(Last updated: 11-May-2011)

I recently completed a job application that wanted to know what websites I read & pay attention to. Here are some of the websites & web pages I provided:

John Battelle’s Searchblog – The man who wrote the book on Search. His blog on the online industry is continually sharp & thought-provoking. Battelle writes really well. I don’t always agree with what he might be saying but that is a healthy thing.

Wired – Do you ever wish there was a daily newspaper just about tech? This is probably the closest thing to it.

Search Engine Land – It is kind of an unfortunate name. But they have a number of good search marketing writers & Danny Sullivan knows search better than anyone I know of.

Google blogs – There are a lot of these so I’m just going to list them:

• Conversion Room Blog
• Google Website Optimizer Blog
• Google Analytics Blog
• Webmaster Central Blog
• Inside AdWords
• Google Southeast Asia
• Conversion Room Asia-Pacific Blog
• And the Google Analytics YouTube Channel is excellent too – particularly the Web Analytics TV episodes presented by Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski.

Conversion Rate Experts – the leaders in conversion rate optimisation. Particularly worth paying attention to for their case studies which give useful insight into their conversion optimisation process.

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog – While some of what SEOmoz says publicly is often couched in caveats e.g. “this may mean”, “this might suggest”, the need for this is partly driven by their highly visible position in the SEO industry & the trouble with stating absolutes. Their blog is essential reading for SEO news & tactics.

NYTimes – US-centric news but it is better than, say, Fox. Their Magazine section occasionally does great long form pieces.  The Critics Best Of videos are good too.

Articles

• Henry Jenkins’s series on understanding “viral” media
  as “spreadable” media. Start with Part One of the Seven Part series.
• [PDF] ‘Measuring The Immeasurable: Visitor
  Engagement‘ by Eric Peterson & Jospeh Carrabis was useful in furthering my thinking about measuring engagement online.

Video

• Seth Godin, a leading thinker in marketing, has an excellent blog. But it was his Google Talk that put me on to him. His TED talk on the tribes we lead is also great.
• Making Inbox Zero my approach to email seriously cut the time I spend on email in half & made email seem useful & powerful again instead of something that chewed up my time & drained my energy. The original presentation by Merlin Mann is highly recommended.

UPDATED:
Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik – Avinash is a Google Analytics Evangelist but he also seems to do things like consulting/speaking on web analytics/writing books on web analytics. He is a guru on web analytics & his blog posts over the years have been critical to educating me about Google Analytics, metrics to ignore & metrics to pay attention to.

In June 2008, roughly around the time when Google made Trends for Websites available, I wrote a post about some sites & their trends. Mainly just trends I found interesting. It’s now June 2009 so I thought it would be fun to revisit the same graphs.

This time I’ve limited the graphs to ‘last 12 months’ as opposed to all-time.

ALL GLOBAL TRAFFIC: The rise & rise of Facebook
I’ve put Twitter in there just for fun. I wonder though if Google can’t see all the Twitter ‘views’ that occur on feed readers, iPhones, smartphones, etc.

NZ TRAFFIC ONLY: Bebo hangs in there
I am actually surprised Bebo isn’t showing more of a decline. I suppose it’s that tween/teen demographic I kind of don’t really care about (sorry!)

It’s tight in E-Commerce
I get to answer my question! We might assume Ferrit’s sale didn’t help because Ferrit is now gone. I think their press release at the time was a combination of “this idea was ahead of it’s time” & “we’ve moved online business in New Zealand forward with Ferrit”. It just sounded hollow. What is that analogous to? The Titanic? The Hindenburg? Thanks for coming Ferrit.

What is that thing they say about slow-moving giants?
I actually find this the most interesting graph. Compare it with a year ago. For TradeMe, let’s call that roughly a 15% decrease in traffic on the average in 2008. Still, I don’t think anyone would be predicting their traffic to drop off over the next 12 months.

The irrelevance of Slashdot
As noted by John Gruber. People are obviously still visiting Slashdot but it is a shadow of its former self. I think it needs editors choosing & writing up its news rather than republishing user submissions.

Google Trends for Websites is an approximation of the amount of traffic Google thinks your site is getting. So while not 100% accurate, it provides some interesting insights.

The rise of Facebook

But for NZ traffic only, it’s all about Bebo

Ferrit’s sale is seemingly helping their traffic (but is it helping their bottom line?)

TradeMe is bigger than the internet
This is TradeMe compared with some signicant international sites. And it dwarfs them.

The fall of Slashdot

I’ve been looking for ping services and free web statistics tools for DaveUnderwood.com, below is what I’ve come across…

Free web statistics tools via contentious.com (updated):

http://www.google.com/analytics/

http://www.sitemeter.com

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

http://www.webtrends.com

http://mach5.com/products/analyzer/index.php

http://www.tracewatch.com/

http://www.addfreestats.com/

http://bbclone.de/

http://www.trafficfile.com/

http://www.haveamint.com/

http://www.summary.net/

http://www.reinvigorate.net/
http://statcounter.com new

Unfortunately Google Analytics is invite only at the moment, sign up here.

XML-RPC Ping Services [codex.wordpress.org]