My Space so Yesterday

Great article from the Washington post on the pending demise of Myspace.com

I don't think it will disappear over night, but the teen market appears to be a lot smarter then the general public and especially parents give them credit for. According to the article teens are leaving myspace.com for privacy reasons and because of the creeps that are hanging out there pretending to be someone else.

Where are they going instead? It turns out many of them our heading to facebook.com.

Read the article for more information

WebTrends Doesn't Work with Internet Explorer 7

I was on the phone talking with WebTrends technical support about the problem I discovered with using WebTrends and the newly released version of IE 7 as mentioned in my previous post.

Their response is as follows:

• Yes, we've seen that problem before
• It doesn't occur with every instance of IE 7, sometimes people get lucky with IE 7
• Development is aware of the problem and WebTrends is working on a fix
• Expect the fix in the next release of WebTrends

As result, my personal recommendation is don't upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 if you don't have to and you need to use WebTrends. If you've upgraded already or if your organization forces the upgrade, or by mistake you let Microsoft upgrade your version with their automatic auto-update utility, then start using FireFox.

WebTrends & IE7

Yesterday I installed the first production version of IE 7 from Microsoft. So far, I'm not overly impressed in anyway.

I find it even slower then IE 6 with just a slightly nicer user interface. I'm slowly going through all my application that use a web interface. While most perform correctly (if just a bit slower), I've run into many issues in using IE7 and WebTrends.

The problems seem to change between reboots and each test, but here are two of the big ones.

* when switching between reports IE hangs so you can't see additional reports
* java applets for graphics periodically fail to load properly in IE.

Of course, I'm having no issues with using WebTrends in Firefox. I'll be calling WebTrends later today to discuss fixes for these issues and to see if others are having them as well. I'll keep you posted.

Helping Raise Money With Search

I thought I had seen it all, but thanks to Blinkx.com, and my bookmark on "search engine optimization", I've discovered something wonderful in the world of search engines.

www.goodsearch.com has developed a new approach to entice users to come and use their search engine for searching the web. Goodsearch.com like many smaller search engines out there is powered by one of the bigger search engines and in this case it's yahoo.com. Like all players in this field, they make money by running pay per click advertising on their site, but here is the twist. Goodsearch.com donates 50% of its revenue to your favourite charity.

That's right your favourite charity and not a charity of its choice. You can choose from thousands of organizations already registered or add your favourite cause (charity, non-profit, school, etc.). This includes nominating your funds to go to your child's school for example. No you're not going to generate tens of thousands dollars a year for your charity or school, but think of the possibilities. According to Goodsearch.com, each search will generate approximately $0.01. So if a school has let's say 500 students and each parent does 2 searches a day that equates to a mere $10/day, but multiply that by say 365 days (1 year) and your cause has earned $3,650. If you're worried about the quality of the search results remember it's powered by yahoo.com and the quality will be the same.

Good search also has a utility that allows you to monitor and see how much money has been earned by the various charities.

This figure is of course an estimate and depends not only on the frequency that people search, but how likely they are to click on the generated ads. Remember only earning pennies at a time still adds up (just think of all those charity boxes on store counters) and if you're going to search anyways, might as well make some money for your favourite cause.

IE 7 Released

Microsoft has finally announced the production release of the new Internet Explorer version 7. IE 7 is now available.

Here is the press release. Take a minute to read and see what's up. Some interesting facts on the loss of market share to Firefox and Opera.

Now that it's out of beta, I might even download it for myself.

The connection between your marketing spend and the bottom line

Make the connection between your marketing spend and the bottom line

I don't know what's in the water these days, but I've been asked to deliver another talk on using web analytics to measure ROI. This time I'll be speaking here in Toronto at AIMS (Association of Internet Marketing & Sales).

The primary focus of my talk will be "Clearing up the confusion about cookies, privacy, and why 'hits' and 'unique visits' are meaningless for the majority of websites".

I'll be one of two presenters and this should prove to be an interesting event for all those who are interested in learning how to leverage their investment in web analytics software to improve the performance of their web site.

For more information visit the AIMS web site.

Measuring ROI with Web Analytics

I'll speaking at WebBuilder 2.0 this coming December. Web Builder is a Fawcette Technical Publishing (FTP) conference. My topic is Measuring ROI with Web Analytics.

