Lijit

Lots of reports over the last couple-a days are hitting the wires on how Microsoft Bing and Google are attacking the problem of adding feeds from Twitter and FaceBook into their respective search indexes. Cool. I personally want my stuff discovered and leveraged by folks the world over as I am proud and confident in the content I publish….be it my blog posts, my tweets, my videos, etc etc. To me as a blogger, this is a good thing, offering additional possibilities of exposure and distribution of my creations.

But I am still wresting with the meaning of ‘real time’ in this context…e.g. how content sources like tweets and public Wall Posts meaningfully get ranked, injected into these types of searches and ultimately yield better ‘discover-ability’ of my content.

But first, humor me. Perhaps I am slow, but I’m not understanding ‘real time search’. To me, ‘real time’ is indicative of push-based notification. In other words an event happens and software triggers a process to push this event and it’s notification package to a recipient. Example: Someone tweets and my desktop tweeting software indicates for me via pop up that a new tweet has occurred…all in ‘near’ real time.

Search, however, is inherently post facto. It is a mechanism of forensics to help humans parameterize what they are looking for on the interwebs and the search tools diligently do their job to identify and produce results in a fairly consistent ‘page rank’-oriented way. Then you start the laborious process of hunting through the results to find the needle in the haystack and hope it’s relevant. In other words, an event happens, the search engine indexes this event (even if moments after it was created in near real time) and thus allows it to be discovered later via search. I think that our CEO Todd Vernon summed up three distinct categories for search really succinctly in his post on this subject of examining real time search…

1. DISCOVERING: Something is happening, it may or may not be something I care about, and I don’t know it’s happening. I usually find out about it via some source, personal network, facebook, twitter, digg, CNN, etc. I don’t have a specific mission to know it before I find out about it.
2. ALERTING: Something is happening and I knew ahead of time I wanted to know about it when it happens. I usually find out about these things via some source such as Google Alerts or Filtrbox. Alerts behave a little like a broad based search with asynchronous results that come back some day.
3. SEARCHING: Something is happening or has happened or simply exists. I want to know more about it. I generally want the best answer, or the most recent answer. I may want the best recent answer, but that’s highly subjective and generally defaults back to my trust in the source as the tie breaker.

So the above known (and I’ll cease and desist on the real time versus retro active search debate for the time being), I have some additional and more important concerns, mainly related to the sheer vastness of the twitterfaceverse and how anything relevant can be discovered from these fire hoses.

Assume someone searches for a term on Bing and they then proceed to the new Twitter timeline result set to poke around at the results. It’s a comprehensive result set at best. But, how am I discovered? Again I’m lost in the sea of the twitter chatter. And as importantly (to me, anyways), how is my trusted network discovered in connection and in context to me during a search as I really want their words, thoughts and images discovered along with mine to help a searcher form an opinion.

To solve this, we did things quite a bit orthogonally here at Lijit to the approach outlined above. We’ve essentially take the ‘internet’ and boiled it down to very explicit and succinct publisher-defined networks. Think of it as filtering the internet’s vastness by producing results based in absolute relevance between sets of trusted associations. If you’ve visited my site, you’re invariably a cycling geek like me. And if you’ve gone so far as to search my site, it’s likely you’ve done so with some strong intent and precision in what you are looking for. Lijit issues results based upon the term’s relevance in all my content and that of my network to provide a super tight snapshot of information we serve to the reader. And like all the content we dish up,  my Tweet’s and TwitPics will all be displayed in addition to those tweets, etc from my network and their chatter about the same topic. We order and display this in very obvious ways including thumbnails to ease discovery….

Net-net, we’ve been doing this ‘real time social media content generation tool’ discovery for some time along with a wrath of on line content sources and have applied relevance to it all. Ultimately when the discussion is all boiled out, the results Lijit produces in contrast with what Bing or Google produce is not unlike the Apples and Oranges analogy and at its core not a debate per se. One yields intentionally focused and ‘tight’ results, the other broad and ‘loose’ results. Both, however, having purpose and fulfilling different search needs. But when pointed at the topic of discovering ‘real time’ micro-blogging content, I am not sure how the ‘broad’ assists in making discovery simple and efficient. These tools are so fundamentally rooted in their network (read: people to people) associations that sifting through the vastness of RT’s, bit.ly’s and tinyurl’s from anonymous and unknown authors and knowing which result to trust and use would be a mind bending, overly complex and time consuming task. But again, all this is strictly my opinion and how I use and value social network tools like Twitter.

