Scaling social media in ten steps.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife In a hurry? The ten steps for scaling social media are in list-format at the bottom of this post. One of the common laments of companies trying to leverage social media is that it can take a lot of time and resources. If you or your employees are on […]

Two Yoast google-analytics-plugin hacks for WordPress

Image by Getty Images via Daylife I love WordPress. And I love Yoast’s Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It makes installation of GA so much swifter. And I really hate hacking plugins because that means I have to be careful when I upgrade them. But there are two things that really stick in my craw: […]

A small case for qualitative analytics.

Image via Wikipedia A lot of the work I do is focused on web analytics. When making things for online consumption, one of the few ways to know whether anything is working as intended is via web analytics. It’s our only way to observe how humans are really interacting with the things we make. And […]

Getting started with a website on the cheap.

Image via Wikipedia Note: If you already know a lot about your customers, your corporate design sense, your product and your broader marketplace this article is obviously not for you. If, on the other hand, you’re just starting a business and want to get going on the right foot but aren’t sure how to do […]

Twitter as Oral History Project: 1YR old retweets

Image via Wikipedia The project outline of the 1YrAgo Twitter handle. [Warning: navel-gazing ahead] One of the salient features of Twitter is its ephemeral nature. We post our short snippets of life or thought and then on we go. Our post gets buried and eventually forgotten in the piles of others’ thoughts and life-snippets.

Other data sources: The stock market as sentiment

Today Apple became more valuable to the stock market than Google. While the stock market doesn’t have a monopoly on defining value, the nature of trading stocks publicly makes for an interesting data source. Perhaps a data source that you can use to provide context to your own data gathering initiatives.

Google Adwords Grants for Non-Profits

Many non-profit organizations would be able to realize their mission goals better with a little more traffic to their websites. Google Adwords, those little ads on the sidebar of Google search engine result pages, are designed to increase website traffic. Google has a grant program available to non-profits that gives the non-profit free advertising via […]

SEO nineball and other emergency search engine optimization tactics

Image by m.toyama via Flickr This weekend a friend here in Burlington, Vermont emailed and described a situation involving SEO woes. Perhaps it’s a situation that sounds familiar: A brand new website has been created in anticipation of an important event and the site isn’t ranking or even showing up in Google. The event is […]