Complex Solutions to Simple Problems» General

Testing blogging from Flock

Pål Heick — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:18:01 +0000

I’ve spent 10 minutes with Flock – and I think I’m in love…
If Flock continues to surprise me – I may have found a perfect substitute for my unstable installation of Firefox.
Now if I could just figure out where the categories are… Ahh – they pop up after I press publish. Cool!

Link love and flock-pushing credits to Nettendenser.dk: Flock: Web 2.0 samlet i én browser

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: flock, browser, firefox

Firefox me up

Pål Heick — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 21:05:00 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

I then tried upgrading to the recent beta of Firefox 3, but none of my extensions worked there, so back to my buggy Firefox again.

What about your Firefox – unstable. What did you do?

Digital Frontier – the doors are open

Pål Heick — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:58:14 +0000

A couple of months ago I sat down with a group of former colleagues from the SEO company formerly known as Notabene.net. While bemoaning the fact that a lot of the interesting news we shared with each other at our desks didn’t go further than sporadic messenger conversations and emails, the idea of a blog collaboration project arose.
As we were all thoroughly brain washed to believe that the world revolves around SEO, SEM, and ROI, it was an easy task to pick the focus of our blog. But as we have now branched out in different directions, our information intake will probably be mirrored by our respective jobs and activities.
So without further ado, I invite you to come see us at the Digital Frontier – read, comment, share.
Be warned though, that we write in danish and only about really interesting stuff…

6 free traffic analysis tools

Pål Heick — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:25:32 +0000

Found an interesting blog-post on Techchrunch today. It seems that the market for free yet complex traffic analysis tools has a few new serious competitors. This probably means that we’ll see even more features from the free analysis tools in the future.
This prompted me to do a quick writeup on the different free traffic analysis tools out there:

Woopra is the latest player on the scene and in the words of Techcrunch is ‘Google Analytics or Nuconomy, but in real time…’ – sounds good to me…
(update: Woopra is currently invitation-only)

Google Analytics is probably one of the biggest players in the market. Analytics has a really nice flashy (flex?) interface, but has a 1 day delay on traffic data.

Nuconomy

is designed to consider the impact of widgets, Ajax, Flash, mobile, etc., which don’t generally show up in page view metrics. And they are also measuring everything on both a contributor level (think analytics by author in a blog) and user level (people on the site).

(Techcrunch) … also read a positive review on ReadWriteWeb

Clicky has a nice web2.0′ish interface, and data in real time. There is a basic free account with a limit of 3 sites to track and a pro account with bells and whistles.

Statcounter has a more traditionally looking interface, but data here is also real time.

GoStats has an nice and clean interface that looks like a blend of Clicky and statcounter.

Bonus info:
If you use Greasemonkey, Joost de Valk has a really nice greaseMonkey statistics detector that gives you an idea of how and when you are being tracked.

I’m on a mix of Analytics, Statcounter and Woopra.
What do you use?

Hooray for Clueray

Pål Heick — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:40:03 +0000

I made my first query on Clueray and waited for more than 20 seconds for the results – luckily I was warned that it might be slow – but it was a while worth waiting. Clueray challenges the way documents are served on the SERP by looking at the ‘document intent’:

One of the key insights leading to the development of Clueray’s unique intent-driven approach was to recognize that all of these different document types can be organized by intent: the intent to inform, the intent to facilitate a transaction, the intent to that serve as a “launching point” for exploring related topics, etc. Interestingly, these document intents map very nicely onto the types of searches people do which have been identified by researchers.

This means that you can filter your results according to your specific needs – and by the looks of the search results, the SERP has a range of additional features – one of which is a couple of new ways to display an the results.

Go play with the thing and tell me what you think
(In return I’ll omit a rant about Clueray totally screwing up their blog…)

…and if you are in a hurry – you can just take a look at Cluerays own break down of their SERP:

BlogDesk – the one and only blogging client?

Pål Heick — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 19:57:25 +0000

I’ve just downloaded and tested BlogDesk after a recommendation from the good Rasmus Sørensen. It may just be the offline blogging client I’ve been looking for, as this client lets me populate the excerpt field in WordPress. So far I’ve tried out 5-6 clients, including ScribeFire for Firefox. So I decided to write this review/test of BlogDesk.

Installation is straight forward and adding account is hassle free and the interface is nice and clean.

The only thing I miss is an option for adding tags and a button for blockquotes.

BlogDesk supports all major blogging tools:

BlogDesk is totaly free of charge and optimized for the blog systems WordPress, MovableType, Drupal, Serendipity and ExpressionEngine as well as the bloghosters Blogg.de and Twoday.net.

Consol Guide for Gamers

Pål Heick — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 08:56:29 +0000

Let me start out by saying that I wonder what game happy Mac owners are supposed to do? What video game system should I buy?

Lemming 2.0

Pål Heick — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 11:53:05 +0000

Jane Copland from SEOmoz has a nice post/rant on the massive Lemming 2.0 effect that occurs when new innovative and valuable services emerge. Photo sharing, social networks and social news sites all have market leaders surrounded by a host of more or less blatant copies of the first service. It’s Clondyke for dollar wanting lemmings.
Jane puts this in words quite eloquently:

The only conclusion I can draw is that these companies can’t create anything worthwhile, but know enough web development (but only just) to create a platform so that other people can create content for them. While all sites that include user participation stand to profit off the contribution of others, I’ve been simply astounded at how many of these sites provide virtually nothing other than a way for the public to build up the companies’ link profiles and PageRanks.

…and now, after my blood pressure settles down again I have a confession:

I am a Lemming.

Optimizing

Pål Heick — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 10:04:09 +0000

So, fluffing content isn’t that hard after all

Not at all, in fact…

Gates is gone

Pål Heick — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 08:58:51 +0000

By june this year Bill Gates is quitting his day job at Microsoft to spend his time doing philantropics in his foundation. This was announced in his keynote at the 10th CES. I was expecing Mr. Gates to pull out some groundbreaking technological gadget from the the big hat of Microsoft. That didn’t happen – but Bill Gates said that ‘nothing is holding us back’ in pursuing the technologies of tomorrow.

What surprised me a little was a video produced to show Bills last day at work – and some of his attempts to make a career jump. See it at Microsoft – but ‘m guessing that the video will also hit the video sharing services as it is somewhat funny, has celebrities and indicates that Bill Gates has gone from being a geek to beeing an old rich geek. Update: Gates’ last day on YouTube.

….but I’m still waiting for that gadget!

What’s future gadgets are on your wishlist?

I’d like to see stable wireless transmission of the signal to my monitors.