So Tweet on. We’ll ensure it is found and understood when its searched for via your trusted Lijit search box on your site.

This was our third year having a booth at Blog World and it just keeps getting better for us. Instead of going on and on about what a great conference it was and how many times our company got mentioned in sessions or during keynotes, we thought pictures might do a better job of telling our story…

Our booth, along with the swag we were handing out, attracted quite the crowd. The  Purell was a big hit…either due to the fact that folks were shaking a lot of hands or that they agreed that Las Vegas was a dirty city.

But, one of the main reasons we go to Blog World is to be immersed in a world we love…that of blog publishers. Seeing their eyes light up when we explain and demo what we do is something that just can’t be described.

Not to mention all the opportunities we have for spreading our message to a larger audience…

However, probably our most favorite thing to do while at a show like Blog World is to thank our current users. Folks like the masterminds behind I Can Has Cheezburger, Neatorama, and WebUrbanist. And slapping a few stickers on cute mommybloggers doesn’t hurt the cause either. (Hi Extraordinary Mommy!)

A conference like Blog World takes a lot of energy. Not only is it a big show, but the fact that it takes place in Vegas makes it all the more tiring. To make sure we were up to the task, we made sure we had all of the essentials covered…

Thanks to everyone we met and to all those who told us how much they loved what we’re doing. Wear your Lijit shirts with pride and we hope to see you next year at Blog World 2010!

[Photo credits: Perry, Grace, Greg and http2007]

Every year, since 2004, Technorati has published the State of the Blogosphere report. The State of the Blogosphere report is considered the best up to date source of information about size, motivations, and practices of long tail publishers.

This year, Lijit helped Technorati by supplying some information from within the blogs that make up the Lijit Network. Lijit performed the analysis on the raw data and only supplied the aggregate insights documented in this post.

Analysis was centered on four distinct areas of interest including Search Engine Referrals, Blogroll Promotion, the Impact of Twitter, Advertising and Analytics.

Methodology

Data for this post was collected from two primary sources both directly collected by Lijit.

The first source of data was the ~11K active Lijit publishers that have the Lijit Search Widget installed on their publications. Lijit builds a unique search corpus for each publisher. This search corpus includes the publisher’s publication, his user-generated content, and the network of the publishers who influence the publisher (i.e., his Blogroll). This network of influencers results in a crawl footprint of over 2.5M publications that we actively index in order to maintain the search functionality on the 11K publisher sites. The second source of data used in this post comes from information gathered on those 2.5M sites in the extended network.

Data was reduced to something we refer to as the ‘typical publisher’. For some measurements, some publishers were omitted from the sample when in our opinion the specific publisher or publishers represented a singularity in the data that masked the typical publisher substantially. In addition, for some of the analysis points, we removed publications with less than 100 page views a day. Where lower page view publishers were removed we point it out. As page views drop into lower numbers some of the data begins to skew and it begins to get difficult to distinguish active and inactive publishers.

Search Engine Referrals

A typical site within the Lijit publisher network receives 27% of its page views from clicks on results in horizontal search engine result pages. As expected, the highest single source of referrals to the typical publisher site is Google at 23.5%. Yahoo and Bing were next, accounting for about 3.2% of referrals. Twitter and Facebook were nearly identical and total about 1.6% of traffic.

Lijit categorizes publications into 23 topical/vertical subject areas. The Tech vertical saw the highest percent of page views from search engine referrals at 41%. The remaining topical areas were fairly consistent with regards to percent referrals.

The percent of page views that come from search engine referrals is fairly constant with the audience size of the publication. The exception to this are publications of less than 100 page views a day that receive a slightly larger percent of page views from search engine referrals at around 30%.

It’s unclear why smaller publications get a larger percent of page views from search engine referrals, but may be linked to the ever growing length of horizontal search engine queries. According to a Hitwise January 2009 Search report, over 50% of queries are now 3 terms or more on the major horizontal search engines. This suggests that as the length of the average query string gets longer, more referrals get passed to smaller publications due to the specificity of the queries. This is a positive trend for smaller publishers.

Blogroll Promotion

Based on the 2.5M publications crawled by Lijit, the number of blogs in the average blogroll is 47, a surprisingly high number. Although not always a prominent feature on a publisher’s site, cross promotion of bloggers by other bloggers is clearly a significant factor in publication readership growth.

