As we all know, web statistics are an unreliable thing at the best of times. I posted on this issue back in March 2006, noting that Urchin and web server stats can be used by people to grossly exaggerate their statistics. Well now Nik Cubrilovic has posted on a similar story, this time involving Feedburner subscriber figures. The blog that Nik refers to has been a concern for quite some time, as it claims to have hundreds of thousands of RSS and email subscribers - and (imho) a similarly inflated page view count. These exaggerated web stats are helping to sell ads on that particular blog, which of course puts honest blogs (like mine) in a bad position. And frankly, this kind of thing reflects badly on the web content industry as a whole.
Thankfully, as Nik points out, Feedburner addressed the issue and the RSS
subscriber stats of the blog in question are now showing the correct figure. I
can verify that I checked this myself, before said blog removed access to his
Feedburner chicklet. The rightful figure is less than 30,000 - not quite
"hundreds of thousands" I think you'll agree.
It's great that Feedburner fixed this issue quickly (and thank you to Pageflakes for also working it out), but really this kind of web stats exaggeration has to stop, for the good of the industry. While Google is trying its best to stamp out click fraud on CPC ads, there is a more subtle fraud that can be perpetrated by fudging your web stats - either through quoting outlandish Urchin or web server stats, or by other means.
Forrester Research has done a usability comparison between RIA (Rich Internet Apps) and HTML apps, in a report entitled Smackdown: Rich Internet Applications Versus HTML. The result:
"We looked for examples of rich Internet and HTML applications in each of four categories and compared how well they supported relevant user goals. We found that, on average, RIAs outperform HTML interfaces; at the same time, RIA usability can fall prey to basic design mistakes."
(emphasis ours)
I checked out the report, which reviewed 22 Web applications across four categories: hotel search and reservation engines, mapping tools, PC configurators, and product finders. Note that by RIA, Forrester bundles together Flex, Ajax and other interactive Web technologies.
In Forrester's analysis, only 5 of the 22 apps passed their usability test - and all 5 were RIAs. The evaluation criteria was a set of 15 questions such as "Is essential content available where needed?" and "Is the task flow efficient?".
Here is one example of the usability results, in the mapping apps:
Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus
You may've heard of OpenID - it's a distributed identity management system, a.k.a. a decentralized single sign-on platform. We prepared a screencast to better explain the idea (see Flash movie below). After that we present a more detailed explanation, focusing particularly on Yahoo and Google.
In the screencast we use a real world example to show you what OpenID is. Firstly we create an OpenID account at one of the best known free OpenID servers, myopenid.com, then we use our new account to sign in to the following supported sites: Grou.ps, Zooomr and WikiTravel. Note that we could use any OpenID provider, like ClaimID or vIdentity, but for the sake of simplicity we've chosen only one. Here's the screencast:
When I was looking for
submissions for Best Web Companies and Innovators of 2006, a R/WW commenter pointed
to a non-profit site called kiva.org - calling it "web
2.0 meets the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize".
Kiva.org lets you loan money to an entrepreneur in the developing world. On the homepage there is a list of relatively small loan requests (usually $2000 or less), from people in developing countries. Incidentally, Kiva is a Swahili word meaning “agreement” or “unity”.
For example Rabil
Hamzayev is requesting $2000 to expand his foodstuffs business. He's described as a
"30, single, internally Displaced Person ( IDP ) from the Armenian-ocupied territory of
Azerbaijan Lachin". He says he will repay the loan over 12-16 months. Here's his business
history so far:
"Before he wanted to open his own market, but he could not do it.He decided to borrow the loan $400 and to built his own market. For the second time he borrowed the loan $800 and bought the foodstuffs. The third loan amount $1400 he spent to expand the area of his market. Now he wants to built the household shop."
Rabil is 69% funded so far and on his Kiva webpage there is a facewall of people who have loaned him money. Kiva.org even addresses the question of "Will I get repaid", with a little popup box that states: "So far, Kiva has experienced a 100% repayment rate on all businesses with completed loan terms."
Disclosure: Eurekster is a sponsor of Read/WriteWeb
Eurekster has quietly rolled out an interesting upgrade to their social search service, Swicki. Now users can contribute their own search answers to a swicki, if they feel they have expertise in the topic. This essentially makes Swicki into a 'read/write' search engine! The owner of the swicki still needs to approve the answer, so users can't just write any old thing and have it published. Here is an example from R/WW's swicki. I searched for "web office" and this is part of what displays:
To usher in the new year, we're very pleased to announce the new Read/WriteWeb Job Board - brought to you in association with JobThread. While there are a few prominent and excellent job boards run by other tech blogs, there are a couple of differentiating factors with ours:
1) It's less expensive! $100 for a month, half the price of some of the others.
