But one thing I haven’t read about anywhere are the technical implications of +1 and the way it deals with canonicalization of votes, which currently is significantly inferior to both Facebook and Twitter.

There are all kinds of reasons why a publisher or ecommerce store might want to include parameters in the URLs people bookmark.

• Various kinds of tracking data
• Geotargeting
• Dynamic landing pages based upon advertising campaign (even with Adwords)

A user lands on a page, and you want to ensure that whatever they bookmark or share with friends or family is the exact same content/offer that they saw themselves, or that the initial source for the traffic is correctly counted to evaluate advertising campaigns.
This is especially important with affiliate marketing if you are a vendor who wants to ensure that affiliates get attribution for the traffic/customers they send.

• You see people use multiple browsers on one PC, and cookies are not necessarily shared
• Then you get people who have multiple computers in their home
• Then you have tablet PCs… someone might find a product on their desktop PC, but when they want to share the product with a significant other before making a purchase, they might do so on their iPad, loading a page from shared bookmarks.
• As mobile browsers become more powerful, a phone could also be the device used for bookmarking.

I don’t think it is possible to get everything perfect, to get correctly attributed tracking, ensure bookmarks are handled correctly etc (especially when paramters that remain visible can affect conversion), but I personally feel it is important to do whatever you can to ensure valid tracking data and attribution.

Facebook & Twitter – 2 Different Methods

Both Facebook & Twitter allow you to define tracking parameters or links for their share buttons, but they do it different ways.

With Twitter it is defined within the Twitter button by defining the url and counturl parameters.

The URL is whatever link you want shared, and the most popular way to use it is probably a tracking service such as bit.ly, but at the same time adding additional Google Analytics tracking variables to the URL that is bookmarked within bit.ly.

This is what the Twitter code looks like

					<script src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
					<a href="http://twitter.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwelcome.uqast.com%2Fpage13312&counturl=http%3A%2F%2Fwelcome.uqast.com%2Fintro%2F&text=How To Profit By Leveraging The 7 Hidden Trends Driving The Internet&count=horizontal&via=uQast&related=uqast%3AWebinar" class="twitter-share-button" rel="nofollow">How To Profit By Leveraging The 7 Hidden Trends Driving The Internet</a>

And this is the result (this uses my affiliate link for uQast, but notice that the count shown is an aggregate canonical value because of the defined counturl

How To Profit By Leveraging The 7 Hidden Trends Driving The Internet

With Facebook it is a little different – within the button code you include the tracking link you want to share, and the “counturl” is actually grabbed from the Facebook Open Graph meta data on the destination page.
Facebook also pull in the thumbnail and descriptions from that meta data.

This is what the code looks like

<script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script><fb:like ref="13312" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/page13312" send="false" width="120" show_faces="false" layout="button_count" ></fb:like>

The result is an aggregate count even though every shared URL from the like button could be completely different.

Google +1 Only Gets Half A Banana

As Google +1 has only just been launched, the uQast landing page hasn’t received 100s or 1000s of bookmarks but it is a good example of the current problem with Google’s implementation of the +1 button.

This is the same URL we were using in the above example, my uQast affiliate link, but it could be any tracking link, or just using Google Analytics tracking parameters.

http://welcome.uqast.com/page13312

This is how that button should be encoded

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<g:plusone size="tall" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/page13312"></g:plusone>

With this result… I gave it a plus one to test this earlier as I am considering adding Google +1 to our landing pages, not just for our launch signup, but also throughout uQast and within our embeddable players.

If Google had implemented +1 correctly, then the count for a URL that points directly to the page would be the same.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<g:plusone size="tall" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/intro/"></g:plusone>

At time of writing the affiliate link shows 1 and the “clean” link shows 0 – I am sure that will change over time

This is how a +1 ends up on a Google profile (this is my primary Andy Beard profile)

Lets see how Google fairs with my +1 test

First of all my profile URL is

https://profiles.google.com/list.andy

But from a search result Google themselves redirect to

https://profiles.google.com/list.andy/about

And if I want to ensure the English version of a page is shown then I have to add an additional language parameter.

https://profiles.google.com/list.andy/about?hl=en

These redirects are a fact of life on the web and so are additional parameters for all kinds of things, but Google +1 doesn’t allow for it, even for a Google URL

Google +1 is broken even for Google’s own pages

In addition they really should take advantage of the thumbnail defined in the Facebook Open Graph, as they currently just scrape the first image on the page.

