Google Launches Stats for Blogger

Google has launched Stats for Blogger, a Blogger feature that was previously available in the experimental version of Blogger, Blogger in Draft. The feaure is fairly self-explanatory in that it provides Blogger users with stats about their blogs.

More specifically, Stats for Blogger provides stats like real-time tracking of each time your blog is viewed, and insights about your audience, such as top search keywords, countries, browsers, etc. The user interface comes with easy-to-read graphs and charts.

Stats for Blogger actually has some improvements over the Blogger in Draft version. For example, it includes self-view exclusion - it will exclude your own pageviews if you turn that option on. It also has more effective bot traffic filtering.

"We've extended our list of known 'bots' (the non-human visitors, such as crawlers), another measure to provide more accurate pageviews from real visitors," says Blogger's Chang Kim.

There are also now rate-limiting visit counts from the same user and internationalization - availability in over 40 languages.

NewsBasis Aims to Be Basis for News-Maker, News-Breaker Relationships

In a nutshell, NewsBasis is a site where journalists and bloggers can find sources, while experts and companies can find journalists and bloggers to write about them in their articles.

WebProNews had a conversation with NewsBasis Founder and CEO Darryl Siry (who also happens to be a contributor to Wired, and was formerly CMO of Tesla Motors) about how the site has performed since launching at the beginning of the month.

"Initial participation was well beyond what I had been planning for, which is a good thing, but keep in mind I am not fully satisfied until we are used by all folks in the media industry on both sides of the table," Siry tells us.

We asked about participation from both journalists and experts. "The participation on the company rep side is a good mix of companies, PR agencies, independent professionals, academic institutions and non-profits," he says. "On the journalist side you also see a broad range of participation, from bloggers to regional newspapers to major news organizations."

Perusing article topic requests on NewsBasis, one can find various familiar names and publications. That's got to be encouraging for the company.

"Of course, there are more experts/companies using the service than journalists, but that’s what I would expect as that reflects the industry," he continues. "There are many more people seeking attention of reporters than there are reporters, and it is important to have deep inventory of experts and sources."

I don't think he'll get many arguments from reporters there.

Siry certainly knows how the game is played, as he has written not only for Wired, but for other publications like VentureBeat and Business Insider. Combine that with marketing gigs he has held in the past. He's clearly played on both sides of the ball.

As user experience plays greatly into the success of any product, we also asked for plans about upcoming features.

"We are balancing customer acquisition activities with our pace of product development," Siry tells us. "There are lots of great features and tweaks that we have been working through and as the product gets better I expect that we will see more users come on to the system. We have features already built in to the system that we haven't really promoted because you can only say so much in a marketing message, so part of my challenge is to educate existing customers about how full featured we are."

"For example, we have built in real time news alerts that work quite well and we also have a robust annotation and sharing system that can be used by journalists for online research," he explains.

Of course, users can always keep abreast of the latest NewsBasis happenings on the company blog, which has provided numerous updates since the early August launch of NewsBasis.

Journalists, bloggers, and brands all potentially have a lot to gain from a system like NewsBasis. At this point, it's just a matter of attracting the users, and getting them to stick with it. This appears to be the main area of focus for the company at the moment. In fact, Siry emailed me personally to let me know that I hadn't activated my account after initially signing up, weeks ago. It worked. I logged in that day. 

Google-Backed VigLink Acquires Driving Revenue

VigLink has acquired outbound traffic monetization company Driving Revenue, which brings over $100 million of merchandise transactions to the company. VigLink says this makes the combined entity the "definitive leader" in the space.

VigLink is a company that is backed by Google Ventures, Google's venture capital arm. It's a content monetization and affiliate marketing company aimed at bloggers. 

"We offer a simple snippet of code you can install in your blog that automatically and transparently does all the work for you," explains VigLink CEO Oliver Roup. "We've catalogued and signed up for more than 12,500 affiliate programs and we collect all the performance information and deliver you a single integrated payment. In return, VigLink takes 25% of the incremental revenue you earn."

"Driving Revenue was the original innovator in this space and has transacted well over $100 million worth of merchandise through their system," he says. "This acquisition provides us with the ability to accelerate our already burgeoning business, as well as to bring on a fantastic team with incredible depth in the affiliate marketing industry."

