egg
Digg
EasyTask Manager
Feedburner
Google Analytics
Google Pagerank
Google Sitemap
gVisit
Habari
HitTail
Inc.com
Mapstats
Mint
Moveable Type
MyBlogLog
MySpace
Performancing
pingomatic.com
ReviewMe
Shortstat
SiteMeter
Squidoo
StatCounter
StumbleUpon
SuperStats
Technorati
Text-link-ads
The Blogging Times
Tracksy
Typepad
weblogs.com
WordPress

Here’s some of the links that were shared:

Thanks for the cool links and for being part of the conversation. I wish I could quote you all, but I know you have an idea of how much time it takes to make that long link summary happen each week. I hate to let it go, but I thought you’d understand.

So, for 2007, we’ll just tell the story and share the links that you bring. You can always read the comments – they’re all there.

After all, how DO YOU explain Open Comment Night, if you’ve never experienced it?

See you next Tuesday? I sure hope so.
–ME “Liz” Strauss and Sandy Renshaw

Related article
What is Tuesday Open Comment Night?

What’s Up With The Weather?

January 17, 2007 by Chris Cree

What’s going on?

Things are crazy right now. Winter is not behaving normally. California is freezing their oranges off. Seattle has gotten pounded. Again. New Mexico has seen cattle killing blizzards.

I heard about a town somewhere in Nebraska yesterday that has been without power since around the first of the year and isn’t expected to get it back for several more weeks.

And then here in Savannah we’ve still been wearing short sleeve shirts with 70 degree days. I mean look at the current temperature map. There’s a whole lot of pink in places that are usually yellow this time of year.

Don’t get me wrong. For my part I’m not complaining. We’ve had it easy so far this winter.

But wildly unusual weather like this does make it a bit challenging to continue to be a global warming skeptic.

A Convenient Theory

Now I admit that being skeptical on the global warming thing is probably not so popular. But please don’t think that I am anti-environment. Fuel economy is high on our priority list in my car purchases. And even though the places we’ve lived in the South make it challenging to recycle my wife and I have recycled on our own through private concerns when we could.

In spite of the fact that I care, I’m still skeptical. It just seems too convenient to hear the high priests of the environment declare “Global Warming” at every single unusual weather thing that happens. Record high temperatures? Global Warming. El Niño? Global Warming. Oranges freezing in California? Obviously Global Warming!

I find it a tad suspicious that the theory seems to bend just a touch each time so that regardless what happens it can be incorporated as evidence the sky is falling. No, wait: The earth is warming.

Perhaps I’m a little simple minded or ignorant. But I have questions about the whole deal.

But how does record cold weather somewhere provide evidence that the planet is warming up?

Comparing how ever many millions of years our planet has been around with the few thousand years folks have been walking around (and the few hundred we’ve actually been recording the temperatures) how can we really be sure this isn’t some cyclical thing that is perfectly normal for our world?

When they take ice core probe temperatures they have to make some assumptions about things such as build up rates and stability of temperature at various depths. While these assumptions may be reasonable, how can we be sure they are true?

Different Biases

Now I admit I bring my own biases to the topic. Personally I think it is a bit arrogant for humans to believe we have that much influence or control over our planet.

As evidence exhibit A I’ll point to the science of Meteorology. In spite of all our technological advances and know how it is still pretty much a crap shoot whenever the weather guessers try to predict the future conditions in any particular location.

If our best scientists have such a hard time telling us accurately whether it is going to rain on the kids soccer game tomorrow night, how can we be so confident that what they tell us is coming down the road in a few centuries is any more accurate?

I guess I get the feeling on this one that many folks have made up their minds that human activity on this planet is bad by definition. Therefore they seem to present everything that happens through the bias that “proves” we are flushing ourselves down the toilet.

Maybe we are. I’ve gotta admit things are definitely a bit weird right now.

But maybe the planet is more resilient that most folks give it credit for. But that’s just The Way I C it.

Chris Cree is a regular contributor here at Successful-Blog and he helps businesses fuel growth through blogging with his consulting business, SuccessCREEations.

Reluctant Readers: Content Is King, But . . . I’m Too Tired to Read

January 9, 2007 by Liz

What This Is Not: This is NOT a design critique. It doesn’t take into account, the elegance, usability, great content, SEO, or revenue values of the fabulous blog discussed here: Read/WriteWeb, which is one of my favorite reads.

What This Is: It’s an exercise in point of view, how readers look at things. It also only addresses one value — how folks read. I choose a great blog to illustrate that even the greatest blog can challenge the patience of a tired, reluctant reader.

We’re All Reluctant Readers

In literacy education, there’s a euphemism, RELUCTANT READERS. That term is meant to name adults and children who come to print after having failed at learning to read. They come with specific needs. It’s hard to catch and keep their attention. Most educators use the term to identify folks who read below the level of the average population.

