Lijit

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.

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!

Our first release of 2010 is an exciting one. And we’re not just saying that because we worked extra hard on it. However, there’s nothing like a new look and new features to really kick off a new year. Check it out.

Web:

Our homepage is getting a little bit of a facelift. We want to be sure that when people come to our site, they know what we do. Crazy, I know. With this release, we’ll be doing a more effective job of explaining our value to both blog publishers and advertisers. In fact, with a simple click, you can find out why using Lijit can help both you and your blog readers.

This release also brings an enhancement to how you can build out your network within Lijit. When creating your network, you can now add the blogs of your Twitter friends and make those searchable. To see this feature in action, simply log into your Lijit account and click on ‘Network’ at the top. You’ll see a shiny, new Twitter tab. For now, this feature is an all-or-nothing add, which means that you can either add all the sites of your friends on Twitter or none.

Ads:

There is a new zone size available to the publishers using our Ad Services. This new zone size is an IAB standard 728×90 leaderboard. If you’re interested in running this size ad on your blog, simply log into your Lijit account and click on the ‘Ad Wijit’ tab to change existing zones.

Search Results:

In case thumbnail images weren’t enough bling in your search results, we’re now doing more with video thumbnails. We previously supported YouTube and Vimeo thumbnails on your Content tab, but as of today, Viddler has been added into the mix as well. And as before, you can play those videos from within your search results.

This means that if you do a search for ‘cage’ on our CEO’s blog, you’ll now see a Viddler video listed in the search results.

AND? Even cooler is that we are slowly rolling out the ability to see video thumbnails from your blog posts. If you embed videos from Youtube, Viddler, or Vimeo in your blog posts, we’ll show thumbnails for those videos in your blog search results.

Told you this was an awesome release. If you have any questions or feedback about the new stuff, feel free to leave a comment. We love hearing from our users!

We like to share companies and services with you that provide value. Partnerpedia is just such a company. They first came to our attention at Chicks Who Click-San Jose, but we really got the chance to talk when Partnerpedia showed up on the expo floor of Blog World this year. Launched in June 2008, Partnerpedia was designed as a way to help channel partners more easily find, recruit and collaborate with one another. Consider it similar to a business social media site like LinkedIn. Basically, being part of Partnerpedia allows companies to increase their business through building a partner network.

According to Vanessa Ho, Partnerpedia’s online community manager, Partnerpedia is specially geared towards small and medium-sized companies that want to create a partner portal but don’t have the resources or capabilities to develop such a thing on their own. In addition to their free service, Partnerpedia also offers enterprise-level companies a paid solution that includes private label branding, metrics, reporting and customer integration with social media channels.

Ho also mentioned that the company has recently launched the beta of their Partnerpedia for Salesforce CRM application that will allow Salesforce CRM users to distribute leads to a partner and track the opportunity throughout its sales cycle. Additional features include automatic notifications to keep users up-to-date and a partner finder to easily locate solution providers.

It’s easy to sign up for Partnerpedia (you can see that we managed to do it) and once you do, companies can create their partner profile, upload documents and publish articles, collaborate on documents and work on specific projects with other Partnerpedia members. If you’re looking for interesting new ways of growing your business, Partnerpedia might be just the answer to find different and strategic partners with which to market your company.

Defrag 2009 was back in the Mile High City of Denver this year, just a stones throw away from our enclave of Boulder, 45 minutes to the north. The conference is an interesting mix of news school social technology with more progressive ‘enterprise’ companies and solutions who are embracing the need to become more “social”. This could mean embracing the voice of the customer or community or leveraging similar means to allow progressive collaborations to occur between employees and partners of a company. All in all it was great to see the movement of a new ‘voice’ being heard and taken seriously by larger enterprise-focused corporations.

While there, our good friend Louis Gray, hosted a panel of 4 technologists which I was asked to participate in. Each of the panelists were essentially allowed to discuss a topic or trend we’re seeing or playing in within our industry articulated in roughly a 5 minute window. These 5 minute ‘pitch-lettes’ were then discussed collaboratively with the audience.

I went through a subset of the data we gathered and contributed to the Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2009 survey. I plucked out the most outstanding trends we’d witnessed from analyzing our data and distilled 5 of those, each spoken about in a one minute diatribe! The audience participation was great and all the presenters had great lenses into and around our community. The presentation I used is below so have a view!

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!

We are super excited to announce a new update to our Wordpress Plugin. The same plugin that brought sweet search functionality and stats information to your wordpress blog is now even better.  You might not notice much, as the core of this update revolves around backend functionality. So what does that mean to you???

• Our search form override functionality is now compatible with just about any wordpress theme out there.  (if you find one that doesn’t work, let us know, and we’ll try to add it)
• The plugin enables new widget functionality which results in faster widget loading for your readers.

If you are using Wordpress 2.7 or higher, you should see auto upgrade notices for version 1.1 showing up in your admin console within the next 24 hours. You can just auto upgrade from your plugins screen. Or, you can always manually install/upgrade the plugin from the Lijit Wordpress Plugin page. For handy install tips and instructions, you can always reference our Lijit Help pages for guidance.

As always, if you have any suggestions or feedback, don’t hesitate to drop us a line at support@lijit.com.