Who searches for this Blog?

Statue of Michael Jackson in Eindhoven, the Ne...
Image via Wikipedia

Using WP- Stats I set about answering this question-

What search keywords lead here-

Clearly Michael Jackson is down this year

And R GUI, Data Mining is up.

How does that affect my writing- given I get almost 250 visitors by search engines alone daily- assume I write nothing on this blog from now on.

It doesnt- I still write what ever code or poem that comes to my mind. So it is hurtful people misunderstimate the effort in writing and jump to conclusions (esp if I write about a company- I am not on payroll of that company- just like if  I write about a poem- I am not a full time poet)

Over to xkcd

All Time (for Decisionstats.Wordpress.com)

Search Views
libre office 818
facebook analytics 806
michael jackson history 240
wps sas lawsuit 180
r gui 168
wps sas 154
wordle.net 118
sas wps 116
decision stats 110
sas wps lawsuit 100
google maps jet ski 94
data mining 88
doug savage 72
hive tutorial 63
spss certification 63
hadley wickham 63
google maps jetski 62
sas sues wps 60
decisionstats 58
donald farmer microsoft 45
libreoffice 44
wps statistics 44
best statistics software 42
r gui ubuntu 41
rstat 37
tamilnadu advanced technical training institute tatti 37

YTD

2009-11-24 to Today

Search Views
libre office 818
facebook analytics 781
wps sas lawsuit 170
r gui 164
wps sas 125
wordle.net 118
sas wps 101
sas wps lawsuit 95
google maps jet ski 94
data mining 86
decision stats 82
doug savage 63
hadley wickham 63
google maps jetski 62
hive tutorial 56
donald farmer microsoft 45

Zen and the art of applying T tests to Spam Data

Decisionstats traffic seemed up mmm but Spam is way way up

Whos spamming my dear bloggie

hmm

is it the russians doing a link spam. unlikely they dont bot against Akismet that much (as they fail)

And Captcha can be failed by python (apparently. sigh)

Is there a co relation of certain tags of posts, and count of spam- hoping to distort say blogs’s search engine rankings for SAS WPS Lawsuit in Google or jet ski across  pacific in Google.

Sigh- an old retired outlaw black hat is never kept in peace. Try doing a blog search for R in Google- Revo  is now down to number 7 (which is hmm given Google Instant)

Of course I think too much about SEO, but I dont run CPC ads- I made much more money when traffic is low – say 5-10 small businesses needing to forecast their sales .

and enjoy your Thanksgiving. Remember the Indians bring the Turkeys.

 

Playing with Playwith- R Package for Interactive Data Visualizations

While just browsing through Google Code repositories for R Packages-

https://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label:R

I came across Playwith-  which is basically a toolkit for creating interactive data visualizations. I then played with ClusterApp and it really seems promising (hierarchical) – Since I am using R 2.12 on Win 7 (x64) platform somthing broke but overall this seemed like a promising interactive tool making widget.

playwith is an R package, providing a GTK+ graphical user interface for editing and interacting with R plots.

The playwith package is maintained by Felix Andrews <felix@nfrac.org>

Here is the Data Visualization called Cluster App that impressed me There is an obvious synergy between Rattle and Playwith (though some bugs with new R 2.12 on an X64 do come into play)

https://code.google.com/p/playwith/wiki/ClusterApp

The SEO mess on joining blog aggregators

 

Mug shot of Paris Hilton.
Image via Wikipedia

 

If you are an analytics blogger who writes, and is aggregated on an analytical community- read on- Here’s how blog aggregation communities can help you lose 30% of all future traffic long term, while giving you a short term.

The problem is not created by Blogging Communities (like R-Bloggers, or PlanteR, or Smart Data Collective or AnalyticBridge or even BeyeBlogs )

It is created by the way Google Page Rank is structured- you see given exactly the same content on two different we pages- Google Page Rank will place the higher Page Rank results higher. This is counter intutive and quite simple to rectify- The Google Spider can just use the Time Stamp for choosing which article was published where first (Obviously on your blog, AND then later to the aggregator).

How bad is the mess? Well joining ANY blog aggregation will lead to an instant lift of upto 10-50 % of your current traffic as similar bloggers try and read about you. However you can lose the long term 30% proportion which is a benchmark of search engine created traffic for you.

So do you opt out of blog aggregation? No. It’s a SEO mess and it’s unfair to punish your blog aggregator, most of whom are running on ad-supported sponsors or their own funds on dry fumes to publish your content. Most of the fore mentioned communities are created by excellent people I interacted with heavily- and they are genuinely motivated to give readers an easy way to keep up with blogs. Especially Smart Data Collective, Analyticbridge and R-bloggers whose founders I have known personally.