I use the term more literally. I think, at times we’re all reluctant readers — no matter how strong our skills are. Any time we have to read when we’re out of steam, we become reluctant readers — even if it’s our favorite topic. Then there are the times when we just aren’t interested. we’re definitely reluctant readers at those times too.

If you question that you’re ever been a reluctant reader, try this — pick up a legal document you don’t care about, and dig in for entertainment. . . . Bet you’ll wish for some pictures and some subheads.

Serving and Being a Reluctant Reader

Last night I was a reluctant reader. I decided to go with it. I looked at pages as an a naive, intelligent customer. My quest was to see when the page made it hard for me to read the content. What I found was that the question of supporting reluctant readers is only one value.

Beautiful blogs have many values.

Here’s a page from Read/WriteWeb, a blog I read regularly. This particular page features a post on Web Previews. The screen shots that follow tell the story.

Read/WriteWeb: the page full width.

Read/WriteWeb: same page main text only.

To get the fullest effect, visit the Read/WriteWeb page itself.

Feeds are a moot point in this discussion. Readers can’t see the ads, but they also can’t respond to them. Some questions to consider about folks who see the whole page:

Where does your eye want to spend it’s time?
Would you call this choosing for the reader?
Could design tweaks increase readership, without sacrificing revenues?
Is content king on this page? How would you order the elements by importance as you take the page in visually?

Read/WriteWeb is an excellent blog. with great content, great design, and a loyal readerhip. They’re in a business that is sponsored by advertising. That’s what lead me to realize that accessing the content has to be a partnership between the blog and the reader. Each has a part to make the experience work effectively.

What do you see that supports a reluctant reader? What might you do to draw that reader into the content?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Enough About Me, Let’s Talk About What You Think

January 3, 2007 by Liz

That Couldn’t Be Us Or Could It?

I share a joke with a friend in California. It’s like a script. It goes like this.

I call him up. He answers.

I say, “Hi, Eddie, how am I?”

He replies, “Oh, you’re fine. What do you think of me?”

I tell him he’s wonderful.

Then he says, “Enough about me. Let’s talk about you. What do you think about my sweater?”

That’s when we laugh to think that we’re not like the people who actually do that.

This morning at Poynter Online something made me realize how it is to do what Eddie I joke about.

Butch Ward gave five New Year’s Resolutions. It’s number 2 that brought this thought home to me. His second resolution was talk to your readers. My thought was I do that. He offered fine advice on ways to engage in dynamic conversation. Then Mr. Ward made a suggestion for this New Year’s conversation . . .

Don’t ask him what he wants you to put in his newspaper or on his news broadcast. Instead, ask what he does. What she thinks. Then you decide how your newsroom can be more relevant to their world.

That’s when I realized it.

Those standard, customer-survey questions sound like “What do you think of my sweater? What do you think of ME?”

Sure, we need to ask how we’re doing, but those can’t be the only questions, or we’ll never know our readers.

Authentic values aren’t revealed by survey questions.

Relationships and understanding come from listening to what folks want to talk about — dreams, desires, unexpressed needs and wishes — what they find marvelous, annoying, heartwarming, concerning, breathtaking. At least, that’s my experience.

But hey, enough about me. Let’s talk about what you think.

What do find worth spending thoughts and words on?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

10 Reasons to Write and Publish Every Day

December 28, 2006 by Liz

Connecting to the World

Look in a scrapbook. Look in your wallet. You’ll find written messages. Diaries, wedding invitations, resumes, love letters, even our names are written as words. Yet, the best writer — the most prolific, the most proficient — is never finished learning, never finished becoming a writer. We are apprentices every one of us. We’re all in the process of becoming.

We’re all apprentice writers — part ego and part self-doubt. It’s the ego that helps us face down that blank page to say what we have to say. It’s the self-doubt that stops us from casting the movie about what we’ve written.

In this age of noise and clutter, we all need to be writers. Writing and publishing are the way we connect to the world.

10 Reasons to Write and Publish Every Day

We write to record our thoughts . . . and by recording them we think them through, rearrange, and re-organize them. We make our ideas clearer. We make our thinking stronger and more easily understood. We carve a path that a reader, a listener, another person can follow from our minds to their minds, from our hearts to their hearts. Writing is a connection waiting to happen.

Publishing makes the connection more natural and accessible.

Here are ten reasons that writing (and publishing) every day is important.

Writing every day makes us better thinkers. It takes our thoughts out of our heads and challenges us to express them in understandable ways. Effective writing is the opposite of seat-of-the-pants thinking.

Writing every day teaches us how to work with words in print, to construct a meaningful message. Like playing a guitar or doing math, writing takes practice.

Writing every day helps us develop a voice that is natural and consistent, strong and confident, and attuned to readers. Everything we write has an audience. Even when we write for ourselves, we go back to read, listening to what we wrote. We question. We consider. We critique our choices.

Writing every day improves our ability to craft remarkable prose that people want to share. Every time someone shares something that we write they add value to our ideas — when they change them and when they don’t.