The typical publication within the Lijit network of 2.5M sites appears in 6.4 other Blogrolls. In other words, the typical blog is pointed to by 6.4 other blogs. The difference between a blog appearing in 6.4 other Blogrolls and pointing to an average of 47 other blogs is largely due to blogs pointing outside of the Lijit crawl footprint. The Blogosphere is a very large place.

The Impact of Twitter

Publications with greater than 100 page views a day received on average 0.83% of their page views from Twitter referrals. This percent tracked very closely to Facebook referrals at 0.80%. Publications below 100 page views a day saw a higher percent of page views from Twitter referrals than Facebook referrals.

Besides horizontal search engines, Twitter is the largest driver of referrals to the typical publication.

Lijit Search aggregates user-generated content that a publisher generates, into search results that display on the publisher’s site. Aggregating this content around a publisher’s site creates a stronger brand association for the reader with that publisher and site.

The most common user-generated content source included within a Lijit Search profile is Twitter. About 50% of Lijit publishers include Twitter in their Lijit Search results. This is a change from prior years. In 2007, 26.6% of publishers included Twitter as a content source in their Lijit Search results. In 2008, 42% of Lijit accounts included Twitter as a content source within their Lijit Search results. In 2009, 50% of publishers included Twitter as a content source within their Lijit Search results.

Twitter was by far the fastest growing content source to be included by Lijit publishers. Clearly, publishers embrace the micro-blog format. Going forward, Lijit intends to track the percent of publishers that use Twitter for blog post promotion as we suspect this number is quite high.

Advertising and Analytics

As Lijit crawls the extended network of publications, we track the widgets and tags we find on those publications. For the first time, Quantcast overtook Google Analytics as the most frequent analytics tag found on publications. This is likely due to Quantcast tags being included in some publishing platform templates.

Comparing 2008 to 2009, there has been a 68% increase in the number of sites with Ad tags installed. This indicates to us that monetizing sites is high on the priority list of most publishers.

Last year, when we ran the analysis, Google Ad tags made up 67% of the Ad tags found. This year that percentage has dropped to 47%, indicating publishers are experimenting with other Ad networks. This is probably not an indication of publishers leaving Google but rather publishers trying other Ad networks and using Google at the end of the Ad rotation.

More Data to Come…

With Lijit’s install footprint of 11K active installed base and a crawl footprint of 2.5M publications, Lijit is becoming the defacto source of information from within publications. Starting in 2010 Lijit will publish a more comprehensive study of what’s happening inside the Blogosphere.

Our fearless leader Todd Vernon, CEO of Lijit, was interviewed by Robert Scoble during a visit he made to our plush world wide headquarters here in Boulder Colorado. Have a view here or check it out on Building43.com!

The last few days I was in New York at the OMMA Global Conference. The OMMA Conference gathers Ad Industry experts to discuss where online advertising has been and where it’s going. This year, the title was “The New Socialism” and talked about how social media is often the key to engagement between brands and audiences. Of course, we already knew that. Lijit is based on engaging your readers with your Brand through all the social connections you have. It was fun to see Madison Avenue coming to the same conclusion.

There were lots of good panels including one entitled “The Mommy Bloggers - What It’s Like When Marketers Really, Really Want You”. That panel featured a couple of Lijit publishers and many thought-provoking insights.

OMMA was very interesting to me because lately, we have been approached by some major brands to help them reach very specific audiences within our publisher base. When there’s a convergence between a publisher’s audience and a Brand, we offer the opportunity to the publisher. Sometimes these are specific Ads within a publisher’s search results page, sometimes these are display campaigns that we offer to our publishers for the content pages, and sometimes they are cool interactive applications that run on the publisher’s site.

Of course, we only offer these opportunities to our publishers if they have expressed an interest in monetizing their site with us. We respect that many publishers simply want to deliver a great experience for their readers and monetizing is not important. For those that are interested, major brands are looking for audiences like yours, and we talk with them every day.

If you’re a Lijit publisher and have not heard from us about a specific opportunity, it’s most likely that we haven’t found the right opportunity for you yet. If you are interested in hearing more, please send us a note. If not - no problem, we want to make sure we are the best solution in helping your readers effectively connect with your Brand!