"Quite simply, if you're a Web publisher who hasn't recognized the value of your outbound traffic, you are leaving money on the table," adds Raymond Lyle, CEO and Co-Founder of Driving Revenue. "Dozens of our publishers make six figure incomes for a one-time investment of one minute of work. Who isn't interested in that?"

The two companies combined, claim to track over 2 million publisher clicks a day and 3 billion monthly page views across over 12,000 merchant programs and dozens of networks.

VigLink will keep all of Driving Revenue's employees, who will continue to work from their Chicago-based office, though the company's CTO and Co-founder, Jack Bafia, will join VigLink in San Francisco. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Is Google to Blame for Its Own News Pollution?

Search Engine Land Editor-in-Chief Danny Sullivan points out how poorly Google handles those gaming Google News, using Google Trends as a starting point.

Do you find Google News to be too heavily polluted? Share your thoughts.

He found a blatant example when the term "chocomize" became listed as "volcanic" on Google Trends. When clicking for the results, he found several sites serving Google ads that presumably only created posts about the term because it was trending (as a way to get some easy traffic, and potentially ad clicks). In fact, some examples came from sites that were clearly aimed at entirely different niches, such as a horror movies site and a TV/Anime site. The biggest problem from the user's perspective is that there was nothing immediately indicating why the term was trending.

The real reason the term was trending was apparently because CNN ran a story earlier in the day about a company called Chocomize that makes custom candy bars (a pretty cool concept, I have to say), but when looking at the Google News results, Sullivan had to really dig to find that story.

"The pollution within Google News is ridiculous," Sullivan says. "This is Google, where we’re supposed to have the gold standard of search quality. Instead, we get 'news' sites that have been admitted — after meeting specific editorial criteria — just jumping on the Google Trends bandwagon, outranking the actual article causing the term 'chocomize' to be popular, polluting the news results and along the way, earning Google some cash."

Earning Google some cash indeed. There is no doubt that this goes on all the time, specifically with AdSense sites. Interestingly, in a story grouped with Sullivan's on TechMeme, the Wall Street Journal has some words from Eric Schmidt talking about Google's famous "one trick pony". Schmidt is quoted as saying, "But if you've got a one-trick pony, you want the one we have. We're in the ad business, and it's growing rapidly. We picked the right trick." The piece goes on to talk about how that trick is going to pay off greatly in the mobile space as well, as more and more people gravitate to the Android operating system.

Schmidt has said in the past, as Sullivan reminds us, that the Internet is a cesspool (referring to an excess of useless content). So, to be fair, Schmidt doesn't come across as being very enthusiastic about the sites that take advantage of Google Trends to game Google News. Still, there is money to be made, and if sites meet the criteria of what it takes to get into Google News, there's a fine line Google has to walk, regardless.

Can it all be so simple?

Sullivan says, “It shouldn’t be that hard for Google to police what shows up in response to what it publishes on Google Trends. Spam sites ought to be nabbed. AdSense sites ought to be shut down. News publishers abusing the very lucky position they have of being in Google News, by routinely tapping into Google Trends topics that aren’t relevant to their publications, should get the boot.”

While I greatly respect Sullivan, and value his analysis and opinions, I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. We've all seen how the mainstream media sites turn to blogs to get their stories (sometimes without giving credit or links), just as the sites in question appear to have done with CNN. We spoke with Sullivan about this not too long ago after he became a victim of such a scenario.

It's hard to say that just because you use Google ads, you should be penalized. That's not to say there isn't an issue, but while there may be plenty of “garbage sites” there are some pretty highly respected publications that serve ads by Google. The horror movie blog pointed to, does appear to generally offer horror movie related news (while crediting sources), based on a quick glance of its most recent content.  But if the Chocomize story on that blog doesn't credit its source, that is a problem. Maybe this is a “garbage” site, maybe it’s not. From Google's standpoint, determining that can’t be easy in all cases.

