Lies, Damned Lies...

Try out Silverlight Streaming, earn money

You may have heard of Silverlight, our Rich Internet Applications framework - and if you haven't, you're sure to hear more about it this summer, as it'll be used on the NBC site to stream Olympics videos. But you don't have to be NBC to take advantage of Silverlight video streaming - or know anything about Silverlight development.

Our friends over on the Windows Live Dev team have had a hosted Silverlight Streaming service up and running for a little while now. You can upload your own videos (in pretty much any format) and we'll transcode them into streaming format and give you a nice little snippet of HTML that you can include on your own website to embed your streamed video whereever you like. And the quality is waaaaay better than those other guys - even if the content might be of questionable quality.

Why I'm telling you about it now is that we're about to start a trial program where we insert ads into the video stream as overlays, and cut you in on the revenues. All you have to do is add a few keywords each time you upload a video and we'll insert some relevant (and appropriate) advertising into the stream (see an example here - scroll down the page a little). So if you've been struggling to monetize your video content with something like AdSense, now's your chance.

Sign up for Silverlight Streaming itself by clicking here - and if you want to sign up for the ads trial, click here. I'm afraid this trial is only open to US residents with a US Social Security number or tax ID right now; if you don't have one of these, we can't pay you, unfortunately.

In praise of TVersity

Nothing to do with web analytics or online marketing, this, but I had to give a shout out to TVersity, which (together with my Windows Home Server box) has delivered on my long-cherished vision of being able to download TV from the Internet (strictly legally, you understand) to the server in my home office and play it via the Xbox that's connected to the TV in my living room.

One of the great unsung features of the Xbox is its ability to stream media files from any Windows-based PC running Windows Media Connect (now part of Windows Media Player 11). The only snag is that for video you can only play WMV files this way.  And we all know how much WMV-format video you can download (not much, if you need telling). TVersity fixes this by allowing you to stream DivX-encoded video through your Xbox; but it doesn't stop there: you can also stream live video (encoded in RSS feeds, even) from the Internet, as well as listen to Internet radio stations.

Why am I excited about this now? Because the new UK series of Strictly Come Dancing starts this weekend, and Mrs Thomas is a huge fan (don't mind it myself, come to that). We moved to the US last year in the middle of the last series, and in order to watch the rest of the series I had to set up a cumbersome system involving recording the show in the UK onto hard disk and downloading it laboriously onto a laptop here which we then plugged into the TV in our corporate apartment. This year will be so much easier. Ah, the relentless march of technology - what a wonderful thing.

Hand-crafted data visualization

If you're a big brand advertiser and you need to get your high-up marketing execs excited about web analytics, what can you do?

Well, one thing you can do is pay someone to build you a really funky interface for your web analytics data:

Much in the vein of 3D Site Stats, this type of 'analytics' is designed more for entertainment/engagement than serious analytics. It's created by German agency Scholtz & Volkmer, and is up for an award at this year's Cannes Lions festival. It has some quite nice visual features (like highlighting a particular data line when you hover over the 'person' representing a part of the site or audience), but its best feature is only revealed when you press (and hold, for about 20 seconds) the D key on the keyboard. Heh.

Funnily enough, Webtrends hired Coke's former interactive marketing VP, Tim Kopp, as their VP of marketing in January. I wonder if Tim had anything to do with this project?

Swivel - the YouTube of data?

Should have blogged about this last week, but other demands on my time prevailed.

There's an article on TechCrunch (brought to my attention by my colleague Justin) about the launch of Swivel, whose founders Dmitry Dimov and Brian Mulloy describe as the "YouTube of data". What they mean by this is that they've created a place where users can upload interesting data sets and then plot them against other data sets from other users to look for correlations, such as the interesting one below:

Unfortunately I don't have much particularly interesting data to upload (and the data that I do have that is interesting is confidential), so I wasn't able to try this with some of my own data. Apparently when the site launches, you will be able to upload data and keep it private - though I don't know how many people will be happy to trust their precious data to a relatively unknown third party (not to mention the legal aspects).

