New Version Of Woopra Released

Excellent news for all of you lucky enough to be able to use Woopra as your statistical analytics package. The Woopra Client is now up to version 1.1.2.1. This new version contains a number of bug fixes alongside some new features.

One of the reasons which might of taken this client update so long to be released is that, according to John P. the client update works hand in hand with the back end architecture of their servers. In other words, the client update comes out at the same time that their back end undergoes an update.

Three features which become immediately apparent are as follows:

The live map view now displays the page that a visitor is reading as they view it.
The calendar has been updated to a cool new extremely easy to select slider bar.
We’ve added multi-monitor support to the full screen live map.

Despite the new features and the bug fixes contained within this release, 1.1.2.1 is considered a minor release with a major version scheduled to be released within the next three weeks or so. Also worthy of mentioning is that all users who have been waiting to be approved should be approved by tomorrow evening. After the approvals, Woopra will have a testing base of over 20,000 users. That is 20,000 users which didn’t exist over 2 months ago.

Unpopular As Bad As Too Popular

Josh Catone of ReadWriteWeb published an intriguing article the other day that dove into the question, How Many Friends Are Too Many? In his article, Josh takes the example of Jason Calacanis who follows 26,672 people (now at 29,978) and suggests that there is no way in hell that Jason can actually participate in conversations in any meaningful way with those who follow him. I agree.

I’m on Twitter myself, and I am following 338 people while 460 people are following me. Not all of those who follow me are participating with me in conversations on a usual basis. So far, I’ve been able to engage in great conversations with those who follow me, but when the conversation involved more than one individual, one of the biggest pains of Twitter shows itself. Twitter’s structure does not bode well for multi-threaded conversations and it’s too easy to get lost in the noise. However, I’ve been able to show that I am indeed listening to those who shout out at me, something Jason can’t vouch for.

But Jason has mentioned before, he uses Twitter more as a marketing, broadcasting medium than a conversational tool. Looking at his Twitter profile, it seems as though he at times participates in the conversation. But with the way Jason is set up, once he replies to something, the conversation is blown off the map. Not entirely his fault.

But back to the matter at hand. According to research conducted by Robin Dunbar, 100-150 people are the approximate amount which would comprise a natural group size in which everyone can really know everyone else. I can vouch for that as I’ve kept the list of people I follow down to a minimum and I pretty much know every one of them by avatar alone.

How have you been able to manage relationships with a large number of people? Do you exchange emails or messages on Facebook or any other social platform where you have close to a 1,000 so called friends? Do any of the conversations you have with folks online contain any value to you, or is it a hopeless feeling of being lost in the noise?

TechCrunch Under A Microscope

The StatBot Logo

TheStatBot has recently published an awesome statistical analysis of TechCrunch.com Some immediate findings based on the number crunching produced by the bot:

Total of 7007 posts….
…spread over 1079 days, or just under 3 years…
…with a total of 1,977,710 words…
…at an average of 6.5 posts a day…
…with 282.2 words a post…
…receiving 228,449 comments…
…from 56,292 unique commentators…
…with 18,440 outbound links…
…to 4641 sites…
…at an average of 4 links to every site

The stats cover Jun 2005 all the way through April of 2008. Considering the success that Arrington has turned TechCrunch into, it’s very very interesting to see how it came about in a numerical sense. Judging by the Top Links which were compiled, TechCrunch has a good internal linking strategy going on with Crunchbase being the most linked to site within the posts of TechCrunch.

I also have to hand it to Mike and the crew he has had write for him. According to the numbers, Michael Arrington leads the way in terms of the number of comments left on the site. Duncan Riley who is no longer with TechCrunch came in at number 4. This means that even though there are hundreds of comments made on the blog, Arrington and his writers at least attempted to continue the conversation after the post is published, rather than letting it die off. I’ve always been told that large websites generally ignore commentators, but could TechCrunch be one of the exceptions?

Please let me know what your thoughts are on the stats provided. Did you find anything that was surprising to you?

Selling Babies On Ebay

According to a story published out of Berlin, Germany via Reuters, police apprehended a 23 year old woman after she tried to sell her 8 month old son on Ebay. The mother told police it was a joke, but I don’t think the police thought it was funny. By the way, the Ebay auction read as follows:

Baby — collection only. Offer my nearly new baby for sale because it cries too much. Male, 70 cm long.

The opening bid was $1.57 with no bidders during the two hours the auction was online before being yanked off shortly there after. Perhaps the crying aspect of the deal put people off from bidding. Would you buy someone on eBay, let alone a baby?

PicoBuzz – Another Twitter Buzz Chart

There are literally tons of people using Twitter these days. However, keeping track of the buzz is difficult unless you use a website such as PicoBuzz.com. PicoBuzz.com is setup in a similar fashion as music billboards. The chart showcases the buzzword, current spot, last spot, and at least five people who mentioned that buzzword on twitter with a link to see more tweets referring to the word.

Some of the buzzwords mentioned in todays chart are lunch, coffee, indiana jones, wii, and facebook. Outside of getting a glance as to what the TwitterVerse is talking about, PicoBuzz really doesn’t do much else.

Twitter Blog Confirms Downtime Issues

Having a look at the official Twitter blog, Twitter has announced that they have detected errant API usage through their Jabber resources.

We found an errant API project eating way too much of our Jabber (a flavor of instant messenger) resources. This activity (which we’ve corrected) had an affect of overloading our main database, resulting in the error pages and slowness most people are now encountering.

We’re bringing services back online now. Some will be slower than others for a while, and we’ll be watching IM and IM-based API clients very closely. We’ll also be taking steps to avoid this behavior in the future.