Looking beyond the credit issue for a moment, when it comes to topic-spam, who’s to say what a publication would find of interest to its audience? I’m not sure that I agree that a blog mainly focused on horror movies, for example, should not be able to blog about chocolate or another off-topic subject every now and then. That’s up to the publication and whether they want to risk alienating their own audience, if you ask me. Again, I’m not saying Sullivan is wrong about this particular site’s practices. I’m just looking at the bigger picture.

Maybe Google could do more to look at story sources, but that's got to be a difficult task across all publications, and there would no doubt be plenty of room for debate between publications about who broke a story first.

I'm not saying this is what happened either, but hypothetically, what if the horror movies blog actually talked to the Chocomize people first and had the story first, and CNN just happened to find it and find it newsworthy themselves, and do their own piece. Now, that's an unlikely scenario in this particular example, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility in other examples, such as the one Sullivan experienced recently himself.

Regardless of that even, it's hard to say "you can't have content about this topic because we posted it as a trending topic."

There is clearly a problem with Google Trends. Sullivan is right in that the result doesn't help explain why the topic was trending. He's also right in that the original source (CNN) should be more visible. However, cleaning up the "pollution" might not be such an easy problem to conquer. It’s hard to say if Google is allowing such pollution to go on so it can make more money or if the problem is just too difficult for the search giant. It could be a combination of the two.

What do you think? Comment here.

70,000 Blogs Shut Down After FBI Finds Terrorist Materials, Blogs May Come Back

Update 2: CNET's Greg Sandoval now reports that users could see their blogs again, but Blogetery likely won't be hosted by Burst.net in the future.

Burst.net CTO says that the service has not resopnded quickly enough to abuse claims in the past, which appears to be the reason the whole service was shut down in the first place. More on the story here.

Update: CNET now reports that the FBI sent Burst.net (which hosted the Blogetery service) a Voluntary Emergency Disclosure of Information request, but never requested Burst's server (the shutting down of which resulted in the termination of Blogetery).

The FBI, apparently found Al-Qaeda-related bomb-making instructions and a "hit list" on Blogetery. It's still not clear why the entire service needed to be shut down, and why Burst decided to go that extra mile, even without instruction to do so from the FBI. Whether or not the Ipbfree incident is related is still unknown. More facts will no doubt be made more clear in time. A big hat tip goes to CNET's Greg Sandoval.

Original Article: Something strange is going on. As CNET's Greg Sandoval reports, Blogetery.com and Ipbfree.com, blog/forum platforms that hosted massive amounts of user-generated content, have been shut down by unnamed law enforcement agencies for unnamed reasons. Blogetery is said to have hosted over 70,000 blogs.

  It is unclear if the two terminations are connected, but it would be a pretty big coincidence if they were not. As Sandoval says, both services have said they are not coming back, both claim to have obeyed copyright law, and both are saying they are legally required not to disclose any information.

A message at Blogetery's site reads:

After being BurstNet customer for 7 months our server was terminated without any notification or explanation.

We're trying to resolve the situation.

So, simply put, lots of user-generated content has been eliminated with no explanation of why, and no government agency has stepped up to at least say it was them who made the order. Naturally, this can only lead to speculation and rumor until someone is able to go on record and take responsibility.  That speculation will only escalate until that happens, and it is already starting throughout the Blogosphere.

Sandoval quotes an official from an ironically unnamed government agency, who says that he doesn't know of any government agencies that have the authority to terminate such services without going through the "legal hoops". (HT: Curt Hopkins)

Any takers?

Twitter Users Are More Social And Politically Active

Americans who use Twitter are more likely than the average adult to be highly active on the Internet and in their communities, according to new survey by Gfk MRI.

The survey found people who use Twitter are highly active when it comes to blogging, video sharing and posting reviews. They are 506% more likely than the average U.S. adult to write a blog, 451% more likely to upload or add video to a Web site, and 314% more likely to post a comment or review on a blog, online forum, message or bulletin board. These active Internet users are also 269% more likely to own an electronic book reader.

In addition to being active online, Twitter users are also socially and politically active. For instance, they index highly for all 17 of the public activities measured by GfK MRI. They are 209% more likely to have written something that has been published, 142% more likely to participate in environmental groups/causes, 141% more likely to be an active member of any group that tries to influence public policy or government, and 103% more likely to have attended a political rally, speech or protest in the last 12 months.