The Solution For Google +1

It is actually fairly simple for Google to fix this.

They are already looking at the destination page, and all they have to do is look for a canonical link tag in the header for which URL to count… anyone who cares about correct canonicalization for their pages who uses various tracking parameters is likely to already be using link canonical… after all it is stronly promoted by Google themselves as a way to get attribution for the correct link.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/intro/" />

You would have thought issues like this would have been fixed during the initial beta period – when news of Google +1 first came about, there was a call for interested websites to sign up early maybe to give feedback… I signed up at that time but from the looks of things on the Google announcement post that was mainly as a PR exercise to get large publishers using Google +1.

Google +1 is really easy to set up, there are also some quite powerful features I haven’t explored yet for triggering various actions similar to a Facebook like button

However as currently implemented it is almost like a negative advert if you implement it with any kind of dynamic URLs showing effectively the same content.

Canonicalization is just as important in social media as search.

p.s I have given up trying to get a “+” to appear correctly with a retweet button with WordPress.

I went as far as trying to use the unicode version within the title but that ended up as the raw text, and then WordPress didn’t save the unicode anyway.

+1.... out

Friendfeed Now Counted In Feedburner

It can make quite a striking difference with Feedburner if you have a few followers there.

But even this doesn’t really account for the shifting sands in online attention.

The latter half of this post was originally published Mar 21, 2008 @ 20:38

Since then Twitter has for many people emerged as the primary way they read RSS feeds, combined with various forms of lifestreaming.

The first time I see tweets and blog posts often is also on services such as Blogcatalog’s dashboard or even Mybloglog (though that can sometimes lag a little on updates these days)

Current Calculation Problems

• Blogcatalog & Mybloglog numbers are just as relevant as Friendfeed
• Twitter numbers are probably more relevant than any Lifestreaming service
• Facebook subscribers are still not counted
• Aweber & Feedblitz, along with Feedburners own RSS to Email service are included, but they are the only ones I know about. Where is the Getresponse support Simon? Infusionsoft should really offer something as well, though they don’t offer RSS to email – I am not sure about Mailchimp

The onus really is on the developers of these other platforms to report numbers to Feedburner, but I have no idea how that can be managed with Facebook and Twitter.

With both Facebook and Twitter there are 2 significant problems

• The data doesn’t always come from an RSS feed – individual Facebook apps programmers use various methods to pull data, and often Facebook items come from other sources. The source on Twitter could be any one of the many RSS to Twitter services, but equally could be a WordPress plugin.
• Items get shared – shared items in Google reader have often affected Feedburner data in the past, how does this work with retweets?

It is good to see services like Postrank now feature within Feedburner stats, as they provide various ways to filter RSS content on multiple topics, and then include only the best items for you to read.
(Niche marketers will probably find a way to make best use of that)

Note: I do have specific strategic reasons why I don’t currently display any RSS subscription options, or even an email subscription box.
This post used to have lots of comments, but Disqus hasn’t managed to sync them after 2 days.

It is amazing how long it takes for things to catch up, the following was written over 15 months ago, and the numbers are really still totally inaccurate

Originally published Mar 21, 2008 @ 20:38

I have been digging around in my Feedburner stats to see how various social streaming and life streaming applications I use are reporting data to Feedburner.

Friendfeed

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Feedreader & Aggregator
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; FriendFeedBot/0.1; +http://friendfeed.com/about/bot)

5 subscribers

Blogcatalog

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Bot
Blogcatalog bot

1 hit

MyBlogLog

I am not sure which Yahoo service they are reporting as, so I am listing a few possibilities

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Feed Readers and Aggregators
My Yahoo
A web-based newsreader that allows you to select and manage RSS headlines within a My Yahoo! account.
42 subscribers

There is also Yahoo! Slurp and Yahoo Test Bot – both listed as bots

Is Lifestreaming Subscribing?