For god sakes, I hope this is what has been causing all of their issues lately and they get this problem fixed as soon as possible. I need my Twitter fix!

MyBlogLog Improves Contact Manager

MyBlogLog Logo

MyBlogLog recently announced that they have improved the way in which users manage their contacts. When you click on the add/manage link that appears below your contacts, you’ll see the new screens. One thing I noticed immediately when checking out my own MyBlogLog profile is the large number of pending contacts. I had no idea that a large number of users added me as a contact. I wonder what the heck happened there. At any rate, you now have the ability to view pending contacts, contacts, and something called followers. Depending on the tab you select, you can add a contact, keep as a follower, block contacts and remove contacts.

As a side note, MBL has also lifted the 15 contact requests/day limit due to the new contact management features.

By the way, this blog and myself are on MyBlogLog and have been for quite a while. I use MBL to create and manage a community of user’s interested in the content of this site. If you would like to be a part of my MyBlogLog community, click on the link that says “Add Me To This Sites Community” within the recent readers section of this website. Or, click here and click on the Join Community link.

Relax Its Just Me

ChatInvite If you have visited this blog anytime after May 2nd, 2008 you may have noticed a pop up appear on your screen similar to the one shown on the right. Now, you might think this is a popup, an advertisement, perhaps even a malicious piece of code being executed on your system. The good news is, its none of the above. This notification is an invitation sent from my Woopra client, to you, to try and initiate a conversation between webmaster and blog reader.

Woopra is a sweet new analytics tool that goes a few steps above and beyond the Google Analytic offerings. One of those is the ability to initiate a conversation with the people who are browsing your site. So here is how this works.

If you use the WordPress Woopra Plugin, Woopra will have the ability to automatically tag visitors to your website. In order for visitors to go from being an anonymous IP address to name and email address, visitors need to leave a comment on your blog. When visitors leave a comment on your blog, they have to submit their name, email address and URL. Once this information is submitted to the website, Woopra strips that information and tags it to that IP address. Now you might be wondering if this is a BIG BROTHER snooping over you type of scenario. The truth is, it’s not. When you leave a comment, you are submitting that information voluntarily to the website. This is how Woopra explains it:

Virtually every site on the Web tracks users via cookies. Until now the only sites that had the resources to analyze and act on the data were large companies like Google and Amazon. Woopra brings this power to the masses.

So, if you visit my website and you previously left a comment, the following screenshot shows you what I would see:

My name is Jeffro on my own blog and that is what I have used to write a comment or two on the website. Also within this window of information is the ability to look up my browsing history on the domain, manually tagging the visitor, all of the information related to my browser, ip address ect, email address and you’ll even see my gravatar. That’s right, Woopra has built in Gravatar support which is pretty nifty.

So when a user browses jeffro2pt0.com and I initiate a conversation with you, this is what it is supposed to look like:

Two way conversation between web master/visitor. Now, I’ve gotten many reports that when user’s have clicked on the popup to initiate the chat, it doesn’t work. I have no idea why this is. It could be related to firewall settings on your computer or could be that, it doesn’t work. The good news is, the Woopra team is going to be reworking the chatting feature of Woopra. They plan on redesigning the Woopra popup as someone mentioned it looked like spam and they also plan on implementing a feature where site visitors can initiate a chat session with the web master instead of vice versa only. I think that would be pretty darn cool if that became a reality. That would eliminate the need for the shoutbox and it would give you one more way of getting in direct contact with me.

I hope that this information doesn’t affect your mindset in terms of commenting on this blog. If you don’t want this information to be available to me, you can always delete your cookies from your PC which will make you anonymous to Woopra. The personal identifiable information presented to me within Woopra is for my eyes only. So rest assured, your user data won’t be strewn across the net.

Jeffro2pt0 Now On WP 2.5

Better late than never! I have upgraded the blog from 2.3.3 to 2.5. The upgrade went very smooth with the exception of one plugin, that being the Berri Technorati Incoming Links plugin which modified the admin panel in 2.3. The plugin caused things to break in the new admin panel. After deleting that plugin, everything is back to normal and appears to be functioning just fine. I’m really digging the new look and I can’t wait to get into the back end and widgitize the hell out of my dashboard.

While I have your attention, let’s take a look at last months Poll results. I asked the question, When Would You Upgrade To WordPress 2.5? The results are listed below:

Poll Results For March 2008

Surprisingly, a large number of you chose the option to upgrade as soon as possible. While ASAP might of been too soon, the rest of the majority decided to upgrade at least a week within it’s release.

Now that 2.5 is here and available for the world to digest, this months poll question is: What Do You Think Of WP 2.5? Be sure to leave your mark and vote for one of the options given to you. I’ve noticed that more and more of you are participating in the poll. Thank you very much!

Safe And Sound

Hello! I’m blogging from within my room inside of my home! After what seemed like an eternity, I have finally arrived home safe and sound from my trip to Dallas. I’ll have to tell you why it was a hellacious return trip some other day but for now, I have so much to do in regards to WordCamp Dallas follow ups that my mind is racing. I have photos to upload to Flickr, videos to YouTube, articles to write based on the event and so much more. It doesn’t help that when I opened my email in box, I was greeted with 120 messages. Thank goodness they are mostly email notifications letting me know people are following me on twitter or from various blogs letting me know of follow up comments.

At any rate, please keep an eye on this blog as you are sure to see a flurry of posts within the next few weeks. WordCamp Dallas was awesome and I’m so glad I went.

Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff

The Musings Of Jeff Chandler

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