Writing every day gets us comfortable with the conventions of writing and the conventions of writing give our messages credibility. The credibility is how society finds the appropriate place for our ideas.

Writing every day lets us find our personal writing process. We lose our fear of flying and learn our way around our creativity. We get familiar with what to do when we need ideas, how to know what we want to say, what is always going to be hard, and what parts are worth looking forward to.

Writing every day teaches us how to tell our internal editor to be quiet until we need feedback.

Writing every day makes us better, more thoughtful readers. We bring the insights and appreciation of a writer to what we read.

Writing every day connects us to people. We meet more people in print than we can ever possibly meet face to face. Many people will know our written voice as well as they know our names.

Writing every day makes us architects and builders. We record our history, and we imagine the future. We inspire and motivate, both ourselves and others. We make something that changes the world, something lasting. We make a unique contribution that others might use.

Everything written is inherently personal and at the same time dynamically social. In a noisy world, it’s the way we communicate across continents, across living rooms; with folks we just met and with every generation of our families. We write our dreams, our business plans, and ask questions. We read. We respond. We get the ultimate first impression.

Each time we write our voice becomes clearer, more focused, and stronger, until our writing is inseparable from our voice. Everything we write is written about us.

Publishing is how we talk to the world and how the world hears us.

What have you told the world today?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Steve Farber Is an Extreme B.A.D. Blogger!

December 27, 2006 by Liz

Blogger A Day Conversation: Hi, Steve. What’s for Breakfast?

It stands to reason that a Blogger a Day call with Extreme Leader, Steve Farber, would take an Extreme form. A telephone didn’t enter the picture at all. It was breakfast when Steve was in Chicago!

This was going to be an Extreme B.A.D. Blogger connection. I packed up myself and my stuff into my car. I put my wallet in my back pocket. I put my key in the ignition. I turned the music up loud.

I drove past Wrigley Field and headed where the breakfast was planned. I couldn’t help thinking on the drive out there of the extreme birthday brunch I had celebrated at the same place — all chocolate, champagne, and one piece of bacon. I promised myself less embarrassing choices when I met the guy from California, I had wanted to meet since this summer.

Arriving at the atrium lobby, I aimed for the restaurant. Then a voice behind me said, “Liz,” and there he was. Thoughtful man, my mind said. I also thought, great smile, extreme shoulders, and a person who hugs when he says hello. I already like Mr. Steve Farber.

We found a table and soon the server, a lovely lady, who seemed part of our party, made sure that we had what we wanted. Not for a second did her presence seem an intrusion. Steve has a way of making the world feel welcome. He smiles a lot, and everyone notices that.

The conversation for me had started much earlier — in the car in my head driving there. As the coffee was poured, I had questions to ask Steve about the characters in his books, Radical Leap and Radical Edge. As a writer and as a reader, I was extremely curious about knowing about one in particular.

“Tell me. Is there really an Agnes?”

Steve paused for a thought, then said, “Agnes is not a real person.”

I told him as best I could what testament that was to his skill as a writer. I tried to explain that I found it quite something that anyone could deliver such a consistent message written in such a consistently believable human voice. I wanted Steve to know that I felt that way about all of his characters, but Agnes was more than a personal favorite. I still wish that I could meet her.

That’s when Steve and I talked about how his books relate to his leadership coaching. His speaking engagements draw lessons from the stories and the characters. Steve asked me how I would do a speech from “Agnes’s Book” Radical Edge. Almost immediately, I said I would structure a speech around the idea of finding one’s personal frequency — that note, the value that wraps around all other values the person holds dear.

Steve, being Steve smiled back at me and gently said “Of course, you go there because that’s where you are. Other folks chose another point completely.” He went on to say how some folks want him to talk only about the WUP — that’s the Wake Up Pad, where folks keep track of the ideas and implications of life as it happens. The WUP I thought. Can’t leave out the WUP!

The problem is that his books are so rich.

We wandered through ideas from speeches and books, to how Steve started blogging, and where he’ll be going over the next two years, when his next book is due to come out.

Somehow, being the leader that Steve is, he managed to get as much of my story as I got of his. It was his story, my story, and the stories of people we knew — all intertwined while we talked about the business of books, and speaking, and blogs, and websites, and future projects. I told Steve what I was doing with Phil. He added his publishing advice to the mix. It made a difference to the plans for Phil’s book.

By the end of the conversation I felt the power of extreme leadership, even though the words had never been mentioned.

I smiled the whole drive home. I don’t remember what we ate, but I don’t think I embarrassed myself in the choices I made.

B.A.D. Blogger Quote

The great, compelling writers are the ones whose voices are unique and whose passion is palpableÃ¢â¬âwhatever the subject. Once I figured that out for myself, the process got much easier and . . . more fun. — Steve Farber

Stop by Steve’s Blog, Extreme Leadership, and say hi!

Thanks, Steve, you B.A.D. Blogger!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Want to be a B.A.D. Blogger see the. . . a B.A.D. Blogger? page in the sidebar