Posts Tagged 'בלוגים'

Twitter/Facebook gave me 1000% boost

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?

Newsgeek Party Tonight

My Hebrew blog (not mine – I just co-author) is celebrating 3 months at a cool party tonight, Tuesday, at Tel Aviv Harbor. Consider yourselves invited!

RSS is (still) alive

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.

IBMres’ blogs

IBM has an excellent presence online, not just ibm.com but also the social space.
Although there’s no official IBM twitter/facebook/blog, there are thousands of IBMers on twitter, facebook, linkedin and other social sites – and hundreds of bloggers as well.

Just in case you’re looking for some IBM bloggers, you can find them (including yours truly) over at ibm.com/blogs. There’s also IBM Social Computing Guidelines, that define how IBMers should present themsleves online – worth the read.




Mobile & Media Consultant. I help startup companies launch products to the consumer market. Reach out: dvir.reznik [at] gmail.com
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This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.