2) We think that a lot of super-smart people hang out on Read/WriteWeb, for the in-depth articles and conversations. And employers want to attract the best brains, right? :-)
But actually we love the other tech blogs with job boards too and one day, who knows, we might all join together. We're all part of the same extended community after all.
For job-hunters, The Read/WriteWeb Job Board provides job opportunities for Web Technology and New Media professionals, at startups and tech firms all over the world.
For employers: Read/WriteWeb is a premium tech weblog which reaches hundreds of thousands of developers, designers, executives and thought leaders in the Web and Media industry. So if you're looking for the smartest and most innovative staff - people who are one step ahead of the rest - then you'll find those people in the Read/WriteWeb community!
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus
In
an article in the January 1st 2007 issue of NYTimes, reporter Miguel Helft writes
about the race in Silicon Valley to beat Google. Certainly the future of search has been
much talked about lately. Last year Read/WriteWeb had a number of big posts on this
topic, including Emre's Search 2.0 and
my post about vertical
search. We have also profiled many search players, including Retrevo, Hakia, Quintura, Pluggd, Microsoft
Live Search, Snap and ChaCha.
Since we have been following the battle closely, we are excited to see the coverage in
New York Times - which signals that the search space has heated up enough to be worthy of
attention by a tech-savvy mainstream audience.
Just before Christmas,
Mozilla designer Alex Faaborg published some introductory posts on his
blog about where Mozilla is headed with microformats. Quick background: Mozilla is of
course the developer of the popular open source browser Firefox; and microformats are (in
Alex's words) "adding semantics to markup to take it from being machine
readable to being machine understandable."
So what use would microformats be in a web browser?
Alex explains that microformats will make the Web Browser into an "Information Broker" and suggests that this could happen in Firefox 3. He writes:
Written by Berislav Lopac and edited by Richard MacManus
Croatia
is a small market for any industry - and especially when it comes to the Internet. It has
about 4.5 million citizens, but only 35% of them regularly used the Internet in 2005,
according to a recent study by IDC. However, the same
study tells us that as many as 54% use the Internet to read online publications - the
highest in Europe in that respect. And this accurately describes the most active part of
the Croatian Web scene.
The most popular sites in Croatia are traditional, all-encompassing news sites and portals. Most of them belong to ISPs, such as T-Com's T-Portal, VIPnet's VIP Portal or the net.hr - which belongs to the second largest ISP, Iskon (recently acquired by T-Com). Most media also operate their own online counterparts, as is the case with Jutarnji list (the most popular daily newspaper) and Dnevnik.hr (operated by Nova TV). These sites are often used as alternatives to traditional media and many users have started to use them as their main online source for news and information. The primary competition consists of similar sites owned by independent teams, not affiliated with any media company or an ISP - a prime example is Index, which specializes in cracking "scandal" stories - like the notorious homemade video of the local pop idol Severina.
Written by Gang Lu and edited by Richard MacManus. Original version posted on Gang Lu's blog The MObilenoDE.
Maxthon (formerly known as MyIE) is a browser that
reportedly has 30% of the browser market in its home country of China, second only to IE
and ahead of Firefox. It is a powerful tabbed, fully customizable and 100% free Internet
browser built on top of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) platform. The milestone
Maxthon 2.0 beta was released early last month. We carried out an in-depth interview with
SVP & Partner at Maxthon Netanel
Jacobsson (former Business Development Director at AOL/ICQ), who told us the full
story of this exciting browser and its bid for global success.
The interview starts with a bit of history about Maxthon, a browser generally not well known in the Western world. Netanel said that MyIE was originally created by a Chinese man called Changyou, who wanted to customize his IE browser. MyIE became the first browser to support tabbed browsing. Changyou posted most of the code onto his BBS, but unexpectedly left the project due to personal reasons in 2000. Luckily, one of his admirers Jeff Chen decided to continue the development and released a new version with the name MyIE2. MyIE2 grew very fast, with massive contributions from passionate users all over the world. They communicated via BBS, Forums and IM - and helped on developing the plugins, sites, skins, debugging, etc.
Netanel said that Maxthon users are very passionate about the IE browser, but they want more from IE than Microsoft provided - so they formed a community to build and maintain Maxthon.
