Lijit

When we saw an interesting blog called Crumple It Up create a Lijit account, we weren’t surprised. That kind of thing happens many times every single day around here. But when we looked closer and realized this interesting blog just happened to be representing a very large health insurance company, well, that was a surprise.

Crumple It Up has been creating amazing content designed to help motivate and encourage a healthy lifestyle. From their posts about corporate wellness to their suggestions of apps that can assist you in reaching your fitness goals, it’s obvious that Crumple It Up is on to something. We just wonder how a health insurance company went so long without having a blog.

How long have you been blogging and why did you start?

Crumple It Up was established in November of 2008 as a way to showcase the projects and people of Humana’s Innovation Center. We’re a small part of a large organization focused on finding ways to make fun things healthy, and we wanted to establish a presence on the social web to make it easier for like-minded folks to connect with us.

What is the mission of Crumple It Up?

Humana’s vision is to become the most trusted name in health. Crumple It Up’s mission is to help the larger organization achieve that vision, sooner rather than later. We think that there are a lot of exciting things going on in the world of health.

Innovation, technology, and well-being (both personal and community) are all converging, and we want to be the resource people turn to for those things.

Blogging for a large health insurance company sounds intriguing. What are some of the challenges and benefits that you’ve found?

This sounds trite, but one of the benefits of being there - out where conversations are happening - is being there. It’s impossible to engage in a conversation if you’re not in the places conversations happen. And while we do blog at Crumple It Up, the site is really a hub that spokes out to where our content really lives - all over the social web. Incidentally, that’s one of the reasons that we are so pleased with Lijit’s ability to pull all of that together for our readers.

In terms of challenges, I think that ours are probably the same as everyone else’s…being interesting every day, for one thing! But having a blog has helped the rest of our company to realize what’s possible. Since we joined the “social web” in 2008, nine other Humana departments have now started using social media to make their work more effective. That makes it all worthwhile.

What are your recommendations for “health creation” in 2010?

Health isn’t just the absence of illness. Your psychological and emotional health is just as important as your physical health. That’s what’s so exciting about where we’re going. We’re all about finding ways to make fun healthy, and that can be either an individual or a group solution. Whether it’s riding a bike, or challenging your friends and family in a game that gets you moving, or connecting with people around something that interests you, the bottom line is that activity creates health - and health enables broader well-being.

How has Lijit helped to make you a better blog publisher?

We’re just beginning to tap into the power of Lijit with all of our social outposts, and the early results have been great. The search and analytics capabilities of Lijit have been extremely valuable in the content creation process, and it’s been really helpful to our readers to be able to tie our growing number of social properties, from around the company, together into a single, searchable place.

We love knowing that our search is helping people to become more active, if only in a very small way. And if health care is on your radar this year (and when isn’t it?), you should dig into all of the resources available at Crumple It Up. You can find and follow them on Twitter. Here’s to the success of Crumple It Up and to health creation all around!

Lijit Ad Tags are an easy to install option for displaying targeted ads on your website or blog. In this video I’ll show you how to do it.

One of our Lijit users, Gretchen Rubin, recently published a book, The Happiness Project. She’s been test-driving different happiness tips for the past year and has been sharing her insights on her blog of the same name.

We’re excited to congratulate her on not only the culmination of all of her hard (but happy) work but also? She’s number one on the New York Times bestseller list for Hardcover Advice books. Nice job Gretchen!

(And if that doesn’t help with her happiness, I don’t know what would!)

I’d like to think I helped Gretchen with her spot on the bestseller list because, as you can see above, I purchased my copy of the book this past weekend and can’t wait to dig in. And, although she may not mention us by name in the book, I’m confident that Lijit has only brought her, and her blog, much happiness.

If you’re looking for a little more happiness in your life (and who isn’t really?), I suggest you invest in Gretchen’s book as well.

Finally, if you’re looking for a quick fix, you can follow Gretchen on Twitter for bite-size morsels of happiness or check out her blog and use her Lijit search to find out even more of what you’re seeking. We love celebrating with our publishers and thank Gretchen for her Lijit support!

