Lijit

Modern browsers have added the ability to keep a list of frequently used search engines available for quick access at the top of your browser. If you’re using Firefox or Internet Explorer 7 you can add any Lijit search engine to that list. Simply go to a blog that has a Lijit Search Wijit on it, that user’s profile page or their search result page. You’ll notice an extra item in the list of search engines allowing you to add it to your list. Now anytime you need to do a search on that person, you can easily select their name and do that search. Below are screenshots for both IE7 and Firefox:

Internet Explorer 7:

Firefox:

Lijit is on fire, growing fast, and looking to hire more great folks to join our team. If you’re a rock star Database Architect/Administrator, Java Developer, Web Developer, or UI Web Developer and want to join (what we definitely believe is) one of the coolest companies around, send us your resume! RIGHT NOW!

Please send resumes to: jobs at lijit dot com

Have you sent it yet? What are you waiting for? Get on it!

It has been a really long time since we last updated the widget statistics. Due to popular demand, they are back. Our hope is to be a bit more consistent with our widget stats posts. You may notice some changes since the last post we did on this topic, some subtle, some drastic.

Overall, we see the same general patterns we have seen in the past. The main differences are some of the widget adoption gains for certain services. I have attempted to highlight these below. One other theme appears to be the overall widget adoption numbers. Based on our analysis, these numbers have doubled in certain circumstances. This really highlights the growth in widget popularity amongst our sampled blogs.

Number of blogs examined: 47,378

Blogs with widget of any sort: 37,281

Total number of widget installations found: 1,200,928

Survey period: 9/26/2007 - 2/12/2008

Overall Popularity

Below are the top 50 widget providers, ordered by the percentage of blogs which contain at least one widget from the provider. Once again we see the classic power-curve (aka long tail) shape, with Google the clear leader. There are some movers though. Services such as del.icio.us, twitter, and the ever popular LIJIT , have increased in popularity. There were also significant gains from MyBlogLog and ning .

*Note that “tinyurl.com” is actually a cloaked reference to PayPerPost.com.

Popularity by Vertical

The items to pay attention to here are “social network” and “search” . Both of these categories have edged above “trackbacks” . The largest change evident here is the increase in the popularity of search. Search popularity has gone from 9% to 21% since the last time we reported.

Widget Popularity

Below are the popularity of widgets within the top verticals. Note that each pie graph represents the percentage widget distribution among all widget objects from the vertical. Contrast this with the numbers below each chart which show the percentage widget distribution among all blogs which contain a widget from the vertical. This distinction is important because many blogs will use use multiple widgets of the same type. The degree of overlap can be estimated by how far the percentage totals go over 100%. For example, in Analytics you can see that the percent total comes to 151%, indicating that 51% of Analytics widgets appear with a competitor’s.

Analytics

Advertising

Search

Trackbacks

Video

Our survey is focused on widgets that are permanent fixtures on a blog, not those that are embedded in posts. However, our crawler makes a note of widgets found in front-page posts, and these are primarily video widgets.Here is a graph of the relative popularity of video widgets in blog posts.

Our definition of “widget” is any regularly-occurring functionality on a blog powered by an external service, voluntarily installed by the blog owner, and powered by Flash or Javascript.

• “Functionality” includes analytics widgets. These add functionality for the blogger but are invisible to visitors.
• “Regularly occurring” excludes widgets embedded in posts, such as YouTube and Dailymotion videos. (We do collect statistics on these, however. The final chart of this post shows the results.) Widgets that occur on all posts, such as the “Digg This” widget, are included.
• “Voluntarily” excludes widgets automatically added by the blog hosting platform. We are only interested in widgets that bloggers make an effort to install.
• Image-based badges, such as FeedBurner subscriber counts, are not counted. HTML forms, such as the original Google search boxes, are also not counted. We may include support for these in the future.

Our crawl is “centered” on blogs with our Lijit widget. (Or as we call it, the Lijit Wijit). Our crawler then expands outwards by following blogrolls. This may give a bias to the overall results.

If you can’t get enough of your Lijit stats (and from the feedback I’ve been receiving, that’s just about everybody!), we now offer you a way to bring that stat geekiness to the sidebar of your blog. Whether it be for reasons of pride or curiosity, we make it possible for you to share what’s happening on your blog in a more public way. With the release we pushed last night, there are two new and shiny wijits available for you to use on your blog.

Like our map showing where your readers are coming from?

You can now install that map on your blog. See the pretty purple arrow pointing to the link that makes it happen.

Perhaps you fancy the list of recent page views, complete with country flags?

If that’s the case, it’s now available for display on your blog.

Once again, follow the pretty purple arrow.

How do you go about making this magic happen for yourself? Like everything else we do, we tried to make it super-easy to install these cool facts on your own blog.

1. Log into your Lijit account and click on “My Stats” along the top.
2. Click on the “Readers” tab of your stats display.
3. Choose to show off either (or both!) of the graphics in your sidebar by clicking on the “Install this on my blog” link.
4. There is an easy install for Blogger and Typepad publishers. Everyone else just needs to copy and paste code into your sidebar.

To see what it looks like on the sidebar of a blog, check it out on the left side of  I Quit for Lijit or The Wizard of Osborne. You need to scroll a bit, but then you too can bask in the glory of our recent visitors and the wonderful countries from which they hail.

We are trying to offer more (valuable) bling for your blog, so if you have other suggestions for things you’d like to see from Lijit, make sure to send those ideas our way. Have fun showing off!

Tumblr is a relatively new blogging platform that allows for easy short form posting of content, audio and video. It is highly customizable, and very easy to use, but interestingly, it is missing the ability to search through posts. Enter our Lijit Search Wijit.

Tumblr makes it very easy to add custom HTML and javascript to the layout.  For example, my tumblog, has a completed customized theme, and includes the Lijit Search Wijit.

So how was I able to add Lijit to my tumblog? It just a few simple steps:

Step 1:

Sign up for Lijit. If you already have an account, just log in, and navigate to the link “My Search Wijit.”

Step 2:

Add your social content and build out your network. (If you have already done this, skip this step).

Step 3:

Customize your Wijit to fit your Tumblr theme. You are only constrained by the theme’s layout. Then click on “Install the Wijit.”

Step 4:

Select and copy the code on the right hand side of the page. It should look like this:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.lijit.com/informers/wijits?type=pvs&username=username&js=1″></script><a style=’color: #999′ href=’http://www.lijit.com’ id=’lijit_wijit_pvs_link’>Lijit Search</a>

Now comes the hard part:

Step 5:

Login into your Tumblr account. Click on the customize icon:

Step 6:

In the Description field, paste the code you copied from your Lijit account where you want it to appear. (I decided to put it after a bit of text):

Step 7:

click “Save Changes.”

All done.  Yup, it is that easy to install Lijit in Tumblr.

Want a couple of other examples outside of my tumblog?

• Lindsay Campbell (who put the Wijit in her footer)
• Bijan Sabet (who has placed several widgets in his description field)
• Alex King (who has made his tumblog look a lot like his main blog).