Archive for February 4th, 2010

This is part of the the book BLOGTASTIC! Growing and Making a Difference Through Blogging. You can read the table of contents and follow the book on this page:

See the table of contents for the book here: BLOGTASTIC project

Previous article: The right tools

BLOGTASTIC!: Blogging stats can be addictive.

Blogging can be addictive. Checking blogging stats can be addictive too.

Imagine you’re fascinated with a video game. It might be the newest game, or it might be a classic like Pac Man. At first, it is hard to clear the first level. You invest time mastering the game’s controls and the techniques you need. Eventually, you gain mastery and move forward. You might be rewarded with a cut-scene that reveals more of the story. This process continues until you face the final challenge and win the whole game.

Pac Man, released in 1980, offers 256 levels of fruit gobbling and ghost chases. It took nearly twenty years before anyone achieved what the gaming community agrees is the maximum possible score of 3,333,360 points. This required six hours of perfect game-play without losing a single life on the first 255 boards.

There’s a famous glitch in Pac Man. On level 256, the entire right-hand side of the screen displays garbled graphics with invisible walls and pathways. If you could somehow clear level 256, the game would loop back to level 1 (with greater challenges). Yet, the glitch makes it impossible to clear this final level. There is no way to win the original Pac Man arcade game.

Blogging offers no clearly defined final level. You can blog for years. You can be fascinated by the growth (or non-growth) of the traffic on your blog. Some people might say that they aren’t concerned about numbers, but almost everyone is concerned about results.

Analyzing your blog traffic will help you understand your readers and allow you to move more quickly towards the results you want to achieve. There reasons to be fascinated about blog traffic. Here are just a few of the details you can learn:

• Where do the visitors come from?
• What posts they are reading?
• Where they click through?
• Which posts get linked most?
• Which posts get the most comments?
• Which search terms do people use to find your blog?

Many people experience surprise when they see their blog’s statistics. There is no way to predict the answers to the above questions. You can be pleasantly surprised or disappointed. Nothing is certain. The only way to find out is to keep watching the traffic.

A smart blogger keeps an eye on their blog’s analytics and then learns from the lessons their readers provide them. For example, if you blog on three topics and learn that one topic receives the most links and comments, then your readers are telling you “give us more of this first topic and less of the others.”

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Blogging Tip: Get organized to measure what matters

Playing ball without keeping score can be boring. Whether it’s your blog or your life, you have to measure what matters most. Only then do you get the feedback to make the necessary changes

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Rajesh Setty is an entrepreneur, author and speaker based in Silicon Valley. He maintains another blog called Life Beyond Code and tweets as @UpbeatNow

Tagged as: addiction, blogging, blogging stats, BLOGTASTIC!, Rajesh Setty, stats

Every day our lives get more and more connected online which has made our lives easier, but at the same time, has put us more at risk as more of our sensitive information is stored online.  With IPv6 right around the corner, which will be able to support an almost infinite number of IP addresses, we will only be more connected, and therefore, more at risk.

On a personal basis, I’m the first to admit that online services such as banking, travel and email, to name a few, have made our lives easier.  On a professional basis, as businesses push more services online to expand their marketplace, conversely, they are also making themselves more susceptible to data breaches from hackers.  Hosting providers are pushing the envelope by trying to get their customers to accept cloud services: email, applications and storage to name a few.  Some of these providers such as Google and Amazon have been successful in selling their cloud based services to small business and have now started making headway in to the enterprise segment of the marketplace.  Their services also allow you to access your information anywhere you have web access.  Their services are great for non-core, non-critical applications that won’t impact your business in the event their service goes down and you are unable to access your applications or data. 

While every company is talking about cloud services, not many are acting on it.  According to a white paper published by Gartner called Hype Cycles of Emerging Technologies, 2009, the most hyped technology was cloud computing. 

Why is this technology “hyped” and not being accepted with open arms?  The hack against Googles intellectual property last month should give you a pretty good idea as to why cloud services are still vulnerable. 

If you decide to move in to cloud services, don’t push all of your applications online.  Start slow.  Test a non-critical application first, or store non-critical data in the cloud that will help off-load space on your storage platform.  If you lose the application or the data, you’ll probably be upset over this mishap, but your life and the business will move on.  From there, look at moving parts of your development environment online and start testing other applications to see how they perform online and how well you can secure the data.  When testing these applications in the cloud, always be skeptical of who will access your data and how.  Don’t move at the pace your providers want you to move at.  Move at the pace that you’re comfortable with and that will protect your intellectual property and your company’s (and customers) sensitive information.

In a Newsweek article recently published by Daniel Lyons called “Where Secrets Aren’t Safe”, he mentions, “Information is not at all like electricity.  Electricity is a cheap, dumb commodity.  Nobody wants to steal your electricity, and even if someone did, who cares?  Information, on the other hand, may be the most precious thing your company has.”

This article was contributed by Robert Driscoll, co-founder of Active Garage. You can follow Robert on Twitter at rsdriscoll.

Tagged as: active garage, business, Business Management, business planning, Business Strategy, http://activegarage.com, information, Intellectual Property, Robert Driscoll, Strategy, technology, www.activegarage.com