Written on July 2, 2008 – 12:22 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As every ambitious web publisher does, I’m trying out some alternative ways to attract more visitors. The most important ways are still to offer great content and strive to address the information needs of readers as much as possible - yet it doesn’t hurt anyone to experiment with the possibilities digital media offers us. Of course there’s the SEO card, for which I gladly refer to Yoast, and then there’s that other popular option, social media.
The long term benefit of Digg
In the early days of this blog, Boris wrote a post about the long term benefits of Digg. Back then, we got a fair share of our visitors found us through Digg. According to Boris, this was caused by two trends:
- People use alternative ways of searching, like social media.
- Deborah Schultz reported that 61% of your visits go to posts older than a month, presumably through Google and.., social media.
We still welcome around the same amount of visitors via Digg, only the percentage is much lower now (around 1 percent of all referring links from the last thirty days). As you can tell by the screen shot below, this isn’t really impressive. Although there’s a long tail of two pages, these top 5 results give an idea of the number of referrers.
Top 5 Digg articles of the last thirty days
So apart from the frontpage mentions, Digg hasn’t be really useful. The long term benefit is quite marginal.
Well, here’s an alternative
Another service did prove to be very useful when it comes to finding new readers: StumbleUpon. Clicks from this service account for 3,2 percent of all our referring links the last thirty days (by the way, most referrers are other bloggers and Google). In a way, this makes sense, as StumbleUpon is all about discovery. When people want to search, they go to Google, when they want to find popular articles, they go to Digg, yet when people want to discover interesting content, StumbleUpon is the place to go to. Partly because of that, it has been the second most popular social media site the last thirty days (Reddit was no. 1 because we hit the frontpage). Here are the top five results:
Top 5 StumbleUpon articles of the last thirty days
Some more fun facts
- For this blog, an article on Digg brings in roughly three times more traffic than on Reddit (10000 compared to 300)
- Hacker News is the no. 3 social medium for us, these guys from Ycombinator bring in 3 percent of all visitors who came here via a referrer.
- Delicious only accounts for 0.6 percent, even though we got featured in the popular section. It seems like this service is really all about self-reference.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on June 13, 2008 – 9:40 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
While we’ve already been waiting nine months for the new Delicious to arrive, the service still seems to be the standard in social bookmarking. I can see why, as Delicious is a robust tool that does the job and thousands of people - maybe millions - have their treasure room of valuable links there. Google Reader and Wordpress integration does the rest. So while Arrington still complains about the silence from Yahoo’s side, web services keep building Delicious mash-ups. One of the latest examples - called inSuggest - seems particularly useful, as it recommends new bookmarks on the bases of your existing ones.
Filtering by tags
After typing in the Delicious username, inSuggest presents five recommendations per page. I was surprised by the good results, inSuggest even knows how to manage my Dutch bookmarks. The interface is dark and shiny, the navigation works smoothly. One of the most useful features is the possibility to filter the recommendations per tags. When I first entered my username, inSuggest came up with a bunch of CSS sites, based on my bookmarks from a year ago - when I was a web designer. My interests lie somewhere else now, so I managed to get some better recommendations by clicking my ‘blogging’ tag.
No-nonsense approach
This Swedish service certainly contributes something to the social bookmarking field, as it offers a refreshing approach. In a time where every service seems to recommend new sites on the bases of linking you to “like-minded” people - often leading to vague results, this no-nonsense approach is a welcome alternative.
Written on April 1, 2008 – 11:57 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
What can we take away, to create something new?
This question was asked by Evan Williams during Le Web 3. Loyal readers of the Next Web Blog might recognize this quote, since I’m referring to it quite often. Williams’ presentation have been fascinating me for quite a while now. It often spooks through my head when reviewing a service.
So when I stumbled upon new bookmarking service Instapaper, I was immediately enthusiastic. The thing is, I’ve been using Delicious for a while to save long articles for later. Yet despite some heavy ‘2read’ tagging these links often escaped my attention.
There’s hardly any chance that I will loose any links on Instapaper.com. Developer Marco Arment left every fancy function out and focused just on the basics: temporary storage for long articles. Therefore, the site is easy accessible - even with my crappy mobile phone and iPod Touch. It’s just a matter of saving the articles with a bookmarklet and looking them up through the site or RSS.
So from now on, when I have an hour of spare time, I just browse to Instapaper and read the well-written content that otherwise would have never got my attention. After doing that, I can always share them on Delicious or Fleck.
Written on January 29, 2008 – 11:49 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Some things never change. You would think that with Del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks and all the other social bookmarking initiatives, nobody would be doing it the old fashioned way with, you know, actual bookmarks. But AddThis tracks what people do on a huge collection of websites. They offer a simple yet powerful widget that makes it easier to share URLs with bookmarking services. Because they do this they can provides statistics about the bookmarking and sharing activity of users.
