Recognizing Best Idea of The Year

There's have been two good blog mentions of HitTail recently that I wanted to mention. The first is from the James Omdahl of the InsureMe affiliate blog, and points out that he found us through the recent BusinessWeek Best of 2006, where we were mentioned as one of the best ideas of the year. This goes to show that offline print versions of publications still drive online traffic. This is of keen interest to Connors Communications, the PR firm that incubated HitTail, because online hype seems to get all the glory. This sentiment is even echoed in Time Magazine choosing "You" as their person of the year. It's a true long tail statement, and I'm sure Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame will be proud. If you take the top most influential people on the planet this year and add them together, it doesn't begin to match the influence of all us B-list'ers added together. One of my favorite things about this post are the concrete hittailing examples that it provides.

On Monday I ran across a website called Hit Tail while reading BusinessWeek’s
Best of 2006 article. BusinessWeek gave Hit Tail a brief mention [...]
Intrigued, I went to Hit Tail and watched their demo video to better understand
what they were all about.

The second article is by another one of those people who instantly "gets it"—not an easy thing with HitTail. For many, the idea of writing for the long tail as a means of new customer acquisition is counter-intuitive. So, it's a real treat to find a blog post that opens with a quote like this from Greg Martin of his own personal site.

Have you ever sat down in front of your computer and had difficulty knowing what
to blog? Or if you do have a blog topic, are you sure it will be something your
readers will want to read? I’m sure that has happened to millions of bloggers
(billions of times!) including myself. Knowing subjects that will both yield
hits and please readers is a tricky balance to find. Enter HitTail.com.

Anyway, thanks to James and Greg for these blog posts. I'm considering offering people who make posts like this about HitTail some free time with the premium services once we go out of beta. And just a reminder to everyone who keeps asking, yes, basic HitTailing much as you know it today will remain free after we come out of beta and start offering our premium services.

And of course, a special thanks to BusinessWeek for the Building a Better Mousetrap article, and their recent mention of HitTail as a best idea of 2006.

The Friday Traffic Report

Yet again, a blogger says it better than I...

The only way to do proper keyword research for a niche is to build a site and develop content for it. You can get initial ideas from regular keyword tools about the popularity of a opic, but developing a site and watching real-time phrases being used to hit your site developes the real keyword list you want to work from.

Using HitTail to Get Dugg

How might HitTail be of use to top Diggers? A HitTail user named eConsultant recounted his experience getting a page Dugg to the main homepage, and watching the HitTail real-time search hit report as people followed the Digg link to his site.



Watching the real-time flow of referrals flow in is one place where HitTail really shines. You don't have to wait a whole day for Google Analytics data to come back, and you don't even need to struggle with your log files. Just install HitTail on your site, submit articles to Digg, and watch for the referrals to start pouring in... maybe.

Many people think that a submitted article is only a success if lots of folks digg it. Otherwise, it scrolls off of the Upcoming Stories list rather quickly. But that's not true. Unbeknownst to you, your submitted article could be generating dozens of visits by people investigating your story deciding whether to digg it. And most users would never know.

So, how does HitTail help get you get dugg? Easy! You watch the referrals and take notice of which submitted articles are "almost working". In the same spirit that HitTail tells you which search engine referrals are "almost working" for you, it can tip Digg's hand about which stories you almost got dugg. Then, you take measures to improve the next submission.

There is great value in generating visits even if you don't get the vote. This will tell you that your headline-writing skills are adequate, but your landing page failed. Conversely, if you submit articles and never get any referrers, you know that your headline writing skills (or story selection) needs a little work too.

In short, HitTail speeds up the Digg information feedback loop, letting you see a lot more about the near-success of your submissions. Armed with this information, you can adjust your future articles.

Keyword Research Can Be Fun

Once again, I find a HitTail user expressing what I find so difficult to get across.

"There's a new FANTASTIC service out there (for once, this is a very
appropriate word!). Hittail it's called. It's about hitting the long tail and
it's all very well explained on their webpage. The essence of it is, that once
you have those basic keywords in place, with almost no work you will get
suggestions for more and more keywords.

So? You ask?

So you get a suggestion for a keyword, or, more probably, a keyword phrase
and then you let your creative juices flow and write an article about it and add
it to your website or blog. Next time someone searches this, they can find
you."

So simply stated, yet so complete. I've got to remember to play up the creative juices. Thanks, HalinaGold.

