Announcing: Web Analytics Conversations, enhanced and revamped!
Web Analytics Conversations
I'm introducing the Web Analytics Conversations, a Technorati and Google Blog Search mashup of over 150 web analytics blogs. Not only does it automatically rank blogs by Authority, Freshness and level of Activity, it also shows blog title, description and latest posts. The interface makes it very easy to sort blogs by any of those criteria, plus another one, called WAC ranking!You can also search any of those blogs with the official Web Analytics Association search engine, which I'm also maitaining, or subscribe to a master RSS feed of all those blogs!
[WAC] the Web Analytics Conversation rank
Blogs can be ranked by WAC scores, which is the sum of the following underlying metrics:- Authority, as defined by Technorati, is the number of incoming links in the last 60 days
- Freshness is the relative recency of the latest post
- Activity is the number of posts in the last 60 days
Limitations
- The underlying data is automatically cached every day. If you ever happend to be the first person hitting the page for that day, the update process takes about 1 minute... Just be patient and it will get there!
- There are sometimes bad character conversions, leaving some weird artifacts in titles and blog posts.
- There is actually some dead wood, blogs that haven't been updated for a year.Those will be more apparent if you sort by lowest scores. I will remove them in the coming days.
- If your blog isn't listed, let me know and I will add it!
Why I did it?
My primary focus is on WASP. WASP includes some reporting features and I wanted to get more acquainted with the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). Also, since I'm already maitaining the WAA search engine and have been keeping a list of web analytics blogs for over two years, I thought I could automate some maintenance aspects of it. Now, my VP of Finance (read: my wife) would ask me if this is bringing any revenue... well... No... Unless someones find a nice way to monetize it!Try it out, and let me know your thoughts. What would you like to see there? Any ideas or critics are welcomed!
4 comments:
Really interesting! Thanks for sharing that and for the good work.
Practical questions: how do get an icon/picture displayed? A real title & description (e.g. author) other than just the URL?
Just curious :-)
Cheers,
Michael Notté
www.kaizen-analytics.com
Michael: the data comes from an XML file. That XML file is automatically refreshed once a day from a server-side script (PHP) that calls the Technorati favorites from http://www.technorati.com/faves/shamel67?show=blogs However, Technorati's API doens't provide the flexibility I wanted for ranking, that's why I'm "scraping" the content. Then each entry is checked against Google Blog Search for latest posts.
Has anyone mentioned the script is broken? I tried it for a minute or two but kept getting 404 errors ... not to mention you have all the same data problems I outlined in a post awhile back which you may want to have a look at:
http://blog.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog/2007/07/technorati-is-a-poor-source-of-blog-ranking-data.html
Any reason you don't use a more reliable source for authority like Google?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=web+analytics+blog&btnG=Search
Otherwise an interesting use of mash-ups and APIs. Neat work.
E.
Eric: 404 error? Are you sure you are pointing to the right page? Cause if the XML data doesn't get loaded, it's not a 404 error you should get...
Why use Technorati? Because I have control over which blogs are listed or not. For example, if a web analytics related blog doesn't use the terms "web analytics blog" in its title, it will rank very poorly based on your Google search term.
FYI, I'm also using Google Blog Search in the mashup, so I could probably also retrieve more Google ranking info and consider it in the WAC ranking calculation.
As I said in a previous post, it's an experiment, we'll see where it goes! :)
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