Lijit

At Lijit, we are constantly developing and testing new features for the product, the search results and the re-search box.

Recently, we have begun to explore the concept of including Flickr thumbnails within the search results themselves. Pretty cool idea, right?

What we cant come to a final decision on is exactly where the thumbnails should be placed. So, we are asking our users for feedback.

Here are the choices:

Here are the thumbnails on the LEFT (click the picture to expand):

Here are the thumbnails on the RIGHT (click the picture to expand):

And, here is a quick poll to help us figure this out. The cool thing about this quiz, is you can cut and paste it onto your blog, and share it with your friends. Check it out and thanks for the help!

I’m excited to announce an innovation on the Lijit customer service front. You might notice a shiny new badge in the sidebar of our blog here? (If you are reading our feed, simply click out for a second to behold the greatness of the badge!) From their site…

“Get Satisfaction is a place where people can get the most from the products they use, and where companies are encouraged to get real with their customers. Customers, employees, and companies are all welcome here. Nothing is hidden, and no one is censored. Join the conversation!”

I first heard of Get Satisfaction when their CEO Thor Muller installed the Lijit wijit on his blog. During my usual outreach, I started checking out what Thor was up to and discovered Get Satisfaction. I was so impressed with the idea behind GS (Open customer relations? A public space to have conversations with your users? Why hadn’t someone thought of this before?) that I immediately signed up for an account with Lijit. However, I never did much more with the account than upload our logo and establish myself as the company representative. I figured that other people would come and do the rest.

That was that. Until I found out that the nice Get Satisfaction folks were hosting a meetup at SXSW…and they were serving breakfast tacos. (That’s a picture of Lane Becker, the GS President standing by all the delicious tacos!) Besides the necessary hangover nutrition they provided, Lane, Thor and Amy also gave me lots of information about how to cultivate Lijit’s presence on GS. It turns out that I forgot to tell people about it. Whoops! Thanks to all at GS for helping out a newbie community gal.

And now, look at me! My how times have changed. When you click on the Get Satisfaction badge, it will take you straight to the Lijit account. I’ve started to add some of the questions that I frequently answer from users and hope to continue building it out over time. However, since the whole point of Get Satisfaction is about fostering the customer community, your input is most appreciated. Ask a question, report a problem or share an idea. I’m there and I’m listening. Don’t forget that you play a HUGE part in getting satisfaction out of this site.

One additional note: once you start digging into GS, you’ll realize that there are many other companies striving to open up the conversation. Some of my favorites in there are Timbuk2, Apple and other Boulder startups Socialthing!, Intense Debate, and Filtrbox. Sign up and start getting heard!

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).

Micah shot me an interesting article the other day. It is titled “The Fight for the Second Click“. It’s pretty interesting and predicts Google’s move into (more) media services in order to monetize the click that occurs after “the search”. Google clearly owns the first click and has managed to monetize it rather effectively. In order to continue the revenue ramp, they will be increasingly forced to own the second click.

I found this concept fascinating. At Lijit we know from watching reader behavior on our publishers’ sites that a huge percentage (33%-50%) of readers come from horizontal search (The Second Click).

We also know that the normal behavior of one of these readers is to read the article that Google referenced and then hit the back button. Reader gone, moment lost, second click wasted.

This is precisely why the Lijit Re-Search feature was added to the Lijit Search Wijit. When you have this feature turned on, Lijit hooks the reader into staying for a third click and beyond. Bottom line, you only get one click to keep to your readers around – do the most you can to mine that opportunity.

Re-Search activates when a reader enters your site from a horizontal search. When a reader types “Comcast tivo cablecard” into the Google box, many results are returned, perhaps thousands. If one of those results is a link to your publication (in this example, my personal blog) and that reader clicks it, they end up on your site and The Second Click has been executed.

On a normal site without the Lijit Wijit installed it’s now a crap shoot as to what happens to that reader next. Statistically speaking the back button is most often the next click. By contrast, as the reader reads the reference article/post, Re-Search goes out and finds other articles/posts written by you on that same subject and offers them up in the Search Wijit. When the reader is done reading the reference article, there now exists the opportunity for you, the publisher, to own the third click – one of the other articles/posts on that subject.

