Web 2.0 Archive

Over the past year the NYC MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) has been going after Web developers who use schedule data to create applications to help public transportation passengers make better use of the system. As a railfan, I’ve always found this policy absurd. Google has been able to get access to this same data set since the launch of their Google Maps with subway directions last year and HopStop has the data as well.

Michael Grynbaum from the NY Times has a great story today about the progress that’s been made with the MTA in opening up the schedule data. Complaints against two web developers have been dropped. Grynbaum discusses how a variety of cities across the U.S. share their schedule and transit data with the public. Up north, Toronto held a “transit camp” in 2007 to help create a better TTC website.

At the end of the column, there’s a comment from Internet law expert Jonathan Zittrain who noted, “I love that the subversive act of the 21st century in the subway is not graffiti, but mapping out the stations so you can know where to exit the car. Twenty years ago they would have been tagging the cars. In both cases, the city is upset.”

Continue reading “MTA Appears Willing to Work With Web Developers…Finally” »

In my past life I was responsible for creating archives of content after our consumer products went live. This was pre-Web 2.0 and was typically a painful process trying to make sure that I grabbed every product mention.

Today there are a variety of services that make it easier to archive content around a term or product. A new offering from Portland-based Iterasi launching today is hoping to do the job even better. The service is named Positive Press and is setup to capture, archive and report on any content across the Web. The core of the product is Iterasi’s archiving service which saves actual web pages from the time of the save including all contents. I spoke with CEO Pete Grillo who showed me that you can even archive full RSS feeds and the archive is of the webpages that the stories are from not just the plain RSS content.

Positive Press can also archive Twitter messages in the full Twitter style and the messages are retained for all time. It’s very simple to use – just enter a search term and any time that term is used on twitter, Positive Press will archive it. Apparently Twitter only saves 30-days of messages.
Continue reading “Iterasi Launches Positive Press for Archiving and Tracking Web Content” »

By now I am sure everyone has heard of the cash for clunkers (official name CARS - car allowance rebate system) program run by the U.S. government. It’s a $3 billion dollar bailout program for the auto industry paid for by tax dollars. If you are new to the program, here’s how it works. If you have a car that’s considered a clunker, you can get up to a $4,500 bottom line discount on any new car.

In my new role I see a lot of websites that are clunkers. Many of the sites haven’t been touched in a decade, are broken, are out-of-date, missing any current functionality or aren’t indexed in Google. How many dollars of revenue are these businesses losing out on because their website is a clunker?

I am not even talking about any sort of social networking or social media optimization. Just simple updates so that the sites are usable and, more importantly, findable. By investing in creating better small business websites, the local economy will benefit which in turn will provide more jobs and strengthen local businesses for the long term. Some of the concept overlaps with Robert Scoble’s 2010 web concept.

With that I’d like to introduce the concept of the “Cash for Clunkers Website Edition”. I’ve posted my initial thoughts on the concept and program in my Information Week column. Have a look at the concept and let me know your thoughts!

Swiss-based online scheduling tool Doodle has announced the launch of Doodle Premium today. I would have preferred if they called it Super Doodle but I guess Doodle Premium will have to do. The last time we covered Doodle they were launching an online scheduling tool inside of Facebook.

Doodle and MyDoodle will remain free while the Doodle Premium will cost $28/year. Basically Doodle Premium allows the user to customize the look and feel of the site. It’s a way to personalize the events that Doodle users create and send to their participants. The price seems a bit on the high side as $9 or $14 feels about right but I am sure the Doodle team researched the right price. Pricing is always the hardest part of any business, whether web-based or brick-and-mortar.

The company also notes that Premium Doodle is ad-free and customers can also request personal information from their event participants, such as postal address, e-mail address, and phone number.

Session-recording tool RobotReplay has announced that the service has been acquired by ForeSee Results. Rob Lewis at TechVibes picked up on the acquisition yesterday. RobotReplay was developed and maintained by Nitobi. Financial terms of the acquisition were not provided.

Nitobi noted in the release, “ForeSee Results acquired RobotReplay last fall and developed the technology to integrate into its existing platform.” Interesting that it took half-a-year to announce the acquisition. ForSee Results also announced the launch of a new product, CS SessionReplay, which they describe as, “a new tool that records what selected site visitors are seeing and doing on a website in a real-time movie format, including recording a user’s mouse clicks and movements, page scrolling, form entry, and all interactivity with a website.”

Session recording tools are very important for website analysis and for understanding usage patterns. For ecommerce sites, they can provide a view into why customers might not be ordering or moving through the process as was developed. Another tool in the session-recording space we’ve covered several times is ClickTale.

German-based Jimdo has put out a call to all Geocities users…a lifeboat if you will. Jimdo launched in 2007 and currently has a staff of 30.  The service offers an easy way to create a website and the company says that no technical skills are required.

Their “lifeboat” is a new offering they are near completion on which will allow Geocities users to transfer their sites into Jimdo. The basic Jimdo service is free and you can upgrade to JimdoPro for $5/month. JimdoPro offers more detailed statistics, larger storage space, personalized domain name, and no ads.

They are offering Geocities’ (and Google Pages) users 10% off the JimdoPro fee. This is a smart move for Jimdo as it makes them look like heros for helping users of a system that is closing.

If you are as much of an analytics nut as I am, then the video below is for you. It features Dr Matthew Hindman, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University discussing online analytics. Dr. Hindman uses a variety of data from Hitwise to go very deep into the true analytics and much further than a basic web report.

From the overview, "Using three years of daily Web traffic data, and new models adapted from financial mathematics, this talk examines large-scale variation in Web traffic. These data show that Web traffic is highly heteroskedastic, with smaller sites having orders of magnitude more variation in the relative number of visitors they receive. These consistent patterns allow us to provide reasonable estimates of how likely it is Google will still be the most visited US site a year from now".

Dr. Hindman talks about rank volatility, items that are missing from traffic, the audience distribution curves for newspapers and news/media websites, and how big media plays musical chairs and how those chairs might affect staffing levels in the future. He also looks at whether the Web and online media can help save newspapers.

It’s 45 minutes long and while Hitwise data is not perfect, the analysis is worth the time.