While many people many have never heard of the Web Builder conference, it origins go way back to 1997 and was originally put on by C|Net before being sold to Fawcette who ran it for several years before sending it to the beach in the fall of 2002.

While Web Builder may have been on vacation, it's nice to see FTP bringing it back. What has always separated Web Builder from other web and Internet conferences is it doesn't target just one of the many groups involved in web development instead it tries to make the conference all encompassing for entire web development team. This covers everyone from the hard-core program to web managers and even web marketers.

It's always fun to see how the crowds at these conferences gel. Sometimes, everyone blends and other times, you can really spot the separation. What usually contributes to the blending is a great kick-off party or event the night before the conference. It will be interesting to see if FTP brings this conference feature back as well.

By speaking at this conference, it will ensure that I've attended every Web Builder conference since its inception. I've gone as a regular attendee and on many occasions as a speaker. Back in December 1999, I was speaking on virtually the same topic. Back then, the web bubble was nearing the point of implosion, and not many people wanted to listen to my message. I suspect that 7 years later the audience will be a little more receptive.

If you attend this conference, be sure to track me down and say hello.

More Video Search

With Google's acquisition of YouTube, web based video is being thrust even more into the Internet spotlight. Despite all the publicity, people still don't know how to find relevant on-line videos.

I've mentioned before some video search tools such as SingingFish.com and Google Video search, well here is yet another on-line video search tool. Check out blinkx.com/!


As on-line search goes, its average but it has a different reach which means it covers more then just YouTube or some of the other search engines. According to their on-line documentation, Blinkx has over 6 million hours of video in its database and "blinkx uses visual analysis and speech recognition to better understand rich media content". My limited testing of this, could neither prove or disprove that Blinkx is using voice recognition software to help rate videos, but what an interesting idea. Instead of relying on what video producers say a video is about why not look at the dialogue and the video itself.

One feature I thought was cool was their video wall. When this option is selected a wall of video thumbnails is created with all videos (that matched your search result) displaying at the same time. See something interesting simply click on the thumbnail to view it in full size and with audio. You can even create a hard link to this video wall that can be added to you bookmarks or even included in your blog. See below for the term "search engine optimization".

VOIP Speed Tester

Thinking about getting a VOIP phone or perhaps you're having problems with your current connection. Well I discovered this interesting tool that let's you test your Internet connection for both speed and quality of service. It then ranks the overall results. So now you can know if you're Inerent connection speed can support VOIP as well if you're having problems with your VOIP phone if the problem is your ISP or the VOIP provider.

It's a free tool and well worth checking out if you're think of VOIP.

My VOIP Speed

Below is a shot of the summary page of my Internet connection.

Web Analytics & Cookies

Measuring how many visitors are coming to your web sites is one of several critical web analytic measurements. But how do you measure visitors? In the good old days 10-15 years ago, you simply needed to track a visitor by their IP address. But those easy days of measurement are long gone with the introduction of proxy servers and large scale ISPs.

Virtually all web analytic tools on the market today suggest the use of persistent cookies to identify unique visitors instead of relying on the old and inaccurate measurements of IP addresses. The by tracking cookies, you can more accurately track user behaviour through the web site, track returning visitors, number of visits between purchases, average number of purchases by visitors, campaign effectiveness etc.

The real question we need to ask is just how effective are persistent cookies. Unfortunately, the answer may not be what you want to hear. First off, they are only as effective as the percentage of web site visitors who accept cookies. From my observations at various clients, I've seen an acceptance rate range between 60%-95%. The biggest factor in defining the acceptance rate is the target audience for the web site. When targeting tech savvy individuals especially those in the open source movement, I've seen the lowest cookie acceptance rates. When targeting general consumers I've seen the highest cookie acceptance rates.

Another factor, based purely on my observations is location. It appears that people in some countries are more likely then others to accept or reject all cookies. The following table contains some my observations. These figures were taken from a single client who operates multiple b to b web sites across the world all with the same target audience and promoting the same product over the last 90 days (bot and internal traffic excluded).

Country/Region	Acceptance Rate
North America	80.3%
Germany	85.3%
UK	88.5%
Ireland	90.0%
France	85.0%
Belgium	87.0%

While the above information may not be statistically relevant across all industry, it does demonstrate that the use of cookies to improve accuracy is not 100% as some would lead us to believe and the greatest concentration of people and organization suffering form cookie paranoia are located in North America. The reality is that cookies are still the best alternative available to us and are far more accurate then the use of IP addresses.