If Swivel can overcome this obstacle, however (and they need to - charging for private data is their main revenue source, apparently), then they could be onto something. They're building out significant data center capability to perform correlations behind the scenes and suggest data sets that you might want to compare. But it will be interesting to see whether the correlations they come up with are anything more than just of the 'happy coincidence' variety (for example, the rising plot of oil prices in the chart above could appear to correlate nicely with the usage of World of Warcraft, if you're careful to pick the right range, etc). So perhaps Swivel should have a little tutorial on how correlation does not imply causation on their home page.

The site's other challenge is the cleanliness of the data - even when trying to compare data that was date-based, the site choked several times (doubtless these are problems that the team is working out), but there is a larger issue of 'standardization' of axes or segments. Date is (relatively) easy - you can make some assumptions about the date range that a particular data point relates to - but other ranges/segments are harder, such as:

• Country (problems with old vs new names, regions, etc)
• Age (lots of data is grouped into age ranges, e.g. 16-24, 25-34, but these are not consistent)
• Income (same problem as above, plus currency fluctuations thrown into the mix)

And that's just the axes/segments for humans - other entities like companies have their own characteristics which are not measured in a standard way, especially not internationally.

It'll be interesting to come back to Swivel in a few months when there's some more data in there (and when they have their private data service up and running). I wish them well.

Break (or feed) the Technorati ranking crack habit

Like everyone else who runs a blog, checking my Technorati ranking has become a daily ritual. But one of the things Technorati doesn't do is give you a history of your site's rank. I'm not quite (not quite) sad enough to write the ranking values down and plot them myself over time, but now I don't even have to. Blotter offers a nifty little chart service which tracks your Technorati links and ranking over time:

So now you can see that my site is languishing in the 200,000s. So still a little way to go before I overtake Scott Adams; but better than the 1,000,000+ ranking I had only a few months ago! And, of course, if you want to see my ranking go up, you can always link to my site...

The chart builds over time - come back and look at this post in a month's time and you should see how my ranking is soaring skywards over that period. There's also a version on my About page.

I heard it on the radio...

In a serendipitous combination of my love of gadgets and my love of Radio 4 (The Archers excepted, which I've never warmed to), Cener Development have come out with a Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget which plays BBC radio stations (in fact, the gadget can be customized to play any radio stream, at least those using Real Media, with a bit of tweaking of the XML, but I haven't tried that). So now I can listen to John Humphrys grilling Ken Livingstone whilst I sit on the Wifi bus to Redmond - well, I can't, unfortunately, since John's on at 6-9am GMT, which is 10pm-1am here. Ah well - at least there's Thinking Allowed.

Web analytics in your sidebar

Whilst browsing the Windows Live Gallery today, I came across a  gadget from MetriServe Web Analytics which shows basic web stats in your sidebar on Windows Vista (they also have a Mac OSX widget). Gimmicky as this may seem to the hard-bitten web analytics warriors amongst you, I think this is cool because it helps to drive user engagement with web analytics - having something permanent the user's desktop drives that web analytics 'addiction' which is the first step to integrating thinking about web analytics into site planning & design.

It's also a smart move for MetriServe because it is a free 'teaser' for their paid web analytics service - and anyone in the web analytics market who's not one of the big players these days needs to find some way of differentiating. My only criticism is that the gadget seems rather simple - for me, the attraction of this would be that it would draw the user in, offering some (very) simple exploration tools within the gadget itself, and then a click-through to a fully fledged analytics package. MetriServe don't seem to have done this.

Sadly also for MetriServe, this is eminently reproducible - as Google has shown, since there exists a Google Desktop Gadget for Google Analytics:

This is quite a nice implementation, but again there's no link through to the full GA interface; plus, the 'View Days' option is completely broken (it does nothing). That little goblin in the picture is my daughter, by the way.

What is Web 2.0? (Part III)

You remember I mentioned in my first post about Web 2.0 that I was preparing to deliver a presentation on the topic to some folks at McCann Erickson in London? No? Ah. Well, I was. And I promised to post the presentation on this blog. So here it is, courtesy of slideshow-hosting site Slideshare, which itself is a good example (they hope) of a  Web 2.0 site - kind of a YouTube for Powerpoint slides. Monetization strategy seems  to be Google Adsense revenues, as you'd expect.

The joy of text

Off-topic, this, but I have just discovered the Microsoft fontblog, which is set in the divine Candara font, which is new with Vista. I'm a total font geek, so I've reset the font for this blog to Candara too, though if you're not running Vista or haven't downloaded Candara, you'll still see it in the old fonts (my CSS skills seem not to be up to embedding the font dynamically, for some reason). So this is what this post would look like if you had Candara:

What does the blogosphere look like?

