Posted On February 11, 2010 at 21:20 in Uncategorized
I came across this awesome visual presentation about the State of the Internet over at Brittany Bohnet. Scrolling down the Focus post, I saw the technological gap people are talking about, a gap that prevents some 2 billion people in the world access to information.
The internet makes our world more connected, leverages business opportunities and makes access to information much more easy. Still, internet usage is higher (no surprise) and more accessible (no surprise again) for people with some form of college education and >$30K yearly income. Only 39% of people with less than high-school education use the internet, and only 42% of people with under $30k income has broadband access.
We need to change this. We can change this.
Posted by Dvir Reznik · Tags: bloggers, blogs, brittany bohnet, Broadband Internet access, internet usage, state of the internet, visualization · No Comments »
Posted On July 4, 2009 at 20:06 in Uncategorized
Relax, not me personally, my blog got that boost.
With June (and 2Q) wrapping up last week, it’s an excellent time to gather some statistics around my blog, and I decided to make a comparison to the previous period, and maybe identify some trends. The period I looked at is 1H08 vs. 1H09.
Google Analytics is truly a powerful tool, and I was able to go very deep (drill-down) and round up some interesting figures. I wanted to verify 2 assumptions I made since Jan 2008:
The results supported both assumptions.
Traffic-wise, the first 6 months of 2009 generated 13,004 visits and 18,660 page views, almost twice than the 2008 period. The increase was expected, but the sources breakdown amazed me. I have a 3-step process for pushing my blog’s content: update my twitter, post to facebook and save to del.icio.us – between those 3 networks I cover almost 5,000 eyeballs (directly). It did the trick, big time!
Facebook generated 5 times more visits – 76 in 1H08 to 480 in 1H09, and twitter generated roughly the same growth – 82 in 1H08 to 490 in 1H09. Direct traffic from Google also increased, by 110%, from 2,800 in 1H08 to 6,030 in 1H09.
Location-wise, I got 3 times more visits from Israel, jumping from 930 in 1H08 to just under 3,000 in 1H09. The US remains my main source of readers, with 4,050 visits in 1H09 (comapred to 2,700 in 1H08). The EU were also loyal readers, with +50% increase in France, UK, Germany, Netherlands and Italy. Australia, India and Canada showed similar increases.
To be honest, I expected those results. With the explosion of new media, facebook, twitter, friendfeed and others, I would be surprised to see a lower figure from those 2 sources, especially when taking into account the amount of self-marketing I did these past 18 months.
Looking into the near future, I wonder what my 1H10 vs 1H09 will look like.. what source will show the most increase in visits? will blogs still rule the world or will we all lifestream our lives? What do you think?
Posted by Dvir Reznik · Tags: blogs, facebook, google analytics, lifestream, page views, social media, stats, twitter, מדיה חברתית, סטטיסטיקה, פייסבוק, טוויטר, בלוגים · No Comments »
Posted On May 7, 2009 at 22:19 in Uncategorized
After a busy week I sat down catching up with my RSS feeds, when these posts popped up, both talking about the ‘death of RSS‘ and the ‘re-birth of twitter as the new RSS‘. While I agree to some extent with both Orli Yakuel and Steve Gillmor that twitter definitely changed the way we consume and search for content, I disagree with their bottom-lines.
RSS is still in the game, and its ‘TOD‘ announcement was premature.
Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed – whatever they grew from, they morphed into a realtime CMS for the emerging media. Twitter, not RSS, became the early warning system for new content. (Steve Gillmor)
And Orli:
Bottom line, you can’t have a live conversation from within your RSS reader. Today, with Twitter, you see links posted by your friends and can immediately create a discussion around it. The web was never as accessible as it is today. (Orli Yakeul)
Twitter has definitely changed the way we communicate with each other, much like cellphones or SMS did several years ago. A simple service, that is considered less-formal (but used for business daily), with a cool GUI and multiple integration points – has hooked us all, and got us thinking in 140 chars sentences.
RSS is still alive because:
- Not missing the action. Since leaving IBM, we have only 1 laptop at home (will change soon), my fiancee’s – I use it when she doesn’t. One of the things that bug me about twitter, is information overload. True, I choose who to follow, I create groups and searches in tweetdeck, but still, how many of you scroll down the column to see ‘the past’? I’m guessing very few. Twitter is about now, right now. If you missed it, it’s old news, not interesting.
- Various integration points. Same with twitter, RSS is accessible from a variety of applications: messaging (even IM), browsers, dedicated software, mobile and more.
- RSS will die when blogs will. RSS was born for blogs and news sites, and makes it easier to track stories and articles, in a slight delay. I first came to know Orli, Kfir, Lior, Ahuvah, Gal and the gang from their blog – which were (and still are) written elegantly, clear and to the point, with their own professional angle on things. The 3 tabs I always have open in FF are GReader, Facebook and Gmail.
Twitter will kill RSS in the future because:
- Micro-blogging will eventually rule. Don’t know if at 140 chars or more, but I definitely see a change in the read/write culture – people are talking in updates, even children. Try having a conversation with a teenager (<18)>
- Topics and not sites. If I had to choose one important change twitter introduced – it’s the fact we’re starting to track topics and not sites (like RSS). Obviously you can create a RSS for twitter search, but there’s nothing like the source. The hashtags (#) have made it easier for us to start a topic (tlvmarathon) and track a story (swineflu).
- Conversation. This is the heart of web 2.0, in any slide and presentation ever written about this term. We are no longer consuming content, we are conversing about content. And while GReader lets you ‘share on facebook’, ‘add to del.icio.us‘ and others, it does not compare to the instant discussion twitter enables us to do.
That’s my opinion. You’re welcome to comment with yours.
Posted by Dvir Reznik · Tags: blogs, conversation, facebook, friendfeed, rss, social media, twitter, פייסבוק, שיחה, טוויטר, בלוגים, דיון, ווב 2.0 · 2 Comments »