This past weekend, Lijit was proud to be one of the sponsors for the ongoing Chicks Who Click conference series. San Jose, or to be more specific-downtown Palo Alto, was the setting for this installment of the (mostly) female gathering of those involved in social media and working in the tech industry.

There was a panel featuring Aubrey Sabala of Digg, Margaret Stewart of YouTube and Meagan Marks from Facebook. These three incredibly smart women talked about how they’ve trailblazed their way to fantastic careers by carving out roles for themselves that cater to their strengths. One of the key take-aways from this panel was the notion of “intelligent risk-taking” and that if an opportunity scares you, then it’s probably exactly what you need to be doing.

I spoke on a panel about being a woman involved with a tech startup. (There I am, in the middle, talking with my hands yet again.) Emily Olson of the delicious Foodzie and Suzanne Xie of the stylish Weardrobe joined me as we discussed the different challenges we’ve faced as being part of early-stage tech companies. Suzanne brought up the point that her background is in finance and coming from that kind of workplace, tech seems very open to women. Both Emily and I agreed that being female has helped with marketing our companies in both online and offline communities. A point that resonated with the audience is that if you’re going to have women users, it can be beneficial to have a female voice or face to assist with tech support or new customer outreach.

In case you haven’t experienced it, there really is a kind of magic that happens when you get a roomful of women (and a few men) together, talking about collaboration, connection and how tech can play an important part in building a business. Women of all ages shared stories of how they found jobs on Twitter, used Facebook to get the word out about their startup or formed relationships with major brands all because of their blog. It was an inspiring day, full of shared knowledge and newly-formed friendships. I’m grateful that Lijit was able to help make it happen.

I love going to conferences and listening. There is always a lot of conversation going on, in sessions and hallways, and I enjoy just shutting up. With so many inspiring bloggers in one place, there is much to be learned. A big part of our culture at Lijit is to listen to what our users have to say and I was honored to do just that in Chicago at BlogHer.

On quite a few occasions at the conference, someone in a group would ask about Lijit and before I was able to answer, a blogger standing nearby would jump in to explain why they were using Lijit. It really is enough to make a girl’s heart flutter. To see the hard work and evangelism that everyone at our company does on a daily basis come to life? Totally awesome.

Here are just some of the Lijit publishers that I ran into, ran alongside, stalked silently, watched on panels, asked for feedback and perhaps even danced with:

A Simple Walk
Deb on the Rocks
Marketing Roadmaps
Surrender, Dorothy
This Mama Cooks!
Inherent Passion
PHAT Mommy
Roni’s Weigh
Crunchy Domestic Goddess
Craftastrophe
OutdoorDogs
Jessica Gottlieb
SecondHand Tryptophan
Queen of Spain
Immoral Matriarch
Average Jane
The Plus Size Mommy
temporarily me dot com
FunnyBusiness
Her Bad Mother
CityMama
Sparkplugging
Mindful Momma
Uncommon Misconception
Scheiss Weekly
Piper of Love
Adria Richards
Jory Des Jardins
Diary of a Crazed Mommy
Assertagirl
Suburban Turmoil
Green and Clean Mom
Blonde’s I-View
Gifted Travel
Cutie Booty Cakes
Velveteen Mind
Kaiser Mommy
califmom
Mommy Needs Coffee
A Mommy Story
Everyday Goddess
Send Chocolate
Big Green Purse
Adventures in Babywearing
motherbumper
the weirdgirl
5 Minutes for Mom
Mommy Bits
No Sense of Time
Twofer Mom
POP! PR Jots
Talk It Up!
Lip-Sticking
The Busy Dad Blog
Adrienne’s House
Whiskey In My Sippy Cup
Miss Britt
The Diaper Diaries
Condo Blues

It’s taken me a while to get to this post, but only because it’s taken me a while to fully process and recover from the conference. I apologize that this post has turned into a long list of links, but it is a long list of links that makes me happy. Some of these publishers are women that I met at BlogHer in 2007 and they’re still using Lijit. When I compare this list with the one I put together after last year’s conference, it’s amazing to see the growth. I can only imagine what next year’s post will look like.

Thanks to everyone at BlogHer and I’ll see you ladies (and gents) in New York next summer!

UPDATE: Just as soon as I hit publish, I remember some lovely publishers I left out. Sorry.

[Mandatory note: If I somehow forgot to link to you, please leave a comment and I'll rectify that situation.]

