Nov 26 2008
I’ve been playing with some leftish (and a couple of rightish) political blogging anagrams.
And - before anyone starts on me:
Nov 24 2008
I’m not going to cover the pre-Budget Report in detail (although somebody else on the team might do so).
Instead I’m noting what I think is a significant development in the BBC approach - that of linking out systematically to Political Blogs, which are not all particularly well-known bloggers either. For the BBC, this approach can add interest in what is a long session. There are links to around a dozen bloggers.
Also, the links are direct links which pass Google-juice, a practice that had been noted as missing on the BBC website recently. This is crucial for blogs to gain exposure.
The things missing from here are Northern Irish and Scottish blogs, and a Lib Dem MP, but the Lib Dems had an extra blogger linked.
A couple of mistakes. Twitter links should be to the individual message, as should blog links - and they quoted a paragraph from Richard Kelly including an inaccuracy.
Overall - probably 7 out of 10 in my view for this Live Blog. Not bad at all. I’ve listed all the blog links below the fold.
9:18 Labour Home: http://www.labourhome.org/story/2008/11/23/18171/231
9:20 Conservative Home: http://www.labourhome.org/story/2008/11/23/18171/231
11:02 Labour Home: http://www.labourhome.org/story/2008/11/24/43835/871
11:35: Conservative Home: http://conservativehome.blogs.com/torydiary/2008/11/the-politics-of.html
12:22: Grimmer Up North (Lab): http://grimmerupnorth.blogspot.com/2008/11/pips-begin-to-squeak-again.html
12:26 Toranika on Twitter: http://twitter.com/home “I am wondering what today’s pre-Budget report will bring and how much taxes will have to rise later”.
That looks purely cosmetic or a space filler. Not only does the comment add no value (at least it isn’t cynically nihilistic), but the link is not how to do a Twitter link - you can use the link for the individual message.
13:01 Dizzy thinks (Tory): http://dizzythinks.net/
Someone’s rushing or Dizzy makes his permalinks hard to find.
13:43 James Graham (Lib Dem): http://www.theliberati.net/quaequamblog/
Someone’s still rushing or James Graham makes his permalinks hard to find as well.
14:00 Lindapierre: on Twitter. http://twitter.com/home What about prices, will this be a reality to “normal” people or only to rich people?
14:21 Tom Harris MP (Lab). http://tomcharris.wordpress.com/
Permalinks again.
14:22 John Redwood MP (Tory). http://www.johnredwoodsdiary.com/
Permalinks again.
15:05 Plaid supporter Ian Johnson’s blog: http://ianjamesjohnson.blogspot.com/2008/11/pre-budget-report-pre-thoughts.html
15:26 Novelist Richard Kelly’s blog: http://richard-t-kelly.blogspot.com/2008/11/hey-hey-its-pre-budget-report-day.html.
A bit of a mistake which the Beeb should have caught, since he quotes Cameron’s “poll-bashing”, which had already been reversed by a later poll.
16:47 Hopi Sen (Lab). http://hopisen.wordpress.com/2008/11/24/the-choice/
17:15 Dizzy Thinks (Con). http://dizzythinks.net/2008/11/live-pre-budget-report-blog.html
17:16 Tom Harris MP again (Lab). http://tomcharris.wordpress.com/
“A lot of politics, too: he repeated that the current crisis is global, not British… The most controversial announcement, I admit, is on proposals to raise the higher rate of tax. This is not the death of New Labour… it’s about a new political culture.”
I’m going negative for a minute. Global crisis, not British? Said the only man drowning in the Tsunami while everyone else floated more easily, because he had carefully cast his own feet into a block of concrete. Next, Tom will be reading us Cinderella. Also permalinks.
17:45 Douglas Carswell MP (Tory) http://www.talkcarswell.com/
Permalink.
18:14 Alix Mortimer (Lib Dem) on Lib Dem Voice. http://www.libdemvoice.org/prebudget-report-the-liveish-blog-6230.html
Nov 21 2008
For some time there has been conversation about the need to look at the Quality and Engagement of audiences for media websites.
This article looks at one of the data items available via the Quantcast.com service, which segments your audience by loyalty. The free service can also identify which organisations and businesses are sending visitors to a website.
I look at the data for national newspapers, and also for this site and journalism.co.uk.
At present comparative data can be hard to come by, however one service that does publish data is Quantcast.com.
A note about the quality of the data first. Quantcast run different levels of service. They publish estimated data about many websites, including the data about the US audiences of British Media websites mentioned here. When a site is bigger, the estimates are more reliable.