Here are some reasons Lifestreaming should count as a subscription

• Personal – with most applications views can be attributed to individual users
• Selected – unlike meme trackers, someone has made a specific choice to read your content
• Trackable – if necessary it would be possible to identify only active users
• Traffic – traffic from lifestreaming is quite visible, though it is hard to determine if it comes from a RSS subscription link, or when someone tweets about you, or maybe from being Stumbled or dugg
• Email – Friendfeed sends subscriptions by email too – does that make it 2 subscriptions?
• Active – people are actually using these services more and more, and subscription data would thus be a useful representation

There are some aspects I am not sure should be counted, but are probably more valuable data than from many feedreaders

• Profile views – MyBlogLog, Blogcatalog and Friendfeed all allow visitors to view content before deciding to subscribe to it in some way – whist no long term commitment is made, a lot of this activity can be attributed to individual unique users, thus could be counted as a subscriber in some way.
• Shared Social Media Links – as mentioned before, when links to your site appear having been dugg, stumbled or shared in Google Reader – whilst this can result in traffic, it might not be something that can be counted as it is not necessarily related to the RSS feed, but to the permalink.
• MyBlogLog Topics – this is based upon their tagging system (I have wanted it to link to content for ages – make sure you update and cleanup your tags) – I don’t think it would be appropriate for this data to end up in RSS subscription stats
• BlogCatalog Social Search – also recently introduced and whilst it doesn’t have RSS yet (nudge Daniel) I can see this happening in the future – again this is a search much like you would have on Technorati or Google Blogsearch

RSS Bankruptcy

Depending on how you use these sites, they can add or subtract to the total information overload you are subjecting yourself to. I am not sure whether my own usage patterns are typical, but I find I am using Social and lifestreaming more than RSS Readers.

I have 1000s of unread items in my RSS readers, though on a lifestreaming service I am not reading every item either.

If the conversation is moving away from blogs there needs to be a way to measure it, track it and possibly respond to it.

I still am not sure how to react to the new item sharing feature introduced today on Blogcatalog, where someone can share items to people following them on the Dashboard, and to their Shared widget, and leave a comment.
When I first heard that this was going to be coming just a few days ago, I immediately thought that I would be vocally against it, but it is like a Stumbleupon review or a Delicious bookmark – it is not trying to start a new conversation, just tell someone why you are sharing the link.

The problem is that people will only share content using a certain number of different methods. Isn’t it best to use the one that is most likely to be seen across multiple networks?

Disclaimer: I consult a little with Blogcatalog

Update

After a little exploring it appears Friendfeed posted about this earlier on their blog and there is further coverage on Louis Gray

Some of the things being added are almost invisible, others are much more visible and hint at how a site can leverage partnerships with other communities to broaden their reach, and provide simple feature additions that just make a site more sticky.

I just saw the strangest search query “cancel blogcatalog account”, in my stats.

If you really want to delete a listing, you can use the contact form though why would any sane person want to instruct a PR7 site to delete their links? There are options in the profile to switch off things like email notifications and return your use of Blogcatalog to being purely a directory.

XML-RPC Ping Server

A couple of weeks ago BlogCatalog added a XML-RPC server, allowing you to ping your content updates, in the same way you might ping Technorati.
Whilst it still needs a little work to cover all blog configurations, Blogcatalog also have various forms of search and tagging mechanisms.

You can just add http://rpc.blogcatalog.com/ to your ping list

Blogcatalog Community

The BlogCatalog discussion boards are thriving, with many of the threads exceeding 500 individual entries.

I have no idea how many new threads are being started daily, but it could well be 100+ and it is rare for a new thread to have less than 20 comments.

It is quite overwhelming, I am amazed so many people manage to keep up with the conversations and still have time for some blogging.

Social Network Integration

Not so long ago BlogCatalog added the ability to include links to your profiles on other social networks, social news site, and bookmarking sites.