More people now share URLs via Facebook than Del.icio.us. But Bookmarks or Favorites, are back, stealing the first position from Google Bookmarks. And yes, they mean “browser bookmarking”. Actual bookmarks, in browsers.
Interestingly enough Facebook has just taken the third spot away from Del.icio.us.
Top Bookmarking/Sharing - October 2007
I think we can look at this as yet another reality check. While we, the Web 2.0 industry, think that everybody is doing the ‘web thing’ just as sophisticated as us, most people are still using the tools they’re familiar with. And IF they’re are using a tool, it’s.., of course, Facebook.
Written on January 20, 2008 – 5:07 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
2008 is going to be an extremely exciting year for Yahoo. With Jerry Yang back as CEO, massive layoffs coming up, the integration of Delicious into their search results and their traffic dipping below that of Google (see graph below) again for the first time since the end of 2006 a lot of people are wondering what 2008 will bring for Yahoo. Or they just wonder if their stock will ever recover again and are waiting anxiously for the earnings announcements on January 29 in little more than a week.
Alley Insider claims to have access to an insider at Yahoo who told them that if the stock price doesn’t rise above $20 per share before the 29th Yahoo will fire 1,500 to 2,500 employees. Earlier this week Techcrunch reported that about 250 employees at Yahoo had been asked to turn in their computers. Yahoo has more than 11,000 employees so firing a large percentage like this will sure have a huge effect on the company as a whole. That might be precisely the effect that Yang is after as he is perceived as too much of a nice guy to run such a mammoth of a company. Taking harsh decisions like this might signal a much needed change at Yahoo, or simply the signs of a death struggle and nothing more than an attempt to please shareholders.
Either way, Yahoo shall not go silently into the night or give up without a fight. And why should they? They still have a market cap of more than 27 billion and are the number 1 news source on the web, Flickr is catching up to Photobucket and Yahoo Mail (with more than 250 million users) is still THE number 1 webmail solution.
The first thing Yahoo should work on is its image. They appear to have lost everything to Google. Unless it can change this perception it might turn into reality. After all, perception IS reality.
Traffic results for Yahoo.com VS Google.com over the last three years:
Yahoo stock price over the last 3 months:
Written on December 28, 2007 – 5:19 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
In case you haven’t noticed yet, the early adopters are moving their workspace from the desktop to the browser. Sure, we all use Google Docs once in a while. But these guys have everything on-line, even their hard disk. Erwin Blom, a Dutch new media pioneer who brought the ‘2.0′in public broadcastings’ web, explains on his blog why he has his tools and documents on the web:
- Always available, wherever he is, even in his favorite bar.
- Always up to date. You don’t have to install or update, the owners of the web applications will deal with that.
- Professional back-ups. Blom admits he’s too unorganized to back-up his stuff, so why not let the professionals take care of that important job?
- Sharing & publishing, he wants to be able to publish his Twitterposts and blog articles from whatever place.
- Cooperating, Blom calls it a ‘major advantage’ that you can work on documents together, without being in the same place.
- Mobile, more and more of those web applications offer user friendly interfaces on mobile phones.
In the field of web applications, Google is dominating. They simply offer rather good services, that work together like a charm. Their greatest force though, is the address book. Whether you want to share a Google Doc, invite somebody for an appointment or tip a good article from a feed, all your contacts are easily available for your sharing-needs.
Google’s hegemony must be quite frustrating for browsers. Since the browsers are becoming more and more important, yet they don’t seem gain a lot of web applications users. With the shift to web applications, the number of users of software like Apple Mail, iCal and Outlook is drastically lowering. The browsers however, are getting used more. Need some more convincing material? Have a look at the most used software page of our friends from Wakoopa. Since the browsers are THE tools that matter now, it’s about time they show up to claim their part of the web applications pie.
For instance, why on earth is there a service like del.icio.us? Bookmarking was a browser’s thing. Yet by creating the social factor, services like del.icio.us conquered that part of the market. Will the browsers ever be able to take it back?
That’s where Mozilla comes into play. They’ve just launched a prototype of Weave. The 0.1 version offers Firefox users the possibility to save browser related info, such as bookmarks, surf history and passwords and synchronize this info with different computers and mobile devices. The data is encrypted and saved on the servers of Mozilla, and can be accessed from computers all over the world.
Hello Google! Somebody wants compete with Browser Sync! And you, Delicious! You’re warned as well: in the 0.2 version - expected early 2008 - Weave will also go social.
Are these the first steps of a browser that wants to conquer with web applications, especially Google? Will the next step be a smashing good rss reader? Or a spectacular user friendly text processor? It looks like a mission impossible, yet users love the brand Firefox, and isn’t everybody a little afraid of Google, considering the privacy issues? And what if Microsoft joins the battle?
Mozila versus Google, hopefully it’s just the beginning.
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
