October, 2013 Archive

Grokking Google+

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It’s hard to grok Google+. On the one hand, since January 2013 Google+ user numbers have made it the undisputed second largest social network. In a similar vein, Mashable just published a breathless Google+ for beginners how-to that calls it “an intriguing network for all users.” On the other hand, web traffic referrals from Google+ …

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Friday 5 — 10.25.2013

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For a number of years instinct and analytics have been telling us that photos are effective in social posts. That hypothesis seems validated by this week’s confirmation of Facebook and Pinterest domination of web referrals, with the former putting heavy emphasis on images in the newsfeed and the latter a nexus for image curation. In an …

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Tale of a social media meme

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person in possession of a social media account will eventually have a regrettable public post. Certainly, that’s the assumption of 59% of teen social media users who have deleted or edited something they posted in the past. Adults are not immune to social media remorse: 74% of …

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Friday 5 — 10.18.2013

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Google Ngram Viewer allows you to search and plot words appearing in books from 1800-2008 — and has just rolled out some new features. The new wildcard feature allows you to find which words appear alongside others. Above, I’ve plotted which noun appears most frequently after “social network.” From about 1990 on, the answer is …

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Mastering digital project momentum

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What are the factors that make a digital project take off and gather momentum—or drop like a stone? We’ve all been in kickoff meetings for large-scale web projects. People show up bright-eyed and well-intentioned, ready to take part in a brainstorm led by someone with fashionable glasses. Colorful sticky notes and Sharpie fumes create an …

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Friday 5 — 10.11.2013

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How do the words we use segment us by personality, gender, and age? An open vocabulary study of over 700 million Facebook posts by 75,000 volunteers provides a range of insights into attributes associated with language use. As the word cloud shows, men use profanity and talk about xbox far more than women on the social network. …

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Friday 5 — 10.04.2013

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Have fun playing with bitly’s new Real Time Media Map, which visualizes how content from different media outlets is being consumed across the U.S. As you can see from the drilldown above, we read a lot of The Onion here in Massachusetts. Next week Google Analytics opens its free, online Analytics Academy. Another example of …

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Why digital is bigger than the screen

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“Digital is bigger than the screen,” says Zach Dunn, who co-founded digital experience company One Mighty Roar with his brother, Sam. tweetableWe can already see how digital experiences are transcending the screen/tweetable, from ubiquitous FitBits and Jawbones to emerging Google Glass to Evernote’s move into Moleskine and PostIts. Arduino experiments are everywhere, with Intel today announcing …

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Try it: 3 ways to use your Twitter archive

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In the past 7.5 years Twitter has gone from novelty to newsmaker. Today, Twitter boasts 200M monthly users and over 170B tweets sent with particularly strong growth in the coveted 18-29 demographic. If you’re a Twitter user and curious to delve into your past (even though you may regret some of what you’ve shared), Twitter allows …

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