You can do one thing- create manual summaries in the excerpt feature of your blog posts- it’s just below the WordPress page. And switch your RSS feed to summary rather than full. It avoids losing keyword rank to other websites, it prevents the Blog Aggregation from gaining too much influence in key word related searches, and it keeps your whole eco system happy, Best of All it helps readers of Blog Aggregators- since most of them use a summary on the front page anyways.

An additional thought on Google Page Rank- something I have sulked over but not spoken for a long long time.  It ignores the value of reader- If Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and 500 ceos from Fortune 500 companies read my blog but do not link to it- it will count daily traffic as 500. Probably it will give more weightage to Paris Hilton fans.

A suggestion-humbly- you can use IP Address lookup of visitors to see if traffic is coming from corporate sources or retail sources -Clicky from GetClicky does this. Use it as feedback in Google Analytics as well as Google Trends.

And maybe PageRank needs to add quantity and quality of visitors as additional variables . Do a A/B test guys some Chi Square juice- its not quite Mad Men Adverting but its still good fun.

 

PageRank
Image via Wikipedia

 

and the world is one big community as per xkcd


Microsoft Online Games

No, this is not about the X Box kind of games. It is about Microsoft ‘s tactical shift in the online space from going it alone, and building stuff itself, –to partnering, and sometimes investing and exiting business.

In Blogs- It recently announced a migration of MS Live Spaces to WordPress.com – It gives Automattic 30 million more users- no small change consider there were 26 million existing WP users.

Microsoft Messenger, which is the oldest online app in the suite, now provides instant messaging services to about 350 million users, and from now on Windows Live Writer works specifically with the WordPress.com blog service by default. Hopefully Skype, and Google Voice will show MS the way to monitize that business app yet.

Google buying blogger-blogspot seems to have done little, but given Biz Stone room to create another content disruption-Twitter.

With the round of lawsuits by proxy, in Android -Motorola, or for acquisitions – MS is just doing what Marc Anderseen (who’s apparently a better VC than Paul Allen was), Sun and co did to it in the nineties.

Google seems to be regretting putting a spade in the Yahoo acquisition- that would have tied up a big chunk of Idle MS cash- leaving it little room for niche investments (like the 250 mill that helped Facebook ramp up in time).

The real surprise here could be Apple- it has shown little interest in cloud computing- and it seems to be testing the waters with Ping. But Apple sure smells competition- and Android is doing to Iphone what Windows did to the Mac in the early 1990’s.

Google lacks presence in online gaming (despite it’s own Zynga investment)- and needs to start monetizing properties like Android OS (say 10$ for every phone license ??), Google Maps (as an app for GPS) and Google Voice. Indeed it may be time for the big G to start thinking of spinning off atleast some products- earning better returns, while retaining control (dual stock splits) and killing those anti trust lawyer fees forever.

As the Ancient Chinese said, May you live in interesting times. Fun to watch the online games people play.

 

 

Awesome new features in Doc Googles

I really liked some awesome new features in Google Docs, and I am mentioning just some of the features I like because they are not there in Windows Office mostly.

Sourcehttp://www.google.com/google-d-s/whatsnew.html

List View and Mobile View Improvements
Now you can see your spreadsheets with all their formatting in List View and on your mobile device, this includes background/foreground colors, borders and text formatting!

Themes for forms
Add a splash of color to your surveys and questionnaires. When you create and edit a form, simply apply one of the 70 themes

  • Forms improvements
    We’ve added a new question type (grid), support for right-to-left languages in forms, and a new color scheme for the forms summary. Also, you can now pre-populate form fields with URL parameters, and if you use Google Apps, you can create forms which require sign-in to access. Learn more

  • Translate document
    You can now translate an entire document into over 40 languages.

    Translate and detect languages in Google spreadsheets
    =GoogleTranslate(“Hola, ¿cómo estás?”,”es”,”en”) gives “Hi, how are you?” (or leave out “en” and we’ll automatically choose the default language of your spreadsheet) What if you don’t know the language? =DetectLanguage(“Hola, ¿cómo estás?”) gives “es”.

    A new curve tool in drawings
    Create smooth curves based on a series of points with this new tool.

    Optical character recognition (OCR)
    You can now upload and convert PDF or image files to text.

     

    You can read the awesome new ones athttp://www.google.com/google-d-s/whatsnew.html but these are the ones I felt were missing in Windows Office.

    Coming up- a Review of newly forked Libre Office

Using Facebook Analytics (Updated)

People sceptical of any analytical value of Facebook should see the nice embedded analytics, which is a close rival and even more to Google Analytics for websites. It has recently been updated as well.

It is right there on the button called Insights on left margin of your Facebook Page

Like for the Facebook Page

http://facebook.com/Decisionstats

You can also use Export Data function to run customized analytical and statistical testing on your Corporate Page.

Older View———————————————————————————-

see screenshot of Demographics of 213 Decisionstats fans on Facebook ( FB doesnot allow individual views but only aggregate views for Privacy Reasons)

fb