I am aware that lots of other sites include similar features, including MyBlogLog who has had this for a very long time, but it is still a useful service that helps people build up a meaningful profile on other sites.

You might notice that there is a Mybloglog logo among the many others – they are not scared of their largest competitor which is an admirable trait.

Continuing on the theme…

Bloggers Choice Award’s Integration

With the date moved for the Blogger’s Choice Awards to November, there is a lot more time for newer bloggers to establish an audience and to gain a few votes and Blogcatalog has proven to be a great source of exposure.

They have just added integration with the Blogger’s choice awards. A link is created to the voting page, and you can choose which category that voting page is in.

The voting button is featured quite prominently on the main blog profile.

The announcement in the forums was:-

Starting today you can now add your Blogger’s Choice Awards voting badge to your Blog Listing page. BlogCatalog and Blogger’s Choice Awards have teamed up to give your blogs the attention that they deserve. So if you have been nominated for a Bloggers Choice Award add your badge now and watch the votes roll in!

Blogcatalog and the Bloggers Choice Awards run by PayPerPost is a very good match for some co-marketing. I am glad something came of it after some of the nudging I gave Tony from Blogcatalog, though I have no idea of the details.

Traffic

I am constantly being asked which of the 3 services brings me most traffic, and it largely depends on participation.

• I have a large Mybloglog community, and they generally have more (in total) active members – when I spend time reading new blogs, I tend to get more traffic – the same is true if you get rotated into the hot communities for 24 hours – I am constantly hovering on the edge of the top50 communities, in fact a few times I have seen that I have more community members than blogs in the top50 – maybe the top50 is only refreshed occasionally and filtered
• On Bumpzee I manage one of the largest communities, my No Nofollow / Dofollow Community and I have one of the highest traffic blogs with active “bumpers”, which certainly has a high influence on traffic.
• Blogcatalog I was previously one of the highest rated blogs, if not the highest, though that has certainly dropped off a little in recent weeks – I haven’t spent a lot of time “friending” and joining communities so it was bound to happen

Referrals in the last 30 days

316 Mybloglog Referrals
134 Blogcatalog Referrals (220+ previous month)
623 Bumpzee Referrals
503 Google Reader Referrals (and I have 472 subscribers using Google Reader)

I know those figures don’t compare to social media traffic, but those are readers who visit your blog to read your content. Stumbleupon sent me 1000 visitors yesterday, but only a small percentage became subscribers, or even stayed beyond the 2 second or 10 second barrier.

If I spent more time on the Blogcatalog forum, or in discussions on Bumpzee, I am sure my referrals would be much higher, and the same would probably be true of MyBlogLog if it had something more than a messaging system.

Live Alexa Stats

I thought it would be interesting to show MyBlogLog, Bumpzee and Blogcatalog side-by-side on Alexa. They all have similar users, so in this case it is probably quite accurate.

For some reason I couldn’t get a live Alexa chart to work, not sure if that is a WordPress security fix

Differentiation

I think the differences in each site are quite complex, and in many ways each is favoured by a different kind of blogger and bloggers in different niches. One thing that is certain, based upon the Alexa charts is that MyBlogLog growth has slowed.

Neither Bumpzee nor Blogcatalog have had a huge amount of big media coverage.

I did see one mention of Blogcatalog on Mashable, and Andy Beal picked up one of my posts a while back.
Shoemoney has covered Bumpzee a couple of times and has the voting widget.

For viral marketing, both sites are doing extremely well.

Specific Disclosure: I have been providing a lot of free ideas and feedback both publicly and in private to the 3 main (imho) competitors in this niche, MyBlogLog, Bumpzee, and Blogcatalog, and all 3 would probably look on me as one of their largest supporters, in spirit if not in traffic (I can’t compete with Techcrunch).
With Blogcatalog I have to note that the arrangements are now slightly more formal in a consultancy capacity from which I may receive financial compensation

I have read lots of guides on how to use StumbleUpon, but Maki has probably just written the Ultimate StubleUpon Guide.

I love receiving visitors from StumbleUpon, and it can come very unexpectedly.