'GfK MRI data clearly indicate that Twitter users are an influential group of people, engaged in a variety of public activities, and willing to share their thoughts through blogging and published works," said Anne Marie Kelly, SVP, Marketing and Strategic Planning at GfK MRI.

"This group of people is also probably interested in finding that next big trend, as illustrated by their higher-than-average ownership of electronic book readers."
 

 

Wordpress Introduces Post By Voice

Wordpress has just introduced a new feature that lets you update your blog by calling a phone number speaking. Wordpress users can go to the My Blogs tab, enable "Post by Voice" and get a special phone number to call for their blogs.

Calling the number and recording a message will post an audio file to the blog, which can then be published to Facebook, Twitter, etc. with the Publicize feature.

"It's happened to all of us," writes WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg, introducing the feature. "The night starts off innocently enough with a little gin and tonic, maybe a mojito, then next thing you know you’re doing tequila shots with the bartender and the girl from Brazil and you find yourself thinking it would be a treMENdous idea to call up your ex and see how they’re doing and perhaps impress them with your newfound wit."

"We've got the cure," he continues. "Now, instead of drunk dialing random friends, lovers, and acquaintances one at a time, what if you could dial your blog and talk to the whole world at once? It’d be like something out of Star Trek."

All joking aside, the feature has huge potential for quick and lazy blog posting. Got something to say, but don't feel like writing it? Just make a phone call and broadcast. Then share.

It gives you an hour of talk time for a post (though WordPress says this may decrease after testing). More details here.

Rude Behavior Causing Americans To Tune Out Social Networks

More than one-third (34%) of Americans are "tuning out" social networking sites, with 39 percent doing so because of rude behavior, according to a new survey by Weber Shandwick and KRC Research.

"We prefer to communicate through social networks the same way we do in everyday social settings. We tend to congregate around shared interests. We want to know who we're talking to. And if there is a difference of opinion, we expect respectful dialogue. If not we tune out," said Weber Shandwick's President of Digital Communications Chris Perry.

"This reality should be top of mind as companies and institutions increasingly operate in social media. It's a personal medium. Same rules of shared interest, transparency and respectful discourse apply."

Nearly half (45%) of Americans have defriended or blocked someone online because of uncivil comments or behavior, while 38 stopped visiting an online site because of its incivility. In addition, 25 percent have dropped out of a fan club or online community because it had become uncivil.

The survey asked Americans to rate the civility of 18 aspects of daily life. Blogs rated more uncivil than social networking sites and Twitter (51% vs. 43% vs.35% respectively). While half of Americans say blogs are uncivil, a much larger 72 percent view the political world and government as uncivil.

"Let's face it. Incivility can be found everywhere today. Blogs, in particular, are mostly open terrain - practically anyone can comment to a post, often anonymously," said Leslie Gaines-Ross, Weber Shandwick's chief reputation strategist. 

"On the other hand, social networks, such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, are usually tighter communities with little anonymity and greater accountability for who is speaking."
 

 

Can You Get More Links if You Turn Off Comments?

Every so often, an argument and ensuing discussion erupts in the Blogosphere over whether or not it is ethical to block comments on a blog post and what value they actually add to content.

Would you rather have blog comments or Facebook "likes" and retweets? Let us know.

The latest one started when John Gruber at DaringFireball wrote a post in response to a John Battelle post about Apple blocking Google from iOS app Ads. Gruber has become somewhat famous around the tech Blogosphere for not allowing comments, and is ususally referenced in these conversations.

Joe Wilcox at OddlyTogether wanted to respond to Gruber's post, but obviously couldn't do that via a blog comment, so he wrote his own blog post instead, questioning Gruber's manhood. "If John Gruber allowed comments on his blog, I wouldn't need to write this post, and it has been long-time coming," wrote Wilcox. "I considered writing it every time I read something outrageous at Daring Fireball but couldn’t directly respond because John doesn't allow comments. Finally, this morning, I had enough."

"A man pushes out only as much as he can receive back," he added later in the post. "By comparison, I see John attacking from a fortified position. He can attack but not easily be assaulted, and, yes, many of his posts are attacks on others. Sarcasm and witticism are the ammunition. Maybe John has different values of what is a man. My values are clear. A man—hell, a good writer—doesn't hide behind his assertions. He stands by them. Discussion and response test his assertions and expose him to more points of view."

