Google Analytics reports missing 2 November 2010

November 3rd, 2010 § § permalink

This morning a client was panicked that we have been banned by Google because Google analytics was showing zero data for yesterday. A quick check on a few other accounts and everything was clear: a pretty nasty bug is causing this. From what people on twitter are saying it has been going for the past 10 hours.

No official reaction yet from Google Analytics blog but expect one soon. My estimate is that is just a reporting error and all the data should appear soon.

Summarizing, google analytics reports missing is just a display bug.

 

 

How inception will be performed by brands on the near future

October 31st, 2010 § § permalink

See below a 44 min presentation done by Aza Raskin on how inception could be performed by brands using our social streams. The presentation is focused around the idea that big companies, with our acknowledgement, may alter our past (tweets/images/personal videos) for a new breed of product placement.

Keynote for the John Seely Brown Symposium at University of Michigan from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

You’d might think that this sounds like fantasy and is never going to happen, but also people thought that 1984 is just another dystopic novel.

WordPress as an E-learning CMS

October 31st, 2010 § § permalink

As you might know I’m a big fan of using WordPress as a CMS. There are different mods and plugins for different purposes but so far I haven’t seen a full CMS plugin for e-learning. Today i Have found out about ScholarPress Courseware a Buddy Press plugin that seems like that optimal solution for an Open Source E-Learning CMS.

Of course this, as many other e-learning open-source solutions might not be ideal for an university but here are a few cases where it might work perfectly:

  • Tutoring: If you are a teacher or a student that offers private classes and you want a low cost solution
  • Trainers: You started a small business on training others on various fields
  • Schools with low IT budgets
  • Online counselling

Below you will find a list of features and a presentation video. This project looks so good that I hope it won’t be abandoned and become incompatible with future WordPress releases

BuddyPress ScholarPress Courseware features:

  • Class Dashboard
  • Courses (Works for both learning models: European/United States)
  • Bibliography
    • Web API’s integration with WorldCat/ISBNdb
    • BibTex Import
  • Assignments
    • Responses
    • Forum integration
    • Gradebook
    • CSV Import
  • Schedules
    • Calendar
    • Month, Week, Day view
    • Integrates with Assignment due dates
    • iCal export
  • Customization using an external CSS

BuddyPress ScholarPress Courseware presentation video:

BuddyPress ScholarPress Courseware from Stas on Vimeo.

Yahoo Messenger video chat for Ipod Touch

October 28th, 2010 § § permalink

The Yahoo Messenger team has kept their promise made when they launched the 2.0 version of their Iphone / Ipod Touch app and today they released version 2.0.1 that enables video calling for Ipod Touch users that have the latest (4th) generation.

This is a big step not only for Yahoo but for all the Iphone / Ipod Touch users that will benefit from the new standards imposed by Yahoo. Let’s see who’s going to be next:

  • Skype? They have the infrastructure as Fring used their API to do the same thing. It should be very easy for them to turn it on
  • Google? They don’t have a custom Gtalk Iphone / Ipod Touch app but would add value to their current IM offering

I know that there are other apps around that provide the same features, but let’s face it. Without multi platform integration and forcing the users to subscribe to yet another service is freaking epic fail.

How Google plays with webmasters

October 26th, 2010 § § permalink

Last year, watching data from a few sites I came with a theory:

Every year, when the summer starts and traffic on the internet decreases, Google does a random shuffle of its main index. As usual in this cases webmasters panic a lot (especially those in the gray area of the SEO color spectrum) and start filling the forums:  “Google has kicked me out what do I do know“. The answer is always the same: “Clean up your shady SEO fill a re inclusion report and pray“.

Through this, Google gets a lot of new spamming techniques in the summer, adjusts the algorithm and then:

  • Before the winter shopping season shuffles back to the old pre summer index
  • Hits hard the sites that match criteria reported during the summer

Crazy enough for you? Well if the answer is yes check out this thread :

Has anyone seen a change, from Friday, MayDay affected pages?
Some of my sites have recovered traffic :)

those who were hit on june 2, were major gainers on october 22
those who were unaffected on june 2, lost everything on october 22

Well? Who’s crazy now?

 

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