If anyone wants to expand their StumbleUpon network, here is my profile.

You can also find me on Digg, Reddit and Netscape, though the latter 2 sites I am a fairly new user.

Visitors to the front page of my blog will now see a spicypage widget – yes that seems to be correct capitalization and yes the widget is a little ugly… or maybe we should just say unique.

I have actually been a member for a few weeks but didn’t get around to adding the widget. I was interested to see how well it worked just adding a site and not taking part in the community.

I first saw spicypage on Jack Humphrey’s Friday Traffic Report, and he seemed to like it. I have noticed recently that Jack has removed the widget, so maybe the results he was achieving slowed down, or he had managed to achieve critical mass, and active promotion was no longer necessary.

Widgets & Community

I think most detractors of MyBlogLog are people who didn’t attempt to get involved with the community, and spend time getting to know other bloggers.
Unfortunately unless you are an A List blogger, with eager readers jumping at the chance to join your new community, it won’t build on auto-pilot.

Critical Mass

Once you have a small amount of popularity, it can snowball. With Digg you just need to be “made popular” to gain some significant traffic that can become a tidal wave.
With widget based social networks, once you have achieved a prominent position, whilst you will never see a tidal wave of traffic, the growth can become self sustaining.

Early Adoption

Popular blogs don’t need to be early adopters. They can quite happily sit on the sidelines and if a service takes off, they can most likely join a little later and catch up.
Smaller blogs can benefit greatly from early adoption if they spend the time to promote themselves ethically within the community.

So Why The Hell Did I Add spicypage?

I want more votes than Jack ;)

Seriously I can’t see anything wrong with the site other than that they haven’t achieved critical mass, and sites don’t achieve critical mass if noone uses them. Their traffic seems to be falling rapidly.
One problem is that they seem to be more of a bookmarking site than a social network, and to be honest the widget isn’t very attractive, or configurable.

Anyway the widget will stay for a suitable test period, 1 month – lets call this giving them a carrot. I will be doing some reciprocal voting with my readers.

Sociable has been due for an update for a long time. In popularity I am sure it is among the top 20 plugins in use, maybe even top 10 – it is certainly very visible on blogs, more so than the very discreet Share This plugin.

I contacted Peter a couple of weeks ago asking if there was an update coming soon, and he said to me that he was back working on Sociable, and an update was imminent.

You can currently download beta4, it is quite possible that the plugin will go final today.

It hasn’t changed a huge amount, other than adding a lot more bookmarking sites, so you can choose which sites are popular with your audience.

I have just sent Peter a small update which he can hopefully include:-

• Adding the nofollow tag to the links
• Inclusion of a Plug IM button
• Inclusion of a Bumpzee Button

You can see the new buttons as I am currently testing them on this blog with version 2.0 Beta4

If you are wondering about PlugIM and Bumpzee, PlugIM is a growing site similar to other social bookmarking sites, but with an emphasis on Internet Marketing (where you are allowed to plug your own posts), and Bumpzee is a new social network for Affiliate Marketers that picks up your feed content automatically for other people to vote upon.

Yesterday the big news was about Technorati adding some kind of Digg clone (Technorati WTF), but in many ways Bumpzee might have similar functions, because you can find content based upon tags, and vote on the ones you like. They don’t have the massive amount of content yet, but it could be a very useful service or script within vertical markets.
In fact from what I read on Niall Kennedy’s blog, WTF grew out of an internal notes tool, and is more a way of explaining news on Technorati, a social feature, rather than a voting system. Technorati votes for sites with blog posts, which generally take more than 3 seconds to write, unlike Digg, so the top stories might actually be more news worthy.

It would only take 67 favorites to get in their top 100 favorites

Top 50 – currently only 115 favorites

327 Favorites to get in their Top 10 !

Those are realistic targets for any blogger (not just me)

Much more realistic than the most linked to blogs. You would need links from 3000+ blogs to get into the top 100.

In my honest opinion, long term, Technorati Top 100 is worth more than the occasional Digg. From now on Technorati buttons will feature prominantly on all my blogs.