Of course, if you want to be 100% accurate, you'd need to have users register and log into your site and then track them by their user id. Of course, if you followed this approach, most web sites wouldn't get any visitors and then they wouldn't have anything to measure. Remember, web analytics is about measuring trends and measuring effectiveness and even with a cookie acceptance rate in the low 80's, you can still provide statistically relevant data

Video Search Google & Singing Fish

I've always been a fan of Sing Fish (www.singingfish.com) for searching for mp3, wav, other audio files and yes video clips. So if you’re on the look out for a search engine that very few people have heard give it a try.

If you're just searching for video clips, may I suggest the new Google Video Search (video.google.com). It's new and they also offer a space where you can up load and share your own videos.

I haven't tried the upload and share feature, but searches on some my hobbies did reveal some interesting home videos. I especially like somebody's windsurfing vacation video all 21 minutes of it. Makes me suspect that Google is offering lots of free space for your videos.

Press Releases, Blogs & Success

It's been 7 days since my SEO friendly press release on this blog was released. So now I need to determine if the press release was an immediate success. I can unequivocally state " yes".

You may be surprised by how my measure its success so let me say first what didn't happen and that I don't care about. The press release didn't drive thousands of visitors to my blog or my web site. Did I expect it to do so? No, but I did expect some increase in traffic and yes that did happen. In fact traffic on the day of the press release was a 150% more then usual and up until today (Labour Day) has been about 25% more then usual with the number of return visitors also increasing.

This alone is not a sign of success. Here are some other factors do make the press release a success.

* Press release was picked-up by Google News and Yahoo News
* Of the people who saw the on-line press release summary, 1 in 113 opened it up and presumably read the press release.
* Of those who read the on-line press release:
- 10.6% saved it as a PDF (presumably for future reference)
- 10.1% click-through to my web site and several of those visited more then once
- those who visited my site averaged 2 page views per visit.

It is these statistics, gathered from both my press release company, and my web analytics tool that I use to measure success. Based on my experience getting an press release open rate below 1 in 125 is a good thing, getting a 10% conversion (people who read a press release and click to your web site to find out more), is fantastic.

Now the best part, I've just finished an on-line interview with a journalist who read the press release. Assuming I get quoted in his article and they include a link to my site (in both the print and on-liversionson), I've garnered a valuable inbound link and expanded the marketing efforts the press release.

Once again, a press release when well written and SEO'd is a valuable tool in the SEM and SEO tool chest and can form part of your SEO Best Practices foundation.

Google Analytics Now Open for Business

If you've been itching to try Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics), but didn't because it trial was on an "by invitation only" status, you are in luck. Google has recently lifted that restriction and Google Analytics is now open to everyone.

It may have also been a worth while wait. Since its launch Google Analytics has added many new features that now allow it to complete with some of the major players. These include click map overlays similar to WebTrends SmartView and the one offered by Ominture's Site Catalyst.

So give it a try and I think you may like it. The level of reporting is still on the light side, but it's free. So don't complain.

Yahoo Click-Fraud Class Action

Something interesting arrived in today's mail. Yes traditional mail dropped off by a mail carrier. It was a "Notice of a Settlement" for a class action against Yahoo for Click Fraud.

The period covered by this class action includes January 1, 2004 to July 31, 2006. Take note that includes the period before Yahoo purchased Overture (at least to the best of my memory).

This seven (7) page document covers a log of material, but basically the outcome is even less exciting then the Google Settlement. There is no mention of how much everyone will get, but simply that Yahoo has to put in place a mechanism for companies who believe they were victims of click fraud to make a claim and then have it investigated by Yahoo and for it to become part of the final settlement.

Sounds like a lot of work to get back a few clicks.

Of course the lawyers did well again. They get $4,950,000 plus expenses up to $25,000 (US dollars of course). Not the same legal payout as Google got hit with, but still somebody is making money with all these law suits and it sure isn't the people who paid for all those clicks.

The only good thing to truly come out the click fraud legal actions (at least one can hope} is better tracking and monitoring by the Pay Per Click programs for click fraud so perhaps in the near future what you pay for in a ppc campaign will be for real web site traffic.