Greg, the blogger behind Mud and Cowbells and a HUGE Cyclocross racer, was a Lijit user before he came to work for us. I can remember him signing up a few years back and sending him the usual customized thank-you note that was par for the course back in the day. And instead of getting a few sentences back from him, I got a five paragraph email with tons of feedback, product requests and ideas for the future. Yep. Even back then, it was obvious this guy needed to work for us. Especially with a face like this…

Our dreams have come true because Greg is now Lijit’s VP of Product Management and regularly rocks our world (or at least our office) with his passion, enthusiasm and spot-on impressions. When he’s not racing bikes, talking bikes or watching bike races, he leads the Product team with his vision for what Lijit should be. Read on for his answers to the usual questions…

What is your Lijit contribution?

Bomb hair. Or so my kids call it. Ha! But seriously, I think a lot of the core thing I may have contributed to the company over the last 5 months or so is to start a cultural shift in thinking categorically about the ‘products’ (plural) the company has put/is putting forth to the market and more importantly, helping to elevate the understanding of them by the now multiple constituencies we serve (publishers and advertisers primarily). We’re right at this exciting point of the company’s evolution. The work we’ve done in introducing ’social search’ to bloggers in a meaningful and impactful way has proven itself and that won’t stop.

Now, what we’ve learned by capturing and analyzing data about the reader audiences and their intent (e.g. search patterns) has led us to sit on one of the largest datasets in the industry. This information can help us assist brands with better precision in matching their campaigns with the right readers through our advertising services. Elevating this understanding vis-a-vis the products we prioritize and release and the marketing surrounding them are core to the group I’m establishing here at Lijit.

What is your favorite word and why?

Freedom. My wife consistently reminds me that ‘my cage door is open…’ This means so much to me and allows me to think without constraints or fear. It’s an abstract term really, but freedom strips away so much ’static’ life can throw at you when you focus on it and know you truly have it. I should probably  tattoo that in reverse across my forehead so I can remind myself of that fact when I look in the mirror every morning. You have to remind yourself of this occasionally is my point or have a wife like I do that knows when to slap me up the back side of my head to reinforce it.

What turns you off, emotionally, spiritually or creatively and why?

Deceit. Subversive agendas make me sort of insane. I say exactly what I mean and mean no harm at any time. I’ve seen deceit blow up great marriages, see friends diverge after years of friendship and businesses suffer when deceit enters the equation. Not so fun. Moving to Boulder was an amazing journey on precluding a lot of the deceitful knob-heads I knew in the past. This town and its people generally wear their hearts on their sleeves. I like that. No, love that.

What profession, other than your own, would you like to attempt and why?

I’d run a cycling team. I love making cyclists feel invincible and get them to achieve higher levels…all by believing they can do it. That is an indescribable feeling. Teaching clinics, seeing progress and re-enforcing how the athlete is going to crush it.

Something you’re guilty of…

Obsessing over Dutch-made cycling tires. That, or maybe my all-white Joe-Namath-style Italian cycling shoes. Either of those put me in a camp of obsessive compulsive ‘consumers’ not unlike Sarah Jessica Parker and her shoe fetish. But I can’t live without them. And now I digress…

If you haven’t checked out his blog and you’re into Cyclocross, you’re missing out. He’s also on Twitter, where he is a source of all things bicycle-related. Greg has been a fantastic addition to the Lijit team and we can’t wait to see what else he has up his cute spandex biking sleeves. And when in doubt, hup hup, buttercup!

I was back on the United “bus” this week…or so that flight  seems to be these days with frequency of trips to the Bay Area for client and partner meetings. This latest trip included a visit to the Nikko Hotel in San Francisco for the OMMA Social Conference, a gathering of on-line social media and marketing professionals. I was asked to be on a panel discussing my ‘favorite’ topic: “real time search”. I’ve been known to say a thing or two in the past about the topic and I loved having the opportunity to discuss it openly with a great group of panelists. Here’s a video of the whole panel if you’re interested.

My point on the panel was this:

There is no such thing as real time search.

Ooooh. “Controversial.” (Yeah, right). Truthfully, I wanted to make it clear that I felt the industry was getting all caught up in a scrum over a term and nothing was really being understood about the “situation”. And the situation is what needs to be understood fundamentally so we can effectively act on it.