Publishers! Maximize your second click, the one you own!

One of our goals here at Lijit is to offer our users more value-filled features with each release. We pushed a new release on Tuesday night and with it, have made our stats even more robust. There is so much analytical information that we had to change the entire layout of our stats display and we now offer tabs. That’s right…tabs and tabs of detailed information…

These tabs open the door to a whole world of interesting information about your blog. If you click on the Readers tab, you’ll see your page views and the list of search terms that brought people to your blog. The fancy new stuff on this page is a map that shows you where in the world your page views are coming from and in a partnership with AideRSS, the most popular posts.

Look at that….even more information to help you better understand the people that are reading what you are producing. Todd Vernon, Lijit’s CEO and owner of the stats pictured, wrote a great post recently about the importance of Lijit stats and the picture they paint of your blog’s audience. Take some time to check out what we’ve done and let us know what you think.

In other release news, there are two other little additions that you should know about. We’ve added a cool link on our home page that takes you to the magic that is our Live Search Map. Now it’s even easier to enjoy the fun…

And the last thing that we changed is a feature request that we had been hearing from users for a while. You now have the ability to pick the default search tab that your searchers will be sent to. Let me explain. In the past, if someone did a search from your blog, they landed on your blog’s search tab for the results. But if they were doing a search from the your Lijit profile page, then they landed on your network’s result page. This sometimes caused confusion. As of Tuesday night, you can choose where your readers will end up first. Click on “my search wijit” and scroll to where you see the drop-down menus to change your default search tab and where to display your search results. (The default will always be set to your blog.)

We hope that you enjoy the new updates and wish everyone a happy, healthy end of the year! Just wait to see what we have up our sleeves for 2008….

In our quest to continually enhance the stats that we provide to Lijit users, we’ve recently introduced a way to see where your searchers are coming from. Literally.

On your stats page, you’ll see a few new things. This map graphic shows you the location of the person doing the searching and what topic they were searching about. So if you wanted to know how much of your audience is made up of Romanians curious about your topic of expertise, you now have the tools to find that information out. Along with the map, we’ve also added some colorful flags to the 25 most recent searches list…

So where in the world is Lijit? That depends on you and your blog’s audience. But thanks to our recent release, you now have the power to see your readers and get to know them even better.

Sometimes we release new features that are big, glitzy, flashy, and scream, “Hello! I am a new feature! LOOK AT ME!” Other times, the features we release are more subtle. Things you have to look for. Things that quietly beckon you to try them. “Come here, gentle user,” they say. “Click me.” I love those kinds of features and we released a couple last night.

If you haven’t visited your stats page of late, drop everything you’re doing, and go check it out right now. Seriously. I’m not kidding. We’re embarking on a stats page overhaul and the first of many updates came out last night. Most noticeably, we combined the two “Source of clicked results…” pie charts into one (new name: “Type of Results Readers Clicked”). In the space left over we added a new pie chart, “Where Readers Came From”. This new chart shows you a breakdown of how readers reached you — via Google, other search engines, a direct visit, etc.

We further added a new stats detail page, which you can reach by clicking on any of the terms in the “Last 25 Searches” (new!) or “Top 25 Searches” lists. The detail page shows you exactly when, over the last 30 days, you were searched using these terms, as well as the number of times you’ve been searched about them. Again, these changes are just the first in a long line of enhancements we have planned for the stats we provide you. We hope you enjoy them and hope they help you better understand and serve your readers.

The other subtle feature we released last night involves little green bubbles. (And no, thank you for asking, we weren’t drinking too many Lijit cocktails when we came up with this feature.) You’ll see them too. On the home page. On your profile page. Give ‘em a click and let them guide you through the Lijit-o-sphere…

This week we added a “Blog Explorer” to Lijit. We’ve done a lot of cool stuff here at Lijit, but I think this might be the coolest thing yet! What is it? Basically, it’s an animated interactive way to surf around the blogosphere, seeing how blogs link to each other.

