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.
During the evening of Saturday, October 27th, and the morning of Sunday, October 28th, Lijit will be unavailable due to maintenance activities. The maintenance activities on Saturday evening will begin at 9pm Mountain Time and should last no longer than an hour. The maintenance Sunday morning will begin at 9am and will take a little longer — around three hours. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but once all of this work is done, Lijit will be stronger, faster, taller, better looking, and more fun to hang out with at parties.
Tags: service alerts | View Comments
It has been a while since the last widget statistics. But we have good news! Derek and Daniel have now automated the process and we will be running results on a weekly basis. Over time, this will give us a clear picture of the ebb and flow of widget popularity. Let us know if there are other statistics you would like included in these weekly runs.
Number of blogs examined: 48,189
Blogs with widget of any sort: 31,953
Total number of widget installations found: 247,121
Survey period: 9/26/2007 – 10/16/2007
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.
*Note that “tinyurl.com” is actually a cloaked reference to PayPerPost.com.
Popularity by Vertical
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. This is especially clear for advertising widgets where 92% of all blogs with ads use at least one AdWords widget, yet the AdWords widget accounts for only 83% of all advertising widgets found. 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 147%, indicating that 47% of Analytics widget appear with a competitor’s.
Analytics
| Domain | % of Blogs | |
| 1 | google-analytics.com | 62.27% |
| 2 | sitemeter.com | 27.69% |
| 3 | statcounter.com | 19.70% |
| 4 | feedburner.com | 16.04% |
| 5 | quantserve.com | 9.30% |
| 6 | hittail.com | 2.06% |
| 7 | getclicky.com | 1.56% |
| 8 | reinvigorate.net | 1.44% |
| 9 | blogflux.com | 1.44% |
| 10 | performancing.com | 1.37% |
| 11 | bravenet.com | 1.32% |
| 12 | 103bees.com | 1.14% |
| 13 | histats.com | 1.02% |
| 14 | measuremap.com | 0.68% |
| 147.03% |
Advertising
| Domain | % of Blogs | |
| 1 | googlesyndication.com | 91.50% |
| 2 | blogads.com | 9.25% |
| 3 | adbrite.com | 3.90% |
| 4 | doubleclick.net | 2.23% |
| 5 | fmpub.net | 1.81% |
| 6 | glam.com | 0.74% |
| 109.43 |
Search
| Domain | % of Blogs | |
| 1 | snap.com | 0.51 |
| 2 | lijit.com | 0.28 |
| 3 | google.com/coop | 0.08 |
| 4 | google.com | 0.07 |
| 5 | sphere.com | 0.05 |
| 6 | eurekster.com | 0.04 |
| 7 | blogbar.org | 0.04 |
| 107.98% |
Trackbacks
| Domain | % of Blogs | |
| 1 | technorati.com | 0.91 |
| 2 | haloscan.com | 0.13 |
| 3 | wholinked.com | 0.03 |
| 106.75% |
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 relative popularity of video widgets in blog posts.
Methodology
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.
Tags: widget statistics | View Comments
We are excited to be attending the CSIA (Colorado Software and Internet Association) DEMOgala next Thursday, October 11, at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in downtown Denver. This gathering will mark the third annual celebration of technology innovation in Colorado and Lijit is one of 40 different companies that will be participating in the Innovation Showcase. (Hmmm….first the BCBR IQ award and now this…) We are honored to have been chosen since there will be many familiar faces from the neighborhood including madKast, Me.dium, Villij, and EventVue.
In addition to letting us show off our service, the DEMOgala will also be presenting four different tracks of sessions (educational, trends, business and creation), impressive Keynote speakers (one of which is Brad Feld, an investor of ours), and lots of opportunity to connect with others working locally in the same sandbox.
If you’re interested in new technology and how it’s shaping Colorado, this is one event not to miss.
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(This job opening was cross-posted at I quit for Lijit.)
We are in dire need of another evangelist to join our team. Here are a few of the things we are looking for in a potential candidate:
- creativity, enthusiasm and cleverness
- willingness to embrace the start-up culture
- effective communication skills
- interest in the web 2.0 space and curious to learn more
- desire to help us with our rapid growth
- deep love for the email
The evangelists are in charge of gathering new user feedback, acquiring new users and taking care of current users. In addition, we do a nice mixture of PR, promotions, marketing, blogging and user advocacy. If you feel you have what it takes and are located in the Denver/Boulder area, please send me an email with your resume, explaining why you want to drink Lijitos work with us. And yes, this picture is meant to an enticement…
If that doesn’t do the trick, we offer full medical benefits, a super casual work environment, stock options and the opportunity to work alongside some of the best people around. Come on…don’t you want to be Lijit?
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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….
Today is BlogDay, the day set aside for celebrating blogs. (Although really, isn’t that every day?) From the site…
“BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest…This way, all blog readers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, previously unknown blogs.”
We here at Lijit love blogs of all kinds and encourage you to do your part by participating in BlogDay. Barney posted his contribution, Daniel gave his thoughts, and I wrote a little something for the event as well. If you have the opportunity today, try to read a blog that you normally wouldn’t. To paraphrase Ferris Bueller…It’s a big blog world out there and if you don’t stop to look around once in a while, something may just pass you by.
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