This Saturday, I am excited to speak at the Blogs With Balls conference in NYC. There is quite a line up, and I am glad to be included.

Yes, my 12 year old mind immediately went to the gutter when I was first approached about speaking. But, the conference is all about sports blogging.

Put together by Don Povia and Chris Lucas as a sports blogging conference, they have assembled a strong array of speakers, highlighted by my good friends, Gary Vaynerchuk and Julia Roy.

The sponsors are also fantastic. (Yes, we are helping sponsor the event!). YardBarker, SBNation, VaynerMedia and BlogWorldExpo are all companies that I have worked with and am excited to have them be part of this inaugural conference.

My panel will be focusing on how to monetize your blog. With Lijit’s recent release of our Ad Network, we have learned a lot about how to help bloggers really maximize the revenue their blogs are generating, and it will be nice to share it with the attendees.

While there is a focus on sports blogging, the truth is that many of the panels are providing information that is appropriate to any blogger.

So, if you are in New York City on June 13, you should swing by and say hi.

Of course if you are a Lijit blogger, please let me know, I would love to meet and thank each one of you!

Here at Lijit, we love finding out about new blog tools that make it easier to discover great content. (Hey, it’s a big part of what we do!) We first met the folks from outbrain at SXSW in 2008, when both of our companies were helping with the b5 Blog Network Camp. Since then, we’ve both grown up a bit. It’s not unusual now to hear both Lijit and outbrain discussed as must-have tools for any blogger.

In the interest of research, I wanted to give outbrain a try on my work blog, I quit for Lijit. It really is a simple one-click install and only took me a couple of minutes to get it up on my blog. I love that I can now get instant feedback and, underneath my posts, I’m recommending other quality content for my visitors to read. For a free service, outbrain rocks. I’m looking forward to checking out the reports that outbrain provides and to find out even more about the people coming to my blog. Who doesn’t love stats?

If you’re interested in an easy blog enhancement, be sure to give outbrain a try. Their widget inherits the look and feel of your blog, making for a seamless integration that can only help your readers. We really like what outbrain is doing and think you will too!

You can read more about outbrain on their blog and follow them on Twitter.

I just checked my TripIt account and so far I have been traveling for 25% of 2009. That means, having just started June, that I have been gone from Boulder for more than a solid month. (Well, not a solid month, more like a total of a month worth of days, but I bet you get it.)

Which also means I get a lot of time to read. Lately, I have been reading a book called The Know-It-All by AJ Jacobs. In the book, which is non-fiction, AJ reads the entire encyclopedia to become the smartest person in his family.

In many ways, I view Google, Yahoo!, and MSN (I mean BING!) similarly. They are out there attempting to catalog the worlds information so that when asked a question, they can provide you with THE one right answer.

Often, they do. But as time as passed and the information store has grown, context has been lost. When you do the search for “seal” what is returned? The animal? The singer?

Google hedges its bets by displaying images of both, but guesses the singer in the results…

There was a recent article in DM News that search queries of three words or less were down 3%, 5% and 1% respectively, but that searches of four to eight words had grown from 3% to 20%.

In short, searchers have learned that to get relevant results, you have to use more than three words.

My friend Kevin Lee of Did-It was quoted as saying:

“Longer queries are a sign of the searchers becoming more educated and savvy and essentially being trained by the fact that results for shorter queries tend to return less relevant results than longer searches.” (emphasis mine)

Frankly, while not surprising, that boggles my mind. Searchers have learned that the major search engines are inherently inefficient and ineffective at applying context to a search query. How is this progress?

That major search engines are relying on the searcher to provide the context via additional keywords in the query.  How does that create a better search experience?

Which, of course, brings us to Lijit.

Across our network approximately 75% of the searches are three words or less. Why is that?

Because we allow the publisher to provide the context. Their readers, by going to a trusted source first, already believe that the results that are returned will be contextual to the query. Therefore, they don’t need to use multiple word queries to return relevant results.

How do we know that this is the case?

1) On average, we get a higher click through rate on organic results than people using Google Custom Search.

2) On average, we get a higher click through rate on ads than the industry standard for text ads.

So what is better for publishers?

The “one right answer” approach that the major search engines take, or the “every publisher has a right answer” approach that we take?

I suppose that is up to the searcher.

But, I can guarantee it will take less keywords in the query to find the answer on a Lijit publisher.