Benefits to Eliminating Comments?

One thing seems clear to me. If you turn off comments, it forces the conversation outward. As Gruber has proven, people who want to respond to one of his posts have no choice but to blog about it themselves, tweet about it, or choose some other venue to discuss it. Most likely, those who wish to discuss it are going to link to DaringFireball to give their own content context. It seems entirely possible that by not allowing comments, Gruber is encouraging more links to his content. This may not be his intent, but it would appear to be the case nevertheless.

That's not to say that this strategy will work for everyone. Don't expect to turn off comments and automatically get more traffic. Obviously, you're going to have to create great content that people want to discuss in the first place. The question you have to ask yourself is whether you want the conversation to happen where it started or to be broken up all over the web.

That said, the conversation (if enough people find it worth having) is going to be broken up all over the web anyway. Regardless of whether or not you allow comments on your blog, people are going to respond to it in what ever manner they prefer. These days for many people, that means simply retweeting it or liking it on Facebook (now people can even "like" the comments on Facebook too).

Maybe the real question is this: how much do blog comments matter anyway? There is no containing the conversation. It's really been this way as long as blogs have been popular. People have always responded to others' posts with their own blog posts. The fact that services like Facebook and Twitter have become so popular in the mainstream is what has changed. It's so much easier to add your comment in a quick status update or tweet than it is to write a new blog post.

Likewise, many will find it easier to simply hit a "like" button or a "recommend button" for Facebook or a retweet button to express their approval of a blog post. With a tweet, they can add their own commentary too, and it really provides more benefit to them, because they are bringing the people they know into the conversation, as opposed to just participating in a conversation with a bunch of strangers that also read that blog.

Naturally, this also benefits the blog post by opening it up to increased exposure, and obviously more traffic, as well as potentially more links, which can even benefit you in search.

Comments Still Have Value

Comments can add value to a blog post by presenting different perspectives around the subject at hand. Even Gruber has acknowledged this. But increasingly, more of those perspectives are being expressed externally. The entire conversation rarely (if ever) takes place on the blog post itself.

When readers see that a post has a lot of comments, they may be more inclined to read it. This is another valuable trait comments have, but if you display a count of retweets or Facebook Likes or Google Buzzes or Diggs, or whatever, it can achieve a similar effect. However, only the people that actually go to your site in the first place will see these counts. A more important factor to consider is probably that as more content is shared throughout networks like Twitter or Facebook, users will be more likely to read a post based on things like the title, who shared it with them, and what that person said about it.

Interestingly, Gruber was able to convince Wilcox to turn off his own blog comments. Would you ever consider taking that leap? For more background and viewpoints on the conversation (of which there are many), I suggest reading through the various posts at DaringFireball and OddlyTogether.

How important are comments to content? Tell us what you think.

Google’s Blogger Users Can Now Customize Their Designs

Update: Google has announced tah the Blogger Template Designer is now available to all (not just Blogger in Draft).

Original Article: Google has launched the Blogger Template Designer, a way to customize the look and feel of your Blogger blog.

"Over the past few years we've worked to scale Blogger and ensure that it is capable of handling hundreds of millions of pageviews per day," Google says. "But we also believe that blogging is about self expression and that an important part of expression is creating a custom design that expresses your unique voice. So last year we started working on a tool that would allow everyone to easily customize their blog’s look and feel, and today we’re proud to introduce the Blogger Template Designer."

Features of the template designer include:

- 15 new templates (with more on the way)
- Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
- Hundreds of background images courtesy of iStockphoto
- Customizable colors, fonts, and more.

"While alternative offerings force users to choose among a limited set of rigid template designs, Blogger provides an intuitive yet powerful interface so anyone to customize their blog's design & layout - putting the user in complete control," the company says.

It's interesting that this kind of customization has not been available from Blogger until 2010, as Blogger itself is over a decade old, and has been Google-owned since 2003.

The Blogger Template Designer is available through Blogger in Draft, Blogger's testing ground/sandbox site.

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