- Image via CrunchBase
Before the end of last year I had started playing with a cool new piece of technology called Triggit that made adding advertising and affiliate links easy to do without spamming them all over the place. As my blogging decreased towards the end of the year, I was mainly focused on quick pieces and didn’t touch Triggit.
You may have noticed the blue search bar at the top of my site (if it’s loaded yet, I need to track down what’s been slowing my load times lately) That is called the Sitebar and Triggit has switched gears and is focusing on this new tool. What does it do? Well, right now it only searches but I’ve boon told to expect more functionality soon, I’ll update more as I get the information 
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Image by Getty Images via Daylife
I am a big fan of the Disqus commenting system, I’ve found it to be a great addition to my blog as well as a wonderful personal tool to use on other’s blogs. I’ve had few problems and with commenting syncing now in place on the WordPress plug-in, I’ve had very few change requests until now. There has been a dramatic increase in human generated spam over the past week or two and if I was a spammer I would jump on this too, because DISQUS does not use nofollow. It’s not even an option that I can find!
Let me give you an example, here’s a post I did on Disqus SEO that has been targeted for spamming (seems fitting, yes?) The comments were on point enough that I replied before i figured out what was going on. I replied by e-mail and the formatting is still screwed upon line wraps when you do that (My other major gripe with Disqus).
If you take a look at the page source and search for iphone and discount office supplies you’ll see some nice free dofollow links headed off to the spammer’s sites. This makes me unhappy – unhappy customers uninstall. Given the nature of SEO, where an outgoing link from your blog counts as a vote, Disqus should have ZERO dofollow links out of my blog’s comments unless I say otherwise!
If this isn’t corrected shortly then look I’ll be installing this Disqus Hack to handle it, and if it’s not upgraded soon i guess I’ll take a look at intense debate and see if they do a better job.
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Caleb Elston, Toluu’s founder, tells us that tagging was the most requested feature for Toluu. I’m very impressed with the implementation as tagging really permeates the site now, it’s feels like a true integration, not a hacked together add on. When adding tags, the auto-complete will cut down on typos. Along with tagging you’ll see better sorting options on many pages.
A word of warning, if you reimport your OPML you will lose your exsisting tags so you’re gonna want to sync everything before you get started and then use the bookmarklet (or single add) to add new feeds to your Toluu account.
Let’s take a look at some screen shots:
Top Used Tags for a user now on their Profile
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You can click Top Tags to see all of a user's tags. Notice the new sort options.
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Click a tag to see all feeds that user has tagged with it
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Quickly add tags from My Feeds, hover to get add button, click for tag dialog
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Click a tag and see all the feeds with that tag
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Click a feed and go to it's tab menu for all sorts of tagging goodness, including similar feeds to check out
I’m sure I missed some things but that’s a good rundown of some of the most important additions. This is a big upgrade in usability for Toluu but it relies on Toluu users taking the time to tag their feeds, something that provides only a small amount of additional functionality for themselves. As people use the tagging system you’ll see Toluu making changes to get the most bang out of it. I’ll go ahead and predict that grouping of tags that are similar except for extraneous characters and plurals will be added. Enough of me, go play with it yourself and get tagging – I need to find some new podcasts!
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Quantcast graph of daily vistiors for Killerstartups and Crunchbase
I botched the article because I wasn’t aware of Quantcast, so to verify that the service was legit I popped it into a friendfeed search and came up with a great article on the Inquisitr giving a brief rundown of web metric services. The thread in friendfeed started off with a comment from the knowledgeable Charlie Anzman of SEO and Tech Daily:
Quantcast is the only one on the list with code embedded in the site making it positively the most accurate.
Charlie was kind enough to let me pick his brain on the subject a little more by e-mail:
While it appears that Google Ad Planner is not (yet?) the ‘Comscore killer’ that so many predicted, my personal preference would be to use a service that has definitive metrics. Most, if not all, of the major web measurement services buy surfing habits from ISP’s as well as major sites that use tracking cookies. These numbers can be seriously skewed. I have a tendency to create my own sets using analytics from individual websites and blogs that I have access to. The reason I continue to mention Quantcast is because their numbers are definitive as they are the only one that require tracking code directly on your website as well as verification.
I find this all to be very interesting and I’ve learned a lot from my mistake. I still felt that I needed to dig into this a little more to find out what happened to KillerStartups’ traffic. Pepe Amorin, VP Marketing for KillerStartups was kind enough to answer a few questions for me:
- All the stats services show a drop in June and the services with more current data show a large climb, what caused the slump and how did you climb so quickly out of it?