I think about it all in this way…

In the days before “user generated content”, life was good. It was simple. The web was a collection of sites with content growing quickly, but consistently and all in a fairly familiar structure (think HTML, image files and text primarily). Moreover, the path to ‘discover’ these sites was perfectly tuned to progressive search algorithms of the time like Google’s Page Rank. Content ‘consumption’ amounted to ‘surfing’ the web on your terms and leveraging search results to isolate items of interest to view and ‘book mark’.

Fast forward to the mid ‘00’s and the era of blogging took off simultaneously with other user-generated forms of content such as videos, photos, etc…all utilizing growing trends to quickly share and syndicate for others to consume. The USB cable and ‘embed’ code changed it all. Faster uploads. Faster syndication. But alas, we were happy to watch idiots do stupid human tricks on YouTube. Content ‘consumption’ at this period revolved around the ‘RSS feed’ and aggregators helped us evolve past the ‘bookmark’ as it simply couldn’t effectively scale. Literally, bookmark features on browsers required search portals to find ‘that old bookmark’!

Now fast forward to today. Everyone is an author. Those that never hit the blogging bandwagon are now provided the weaponry to transcend from one side of the monitor’s glass to the other…from reader to author. The age of ‘micro blogging’ has come in strong and provided an ability to broadcast your ‘status’ to your trusted group of friends that you just sneezed, OMG! WTF! and every hashtag-driven commentary we can manufacture in 140 characters. Content consumption now is just….well it’s just too much as it comes too fast.

So back to my point of ‘there is no such thing as real time search’:

Content is content. I don’t care what form it is (text, video, photo, et al) or by whom it is created. Content is merely DATA. It is how this data is sourced, consumed and synthesized (and at what frequency) by the reader that it can have the hope of becoming relevant INFORMATION to the reader. And therein lies the major problem. The most problematic of all of this is the escalation in data being generated….the majority now of which is 140 characters of garbage.

I personally believe what is meant by marketers who invented the term ‘real time search’ is simply “the ability to search for and aggregate content spilling out of user-generated tools” (primarily twitter). In my view, you are either searching with intent to source content….or being notified in real time of ‘events’ through other forms of content(e.g. tweets, etc). The gross volume of data now requires that people REALLY do a rethink about their social graph…e.g. not being so impulsed to hit the ‘Friend’ button every time and prune those that aren’t true analog friends.

That level of restraint aside (we must assume people will be people and measure their importance by how ‘long’ their follower list is…), tools to synthesize data into information must evolve…and evolve quickly. Search systems need to embrace aspects such as scanning a trusted social graph first (like Lijit and now Google Social Search Beta as a feature of Google Search) before opening up the query to the web (and non trusted sources). Real time notification systems should take a page out of the chapter of financial institutions who have been required to synthesize minute bits of data (trades) on sub-second intervals. A re-think of this being in the browser or as a traditional thick client tool on your non-mobile devices also needs careful examination to ensure the best productivity in consuming the data without friction to your work flow.

OK, rant done. Time to tweet this article.

In case you hadn’t heard, January is a very special month. Not just because we all head back to the gym with resolutions in mind or because it’s considered the door to the year, but also because it’s the month that we celebrate oatmeal. What? You didn’t know? Let us explore the wide world of oatmeal together, as seen through the lenses of some of our publishers…

Food Loves Writing shares the recipe for the best cookies she eats, which also happen to be oatmeal chocolate-chip. If the picture doesn’t do it for you, take into consideration that she bakes a lot of cookies…and these are the best she eats. That says a lot about oatmeal. And these cookies.

Perhaps you’re in the mood for a cookie and for oatmeal, but you want something that might be a *bit* healthier than the cookie pictured above. EcoSalon has a yummy recipe for Oatmeal Harvest cookies, which substitute dried fruit for chocolate chips. So maybe you feel a little less guilty eating ten of them?

Then, there’s the Brown Eyed Baker, who eats oatmeal in the mornings, but enjoys it in a different form. She has a delicious-looking recipe for Maple-Oatmeal Scones. Although not as healthy as a bowl of oatmeal, they seem to be much shinier. And quite possibly tastier.

If you’re in Chicago, one of our publishers highly recommends going to the Protein Bar, a healthy cafe where you can get a bowl of oatmeal that tastes like a pancake. But much better for you. In my opinion, this is one Foodie Wannabe that dishes out good recommendations.