Free Business Apps from Google

In case you didn't hear it yet, Google yesterday formally announced that it is offering a free trial of the Beta of its new enterprise business application. This includes everything you see at www.google.com/a

So now you can have an enterprise version of:
* Google Mail
* Google Calendar
* Google Page Creator
* Google Talk

While I'm a user of Google Calendar for my personal calendar and have enjoyed using it with the ability of sharing my calendar with others (makes scheduling appointments much easier), I'm not sure of the others.

Do I really want to shift my business e-mail from its current provider to Google? Yes Google will be free, but who do I call when something goes wrong?

While free today and Google does promise that it will be free forever to all beta users, what happens when the new and improved version of everything becomes available and is sold as a premium service? Is this is just a fancy take on the bait and switch?

Just more offerings from Google, now add these to other offerings by Google: Writely (www.writely.com a free word processor) and Google Spreadsheet (spreadsheets.google.com) and you have a company which is ready to take on the entrenched Microsoft Office. Perhaps these products aren't ready for major corporations, but they do and will make sense to all the small and medium sized businesses out there.

It's strange that about 6 or 7 years ago or so, I had predicted at a conference that Internet and web would allow software companies to move their applications on-line. This had a few advantages, from the users perspective, they didn't have to keep buying upgrades and could always be on the latest version and it should cost less per user. From the software manufacture perspective, they can say good-bye to pirated versions of the software since there are no CDs out there to be burned and license keys to be hacked.

Well let's wait and see how all this plays out. It could become very interesting.

Blogs, SEO & Press Releases

On Tuesday August 29, my firm is issuing a press release formally announcing this blog. The questions may be why now after a couple of months or why issue a press release at all.

So let start with why wait. First off, I wanted to see if I'd be posting blog entries on a regular basis. I never planned on the one day thing, but at least one a week or so. Well a review of past postings shows, I have didn't always meet the weekly posting boal, but I've managed close to an average of one a week. There is no point in issuing a press release without having anything to show. Secondly, I wanted to see what would really happen without any formal announcements.

From my log files I've been able to see that several of my posts have attracted many visitors via the search engines as I had hoped they would. What's nice is many of you do appear to be coming back to read more despite the not posting comments to my blog entries.

So, I've started with the soft roll-out. Now out comes a press release. So why a press release? There are a couple of factors; first a high quality on-line press release with links to a specific page does create high quality external links an important factor in ranking well in the search engine results. Secondly and the most obvious is to drive traffic to my blog and perhaps increase the number of regular readers and in turn increase the value of my brand. Third and the last reason, is a well written press release (I believe this one is), may get picked up by on-line news engines like Google news and Yahoo news. This increases the probability of someone searching for an SEO or web analytics blog from finding mine and perhaps a reported looking for a quote on a specific subject that I've covered will come and seek me out and once again improve my brand.

From an SEO perspective, a well crafted press release is always a good thing. From a business perspective, it always good to issue one when you have something positive to announce, so why hold back.

So as an SEO firm that tells clients to issue SEO'd press releases, it is always a good time to "start eating our own dog food".

Free Skype To Landline - Have You Tried It?

As a regular user of a VOIP (voice over IP) telephone system and regular user of Skype (an Web based VOIP network), I was intrigued by Skype's offer earlier this summer of free Web to landline calls in North America.

I love using Skype to talk to friends and family all over the world for free. All they require is the free Skype software, speakers and a microphone. Now throw in a web cam and we have live video calling. Truly amazing to talk and see the person who you're talking with in real time. Of course depending on your bandwidth, the person on the other ends bandwidth and the overall available bandwidth on the network this can range from a great call with OK video to a poor quality call with very jerky video.

In my experience, when you turn off the video, Skype delivers an OK quality voice call. So now I could call for free friends and family throughout North America (assuming I'm in North America) for free who don't have Skype. Of course with my Primus TalkBroadband VOIP line I already had unlimited calling in North America, but for others who only had Skype this could be a real money saver and extremely convenient.

Let me explain, for Skype to Skype to work, both people have to be on-line. So if the person you want to speak to isn't at their computer you can't talk to them. With Skype to landline, you login in to your Skype account, dial their telephone number and your almost instantly connect.

The problem is the quality of the call. While on the web you might expect a poor quality call, but on a land line that is another story. I gave it a try a few times and was reminded on International calls I used to make 10-15 years ago. Where you talked wait a few seconds and hear yourself on the other end.

OK this is for free, but the person on the other end doesn't know it. I personally think if Skype is trying to promote this service in North America they need to improve their network routing within North America. I know of several Europeans who use this service regularly with Europe and are happy with the quality.

