Wonder what this says

Linlat Be Balash feedburner , originally uploaded by Scheherazade Al Arab.

Can someone who reads Arabic let me know?

Twitter traffic via FeedBurner Socialize now represents majority of time on this blog

Recently, over at Google we've done two interesting things that allow you to get a little more information out of referral traffic to your site. FeedBurner can now automatically tag your feed to make it compatible with Google Analytics, and we now also allow you to automatically distribute links to Twitter. The combination of these two services is even a little smarter than that, because when FeedBurner knows it's sending the feed out via Twitter, it marks it as such, so you can actually tell the difference between traffic that is organically distributed via Twitter versus traffic that originated from the feed.

In the case of this blog, and like most weight loss pitches, these results may not be typical - traffic originating from the feed and coming from Twitter seems to be of better "quality" than other traffic, as is now resulting in a majority of time spent by users on the site.  

From a standpoint of just comparing the medium from which this time on the site comes, Twitter is the clear leader. In this case, the difference between "Twitter" and "feed" is simply those clicks that came from the socialize service from the feed, and clicks from feed readers. The big caveat here though, is that I publish full content feeds, and most of those views happen in Google Reader, so there is little incentive from for the user to come here and spend time on this site.  As we've noted many many times before, users of Google Reader and other feed readers tend to be a separate audience that stays in their RSS reader when reading content.  Many won't even subscribe to partial feeds.  The combined aggregate view of time in Reader plus this site would be much more interesting and something we'll have to work on providing.

From a Source point of view, you can see that most of this time, including the traffic from Twitter originated from the FeedBurner feed.   Look at the big yellow PacMan in the picture below.

Breaking this down a little more, you can see even more that the Twitter traffic itself is divided between the twitter.com site  (Twitter) and other non-web Twitter clients ("not-set"), which I've confirmed via other analytics on this site are mostly iPhone and Android Twitter clients.  According to PercentMobile, about 7% of my traffic is mobile, and I think that's all referrals from Mobile Twitter applications such as TwitDroid, TweetDeck and Tweetie.

We're working on ways of being able to display this breakdown as well so it's not marked as "(not set)".

Finally, looking at both the Medium and Source together confirms that the majority of traffic on this site is coming from the Socialize service - that's the "twitter/feedburner" combo.

Again, these are just results for this particular site, and may or may not be meaningful for the larger ecosystem, but they definitely hint at some larger trends.  They are interesting nonetheless in showing that how that part of my audience interacts.  Clearly, Twitter users do click through on links and are somewhat more engaged than what is otherwise  "anonymous" traffic.  It's yet another audience that needs to be tracked and analyzed separately from search and other referrals, and separate again from those who consume content in feed readers.

I had PopTarts for Breakfast

They were yummy, but they actually weren't PopTarts, they were Nature's Path Organic Toaster Pastries from the Google micro-kitchen.

PopTarts are the new Toast.

Rick's first trip to Vegas

the gang, originally uploaded by tracih.

I think. I just ran across this today by happenstance.

Pulling into Terminal C at ORD

I thought this was cool to see how dead on the GPS and Google Maps
integration was.

The OG FeedBurner office

Another random snapshot on my walk from work.   The original FeedBurner offices at 211 West Wacker.  This one held five of us, I believe, and had a small conference room with a cheap Costco plastic table in it for board meetings.

The first version of the feedburner.com site was run an HP-UX(!) box from a DSL line in this office.

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QR Codes Redux

I've always liked QR Codes.   I think I wrote about them four years ago when I first went to Japan, as I saw them on pretty much every print publication instead of www.internetsite.com.   That's because QR Code reader applications were already on most mobile phones in Japan.  If on the train, you'd snap a picture of the QR code for www.internetsite.com and you were browsing there on your Docomo browser within seconds.  It's no secret that typing on a phone sucks, but has gotten better with iPhones and Blackberries and their ilk - however, typing Japanese with 3 different alphabets was even worse, which is probably why this was popular there so early.

These are just starting to catch on today in North America.  There's a QR Code on the back of all of the Nexus One gift phones we were given as our holiday bonus at Google (goes to http://www.android.com/holidays):

I'm still surprised these aren't used more but it all comes down to having useful applications that process QR Codes.  They aren't in-built on our phones yet or the apps yet, but you can get a free standalone QR Code reader pretty easily from the App Store on the iPhone or Marketplace on Android.

Currently I'm using i-nigma on the iPhone and Barcode Scanner on Android, but I'm gonna start inspecting QR codes a lot more whenever I see them to see how people are using them.

QR Codes are one of those things you will have never noticed before but will start to see all over now that I've mentioned it.

Most Beautiful Steel Bridge

I noticed today whilst walking to work, which honestly I haven't done in a long time - I usually either take a cab or ride my Xootr Roma to work - that the bridge I go across won an award for the "Most Beautiful Steel Bridge" in 1963 - 1964.  This made me pause, look again, and then fumble through my three layers of zero degree Chicago winter clothes to dig out my iPhone and take a picture.

This made me pause, not because I was proud of the award, but because this must be one of the fugliest  bridges I have seen in some time.  Some of you will recognize this as the bridge that connects Wacker Drive to Marina Towers (what Wilco fans refer to as the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot towers) but hopefully you will agree that in any epoch, even the architecturally challenged 60's this is a fucking ugly bridge, and that's before the hobos camp themselves on it right before lunch and start begging for change or that last dollar they need to take the El to Oak Park.

Aside:  Who can name the 70's or 80's movie in which they drove a car off these towers?

I guess Santiago Calatrava was too young at the time.   See some of his bridges.

EPL Stadiums in Google Earth

I found an old Google Earth file I made with the EPL Stadiums plotted on a map, so I made a few updates.  Ever wonder how close Liverpool and Everton's stadiums are?  Take a look:

EPLStadiums.kmz