Joining in on the oatmeal party is another of our publishers, Whisk, who proudly shares an old family recipe with an awesome name…the Rickety Uncles. Seriously. But judging from the picture, these are probably much tastier than anyone’s real rickety uncles. I’m guessing.

If you’re looking to go a completely different direction in celebrating this fine food, one of our local Colorado publishers, Crunchy Domestic Goddess, has a very interesting idea: oatmeal burgers. She says that they’re a great alternative to veggie burgers and since I’ve met her in real life, I’m thinking she’s not totally crazy when she claims such things. Plus, she makes them look good.

Perhaps healthy isn’t what you’re looking for with your oatmeal. If so, might I suggest some oatmeal stout ice cream? It’s featured on one of our most favorite sites, Drink of the Week, and it looks dangerous. And while you’re over there, be careful searching for new drinks…you never know what kind of trouble you’re going to find.

And speaking of drinks, in case you were curious, this is the official drink of the month. (Unfortunately, we don’t have any beer bloggers using Lijit, but it’s a vertical that I plan to go after. Soon.)

Many thanks to our Lijit publishers, who continually teach us about new recipes and make our mouths water with their pictures. No matter what means you choose to observe National Oatmeal Month, be sure to enjoy it. And in the famous words of Wilford Brimley…

Today, I’m guest-posting over at one of our publisher’s sites, Elementary Spirits, discussing this very topic.

If you’re unsure about how to interpret some of our stats, I’m breaking it down for you over there. Check it out and if you have questions, be sure to leave a comment on Barb’s blog!

It’s no surprise that we dig what PostRank is doing with their analytics around blog engagement. They let blog publishers know how readers are interacting with blog content, from commenting to bookmarking to writing a blog post in response. This is valuable information for getting to know what your audience likes and can help you to create better content.

These kind of stats are right up our alley. In fact, we use a piece of their data to show our publishers what posts readers are especially enjoying. You can see for yourself by clicking on the ‘Readers’ tab within your Lijit stats…

So, when we heard that PostRank was coming out with a 2009 Best of Blog list, culled from the data they collect, we were excited. PostRank did all the hard work of analyzing over two billion engagement activities on twenty different social services to rank blogs in fourteen vertical categories, everything from art to religion to technology. And to keep the rankings fair, the PostRank team decided to award bloggers in three areas of accomplishment: Most Engagement, Most Influential and Biggest Movers & Shakers.

Imagine our pleasant surprise when we saw the number of Lijit publishers who were in the top spots. Nicely done folks!

If you want to see your blog on the list next year and are interested in checking out PostRank, they’ve generously offered Lijit users a special deal: one month free to see what their analytics are all about. Use the coupon code lijit109 when signing up and have fun discovering (even) more about your readers!

Although his title above is self-appointed, there are many signs that point to it being true. For instance the header on John’s blog states that the stunts he performs on a closed course should not be attempted by the home viewer. I think this has something to do with MySQL, but I could be wrong. In addition, he also claims to be the first person on earth to connect a Tcl/Tk application running on a Mac to a PostgreSQL database running on an mklinux server.

Yep. He really is that awesome.

But just in case, you need further proof, check out what John has to say when asked some hard-hitting questions.

What is your Lijit contribution?

I’m on the team that is developing the coolest business intelligence system on the planet. Right now I’m building the processes that will load the data. When it is done, Lijit will rule the universe. No really, it will.

What is your least favorite sound and why?

Gasoline engines. They just don’t have the calming rumble of a diesel. Crying is a close second.

What turns you on emotionally, spiritually or creatively and why?

Hiking in Colorado, especially near streams does it for me. Instrumental music really helps me in the creative category.

What profession, other than your own, would you like to attempt and why?

I’d like to be a professional fishing and hunting guide. Then I would know where all the secret spots are and have a great excuse to go more often.

Something you’re guilty of…

Nothing - I was acquitted, thank you. I will admit that I have no problem stealing candy from my kids’ Halloween stash, or desks of co-workers.

Now that we know that none of the candy in the office is safe, John suddenly seems much more dangerous. Or perhaps that’s just how all top-notch database architects talk?

Either way, welcome aboard John. We’re glad to have you joining us in the mission of total domination. Your help is greatly appreciated.