During June we had most of our URLs changed in order to make them friendlier for our users and search engines. That slowed the traffic for a bit, and we knew it would happen. We’re constantly improving our site in all aspects, and SEO is one of them. So every time we do one of these changes, it’s like going to the Doctor for us. It might hurt a little, but we know everything will be better and these slumps are the preface of great improvements.
- There have been some questions raised about the validity of even Quancast’s direct traffic statistics, have you noticed any discrepancies?
Quantcast is the source we prefer for traffic statistics. Let me tell you why. The way Quantcast works is that the website owner or webmaster pastes a code in every page of the website. This is a script that sends information to Quantcast every time someone visits your website. Basically, it works just the same way as Google Analytics, only the results are public. The only flaw I can find in Quantcast is that it requires the website owner to paste the script on all pages, but if they do (most people do, and I recommend everyone to do it), it’s as accurate as it gets.
- How has the Digg ban affected your traffic and have you ever gotten a good explanation for it happening?
Frankly, I don’t know why Digg has banned our URL from being submitted. We sent a few emails to them, but their customer service is far from being their best feature. Anyways, they’ve banned our URL shortly after we started back in 2007, and after the second email they didn’t reply, we gave up. Since we were never allowed to be submitted to Digg, we don’t have any numbers to compare with and see how it affects us. We’d probably have more traffic, since many of our stories are very “Diggable”. But we get a lot of traffic from several other social bookmarking tools such as Delicious, Reddit and StumbleUpon. We’re more than happy with the 50,000 visits we’re currently getting every day.
Let me again offer my apology to the team at KillerStartups, thank you for your understanding and your time. I would also like to apologize to everyone that reshared this and all my readers, the article was poorly researched due to my ignorance and it turned out the premise I was putting forward was incorrect and I hope this post will help clear up any misconceptions I created.
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One way that a new blogger can get story ideas and make a name for themselves is to report on new and interesting startups, the problem has been how do you find out about a startup early enough to get the scoop? The main service that I was aware of was KillerStartups.com, they saw the need, the niche, and acted with great success. The problem that appeared was the sheer amount of new startups interested in the publicity made it impossible for detailed coverage of any of them. The cookiecutter information that became the standard fare on KillerStartups, while still useful, left open a door for competition that could do a better job providing coverage.
TechCrunch’s Crunchbase has been steadily gaining users in this arena and with the recent addition of an API and KillerStartups’ decline, has taken the lead according to Google Trends (it’s recent integration into Zemanta means you’ll see more of it from me):
Google Trends Data for Startup Info
Still, it’s hard to scoop TechCrunch with their own database, so other startups have entered the field, two that I’ve used and think are notable are TradeVibes and YouNoodle. If you check out the Alexa data you can see that YouNoodle is enjoying a spike in traffic among Alexa users. And while Alexa data is generally considered less than ideal, in this case it might be a better indicator of where web-savy users are getting their information:
Page Views by Alexa Users
The Alexa data also seems to show some hope for KillerStartups, but the Google Trends data is showing a clear flatline. So, we get back to the title of this post, does the way KillerStartups delivers information still have a place? Can they bounce back or has KillerStartups been killed?
(Disclosure for this post) TradeVibes “Be The VC” Winner is Me!
*Update! – Please be sure to take a look at the comments and note that the Quantcast directly measured results back up what the Alexa results show, a significant bounce back up in traffic and a hefty lead in readership over Crunchbase.
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I found that many times I had no idea what a feed was about but, I didn’t want to click on it and then have to click back if I wasn’t interested I wanted a really quick way to get some more info so that is how the tooltip came to be it shows the 5 most recent post titles from the feed and you can click a title and go directly to the source
With this new enhancement the Activity page has just gotten much more useful, and it’s good news for bloggers as well. Those of us who are total marketing geniuses and not only put 2 silent Ks in their blog name, but also give no context clues about the content, can now rest easier. All you would have to do is hover over ‘The Knight Knetwork’ and you’d see my 5 latest posts, giving you a chance to visit a post with an interesting title and see what you really think about my writing and subject matter. Here’s an idea of what you’ll see:
Kudos again to Toluu for adding enhancements that really increase the usabillity of the site, and don’t forget to Toluu ‘The Knight Knetwork’, those silent Ks actually speak volumes.
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Tracert of Twitter.com
Tracert of Search.Twitter.com
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