They also have a service where a snippet of Javascript is added to each page on a website, which gives better data. The data for journalism.co.uk uses this service.
The graph I’m presenting divides the audience into addicts (30+ visits per month), regulars (1+ visits per month) and “passers-by” (i.e., once only in a month) visitors, and looks at how much traffic (% of visits) derives from each segment.
Here’s the graph for the Journalism.co.uk, which is a profile of all traffic to the site (link to Journalism.co.uk data):
These figures sites are on US traffic - i.e., one segment of the overseas audience for the site. There is much more detailed data available by following the link.
The raw data does not tell you which site is “best”, but needs interpretation in the circumstances. As ever, context and knowing what is happening in the background with your site is important. For example, a large “addicts” figure might indicate a loyal core readership, but it could also indicate a site which is not reaching out to new audiences. Equally a high “passers-by” figure could indicate success in breaking particular stories and thereby obtaining a new influx of visitors. If a site runs full content in the RSS feed, many regular readers may never visit the site itself, as there is no need to.
Nov 21 2008
This is the first of two articles about web audiences for national newspaper websites - I’ll comment on the quality of audiences later today.
For months and years we have seen a long and meaningless debate about which national newspaper website had the biggest “unique users pen1s” when in fact the competing organs have been the same size to within a tiny fraction, and it would have been more practical to argue about who had the smallest brain and the most desperate need to generate copy.
We now have - in the ABCe traffic figures for October - a difference which is worth noting among the national newspaper websites.
The Guardian is ahead by slightly over 10%.
The Key Numbers for October 2008 are (in Unique Users measured using the standard ABCe process):
via Press Gazette.
For most of our national newspaper websites, approximately two thirds of the audience comes from outside the UK. Again from the Press Gazette:
Geographic breakdown
Telegraph.co.uk derived the smallest percentage of overall traffic from British web users, at 30.1 per cent, closely followed by Mail Online with 30.4 per cent.
Times Online recorded 34.8 per cent of its traffic from the UK, with Sun Online at 38.1 per cent and Guardian.co.uk on 39 per cent.
The Mirror Group of websites had the highest proportion of British visitors, with 57.8 per cent.
The highest quality readership (and hence the one that can be made most profitable per overall unit of audience for a UK organisation) is the Mirror. Unfortunately that is most probably due to the Mirror website being late out of the blocks in developing an international audience, so it doesn’t really help. UK media organisations have struggled to make money from international audiences, but as long as the marginal cost of servicing the international audience is low there is still an overall benefit (sorry - that is obvious but it needs to be said), and it helps in the willy-waving debate.
Nov 16 2008
Browsershots.org offers a service which will display screenshots of how your website will appear in a wide range of different web browsers:
What is Browsershots?
Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.
The service displays thumbnails of your website after you enter the web address into a queue and return to the site a few minutes later.
There are options to check the appearance with different screen sizes and colour depths, and with Javascript, Flash and Java turned on or off.
[tags]broswershots.org, web testing, servies, reviews[/tags]
Nov 13 2008
I’m trying out a new search facility on the Wardman Wire from a company called Lijit.
The search facility uses the Google search results, but allows me to nominate a network of websites from which an alternative set of search results are selected - so the service incorporates features of social networking websites into the site-search.
I have set up some of the other contributors to the Wardman Wire as my “network”, and I’d be interested to hear what you think.
You can find the search box at the bottom of the sidebar on the blog version of the site.
Nov 03 2008
I’m ready to be hoist by my own petard on this one, as it is an old story - but I haven’t seen it reported anywhere: the Guardian has started publishing a sectional breakdown of its traffic figures.
The Guardian has started breaking its web traffic figures down by the various sections of its website: News, Arts, Blogs, Books, Business, Comment is Free, Education, Environment, Film, Football, Life and Style, Media, Money, Music, Observer, Politics, Science, Society, Sport, Technology, Travel.
So now blogs in each of these niches can start to make some interesting comparisons.
The numbers have been published as part of the advertising offer for the Guardian.
Worldwide Page Impressions: 208,701,946
Worldwide Monthly unique users: 24,186,422
UK Page Impressions: 93,244,526
Worldwide Monthly unique users: 8,972,467
These Worldwide figures are generated from the monthly audit of Guardian logfiles by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (Electronic) .
Here are the detailed numbers for August and September.
August Detailed Figures.
September Detailed Figures.
This detailed data is generated by Generated by Omniture, who are totally reputable. The data is generated from a Javascript snippet in each page, which means that the figures are (very roughly - my guess would be to allow a tolerance of perhaps +/- 20%) comparable with Google Analytics figures. My detailed comments are below the fold.