It looks like this:

The picture above is a map of the blogosphere from Matthew Hurst's fascinating Data Mining blog. Here's Matthew's description of the above image:

The dark edges show the reciprocal links (where A has cited B and B has cited A), the lighter edges indicate a-reciprocal links. The larger, denser area of the graph is that part of the blogosphere generally characterised by socio-political discussion (the periphery contains some topical groupings). Above and to the left is that area of the blogosphere concerned with technical discussion and gadgetry.

Matthew is Director of Research at Nielsen Buzzmetrics (formerly Intelliseek), and co-creator of BlogPulse, from whence the data for this visualisation comes.

This kind of information is very useful for planning word-of-mouth marketing campaigns - as Matthew explains in one of his posts, the blogosphere is characterised by a number of very popular blogs which are linked to by hundreds or thousands of others. So if you want to reach a large part of the blog-reading public, you don't have to advertise on every blog; just find the ones which are linked to a lot - ideally from blogs which are in your demographic.

(Thanks to Mrs Thomas)

Mint

No, not the UK credit card. Nor the shop on Wigmore Street in London where I bought my wife a very nice chandelier a few years ago. Mint is a nice little web stats app written by Shaun Inman. Unusually for such things in this day and age, it's not a hosted service but a little chunk of PHP/MySQL/JavaScript which costs $30 to install for a single site.

Given the bazillions of teeny tiny web stats packages out there, this wouldn’t normally be worth a mention, but it has a number of features which are pretty cool and not often found at this level:

Interface - the Mint interface is very, very simple (there aren't even any charts, at least in the version I've seen), but does have a nice feature that lays out multiple tables on the screen intelligently even as the screen is resized. This is paired with a jump-to navigator in the top bar of the interface, which makes it easy to get to a particular table of data (and the jump is nicely animated, too - or that may just be IE7).

API – the most interesting thing about Mint is its API, Pepper, which allows people to write plug-ins for the app which display specific kinds of data, such as outbound clicks on Google AdSense ads (something Google Analytics doesn't do). Pepper has become pretty popular – see Peppermint Tea for a list of current plug-ins - and is a stroke of genius on Shaun's part, since the effective functionality of Mint is now far greater than anything he could have created on his own.

RSS – information can be made available as an RSS feed. This is fairly obvious, since RSS is becoming the new e-mail, and web stats packages have been able to e-mail reports out for some time now (and many of them make their data available in XML format). But it's a nice little touch, and given than Mint is aimed squarely at the self-hosting/blogging community (even though you can't run it on a shared blogging service like TypePad), it's very much up with the zeitgeist.

(via Vitamin)

More on dashboards

Following on from my previous post on this topic, I'm amused to see this innovative application of data visualization via Juice Analytics. I sure could have done with this when my own daughter was younger (now, at 19 months, her daily schedule is something that you can actually keep in your head without needing to resort to assistive technology).

The best I managed was a rather anally-retentive chart of my daughter's weight (this being a concern in her early life as she was born very small). There was a pleasure to be derived from entering the numbers into Excel and seeing her weight edge up over time.

I'm too sexy for this reality...

Discovered this amusing video (clean) via Paul Smith's blog. Paul is a senior technical guy at ABCE in the UK, so there's a tenuous relationship with the primary subject matter of this blog. Plus I'm sure it says something about how everyone can create their own media in this post-MSM world; but I can't for the life of me think what it is at this stage.

Another day, another tool...

My quest for the perfect blogging tool may be of limited interest to anything to anyone other than me, but I'm excited today to learn of the release of Windows Live Writer, a new tool from my colleagues in the Windows Live team which makes it easy (at least I hope so - this is my first post with it) to create good-looking blog posts without having to suffer your blog provider's HTML-based authoring interface.

(By the way, the picture with this post - included to test WL Author's image-insertion capabilities - is an entirely unrelated one of my daughter at an impromptu fairground in Kensington Gardens).

Bio Motion labs

Found this cool experiment on the Bio Motion Lab website, which demonstrates our ability to interpret a collection of moving dots as a human (or, indeed, animal) in motion.