It’s funny that social networks have been around for years now, but all the major networks still show your friends in boring lists. We’re pretty excited about the Blog Explorer because it represents a giant leap in graphically showing relationships between people.

Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

I’ll describe the three colored zones below, but you can probably figure it out just by playing with it. Click here to try it now.

You can launch the Blog Explorer from the Lijit Search Wijit on any blog. Look for it at the bottom next to the Lijit logo.

The three sections around the center blog show how the blogs are related.

Blogs in the green zone at the top are friends with each other; they list each other on their blogrolls. In the screenshot above you can see that I’m friends with Ben Casnocha. I have Ben in my blogroll and he has me in his.

Blogs in the blue zone to the right are on the blogroll of the center blog, but not vice versa. For example, I list BoingBoing, but they don’t list me. (Maybe someday!)

Blogs in the orange zone at the left are blogs that list the center blog in their blogrolls, but the center blog doesn’t list them. They are fans of the center blog.

Below the center blog is a detail box showing the URL of the blog, and accounts that the blog owner has on other services. In the screenshot above you can see that I have accounts on Delicous, Twitter, YouTube, and MyBlogLog.

This is our first version, so there are a few limitations to what you can do. Right now the system only knows about blogs that are within 2 degrees of Lijit users. “2 degrees” means that we include blogs that are on the blogroll of Lijit user blogs, and also blogs on those blogrolls. If your blog doesn’t show up, sign up now. Also, we show a maximum of 21 blogs in each zone. We’ll allow you to show more blogs in future versions.

But don’t worry, a lot of good things are in the pipe for future releases. Most importantly, we’re beginning a crawl of the entire blogosphere. We also will be inluding additional relationships besides blogrolls. First up will be your social networks from Delicious and MyBlogLog, with Twitter, Facebook, and more on the way.

We hope you enjoy playing with our new toy. And of course, let us know what you think. This is just the beginning of a whole new way to navigate and use social connections on the internet.

Color customization of the wijit was the number one thing that users kept requesting. We pushed an exciting release on Wednesday night and now, that question becomes easier to answer. Feeling a little blue?

Or maybe you are one of those people that cannot think without pink?

What if you don’t view the world in black and white, but in shades of grey?

Whatever your style, you can now pick a wijit to match. Not to mention, the newfound ability to match your wijit to the color theme of your blog. And, if you are one of those people who wants even more control, we’ve added something special in the drop-down menu of the wijit style options. You can now choose to “style your own wijit”. By choosing this option, you can use CSS on your blog to make the wijit of your dreams.

To access all the color goodness, simply log into your Lijit account and click on “my search wijit” along the top. You will see the wijit configuration page with lots of new options. Besides changing colors, you can also change the size of your “popular searches” cloud by choosing how many terms you want displayed.

There was one other big addition to our latest release. I’m only going to touch on it lightly because I know that Stan has a BIG post about it in the works. If you look at the shots of the wijits above, you might notice a little something different about them. Do you see the Explore button located under the wijit? Feel like exploring the world within a blog and seeing a visual representation of that blog’s relationships with others? Well then, what are you waiting for? Click the Explore button on any blog’s Lijit wijit and watch in amazement….

Do you look like this?

Well, you may look like that in Lijit, but we’re pretty certain you don’t look like that in real life. (…but if you do, please send us a picture, because that would really be something.) In a release we launched last night, you can now easily update your Lijit user picture to look like the real you. You can select from pictures we automatically discover from the other services you use, or upload a brand new one to use specifically within Lijit.

So c’mon, show us the real you…visit your Profile page in Lijit and click on the “Edit picture” link underneath your user picture. You know you want to.

You might also notice with this release, along with the last couple of releases we’ve done, that everything seems to keep getting faster. The pages within Lijit display faster, the Wijit loads on your blog faster, and so on. We’re doing an awful lot of work behind the scenes to make sure Lijit is not only fun and interesting to use, but works well and fast, all the time. So if Lijit seems faster — no, it’s not just you — it really is faster. Enjoy!