If you're using this free Skype to landline a try in hopes of evaluating VOIP overall don't. It simply isn't the same thing.

I gave a few VOIP providers here in Canada a try and all provided a good quality service (except AOL). For the most you can't tell I'm on a VOIP phone system regardless of where in the world I'm calling.

Dan MacLean over at ITworld Canada has a good editorial piece on why you shouldn't use Skype to evaluate VOIP. Well worth the read if you are thinking of going to a VOIP phone.

Access Log Scrubber Update

I'm happy to announce that versions 0.8 of our log scrubber beta is now available.

The biggest enhancement is that the scrubber can now open and process files that were gzipped. So now you can scrubb (remove unwanted entries) from your IIS and Apache access log files in the following formats

.log
.zip
.gz

To register for the beta trial simply go to www.knechtology.com/log-scrubber/log-scubber-30day-trial.html and complete the registration form.

For more detailed information on the Log Scrubber visit http://www.knechtology.com/log-scrubber/.

I hope to have the production version ready within 2-3 weeks.

Canadian Web Surfing Facts

I saw these interesting facts from Statistics Canada last week and thought I'd share them.

• 68% of adult Canadians used the Internet for personal non-business reason in 2005


• In Toronto, that number rose to 75%


• Almost two-thirds of adult Canadians who used the Internet from home used it every day during a typical month


• About six in 10 Internet users used it to read news or sports, or to conduct their banking online.


• More than 50% used the Internet to check weather conditions, make travel arrangements, to search for medial or government information and window shop.

I found the last point most interesting especially on the point about "to window shop". While it is always easy to see and measure the direct benefit ("ROI") of a web site sells something or has various on-line conversion points, it is difficult to measure the success of window shopping. Yet there is a benefit and we all know it. Think about how many restaurants have web sites. If they don't provide takeout and merely have a web site for promotion and letting people check out the menu then this site is purely for window shopping.

What about stores which operate both on-line and in the brick and mortar world. There must be some residual value of people merely window shopping on the electronics side to review product offerings and price. From the benefits side, this needs to be taken into account when assigning a true value to the company web site.

Microsoft AdCenter Beta - Review

In case you haven't heard yet, Microsoft has entered the world of search engine marketing with its own Pay Per Click search engine ad system called AdCenter which has been around for about 9 months now and servers ads on the MSN search engine (perhaps you didn't even know Microsoft had its own search engine). While still in beta, I've been privilege to be a participant in the AdCenter beta program for the past 3 months.

What is interesting is that for once Microsoft seems to have done something right. While PPC has been around for a long time already, and the industry is supported by many tools to support search engine marketers, Microsoft has taken the lead of these 3rd party tools and taken the best form Google Adwords and Overture by integrated them into AdCenter PPC engine.

Some features of AdCenter include day parting tools (the ability to set specific days of the week and times to run your ads), a keyword research tool (which incorporates the best of Overtures keyword tool, WordTracker and others) and a demographics tool. All these tools fall under its research tab.

The most interesting tool is the demographic tool. With this you can enter a specific word or phrase and see the demographic of who is searching on the phrase. You can find out the split between male and female web users, age bracket and income. What is suspicious is how does Microsoft know all this? Well according to one Microsoft rep I had the privilege to talk to at a conference they gather all this info when users register for their products such as HotMail, Operating systems, MS Office, etc. So how much value should you put into these demographics? To me the answer is how truthful do you really think everyone is when registering on-line for products. Have you ever stretched the truth? Regardless it at least has some merit and may be useful in targeting specific ads to specific keywords to a specific category of user.

While AdCenter does offer some limited geotargeting, for Canadian you are out of luck. AdCenter does not allow its ads to be targeted at Canadians (msn.ca). The reason is that Micorsoft Canada still has a deal in place with Yahoo Canada (hence Overture) to continue to server ads on MSN Canada Search.

As mentioned earlier this product is in Beta, but I now know Microsoft is taking PPC and AdCenter to heart. I was invited to participate yesterday in a survey of SEM professionals here in Toronto. The focus of this survey was AdCenter. I can not comment more on the survey as most of it is confidential, but I can say get ready for a strong ad campaign for when it comes out of beta.

For now AdCenter is still in Beta and I'll keep my eye on it to see if when its ready for prime time.