Web 2.0 - Sun's Vision Has Finally Arrived

I usually keep my posts here on HitTail to be related to online marketing. Rarely do I venture off into industry-wide issues, choosing instead to put those on Mike-Levin.com or Connors.com. But with HitTail increasingly referred to as a Web 2.0 application, I thought I'd weigh in on my definition of the topic. It's going to be a slightly intellectual, rambling post, but such are the heady topics of where Web development is going.

There is a lot of confusion surrounding Web 2.0. I feel that it's merely the third coming of Sun's recurring promise that the network is the computer. The second promise was Netscape's that the Web browser was the new computer platform. And today, Web developers finally have the ability to write client/server-like apps for the Web browser, wiring up program modules that reside all around the Internet, and using Ajax or Flex to break free of the hyper-linking page-load model. This finally makes us feel like Sun's long-ago promise has arrived--but having forgotten that promise, the Tim O'Reilly innovated term "Web 2.0" was sitting there waiting to fill the vacuum.

The sub-text here is a leveling of the playing field, taking away any disproportionate Microsoft advantage. In this new world, it's the vendor-neutral, open source specification that's important, not the implementation. That's why the open document format (ODF) is so important, and why Microsoft has no interest in it catching on. Once data is universally interchangeable, and office document formats are standardized, then it doesn't really matter whether you're using Microsoft's software or somebody else's to get there. The playing field is leveled.

The same goes for the underlying computer platform. A standardized open source, vendor neutral code execution platform is a huge threat to Microsoft, for the exact same reason. One would think that this was Sun/Java. But it wasn't, because it was neither open source nor vendor neutral. Instead, it's a closed-source solution whose security and standardization comes from being closely held by Sun. This may change very soon, but along with open sourcing Java comes a huge infusion of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) that ruins security, and perhaps even standardization if not done well. Also, Java performance sucks because of the virtual machine, and the Java language appeals only to career programmers.

In response to Java, Microsoft programmed its own virtual machine (VM) in the form of the common language runtime (CLR) which is the VM in .NET, and while it doesn't close you into an obtuse language, it has similar performance issues as Java, and is most certainly not open source or vendor neutral. Enter Netscape's promise of years ago that the Web browser was destined to become this new computing platform.

All the techniques of making the Web browser a valid programming platform have been around since Internet Explorer 5, but Microsoft has not been very open about promoting its use as such. Basically, people who used the Web interface to Microsoft Exchange were the only ones to see it, plus a few hackers who figured out how to do the same trick with Microsoft's HTC technology, or hacks using cookies and iframes. It wasn't until Google starting sticking seemingly impossible features into GMail and Google Maps that the world took notice, and non-MSIE browsers starting showing browser-envy—adding the same features, thus achieving some semblance of standardization. Scrolling maps forced the Mozilla project and Safari to match MSIE's capabilities, and therefore the open source, vendor neutral code execution platform was born: the Web browser (and Sun/Netscape's vision was finally realized).

The only problem is that it still sucks. About the best application I've seen to date emulating true machine-native client/server code is the new Web-based Yahoo email program. It allows such things as extended-select, click-and-drag, and other such things we're only used to seeing in Microsoft Express and other true mail clients. But even such, it's slow and riddled with limitations that remind you that it's still in a Web browser. The essential problem is that the Web browser is still limited, and the mechanism for extending its limits, JavaScript, is limited. The result is the propagation of dozens of Ajax libraries attempting to simplify the process, and a fragmenting of what it means to program for this new platform. Meanwhile, you have no guarantees that what you write today will work in the future, because the entire computing platform just sort of happened by accident, and everything's a moving target.

So, where does that leave Web programming? Do we jump on the Ajax bandwagon by adopting the lest-objectionable Ajax library and living in the Web browser world? Or do we persist in our faith in the obtuse and under-delivering and soon-to-be fractionalized Java platform? Or do we trust the single, unified Microsoft .NET platform that has the biggest installed base via Windows, largest developer network via MSDN, best development platform via Visual Studio? Or do we bet on a dark horse, such as Adobe/Macromedia Flash, which has the potential of being its own high performance, platform independent platform such as the Flash video player's recent massive success has demonstrated that it can become?

Web 2.0 only stands for a little piece of the software development nexus that is occurring. The dream is an open source, standardized code execution layer that all programmers can write for and target. At very least, developers should be able to target a generic platform, and have the compiler do the work of making it run on different platforms. Of course, you still have all the wildly different variables of device form-factors, display capabilities, speed, special graphics abilities, support for subcomponents like TV Tuners, Internet connection speed and the like. So, even with the ideal "platform", the bigger development challenges are merely simplified--not solved. But people thirst for this simplification.

All this plays into accelerating what we have come to know as "Web 2.0", because it locks certain variables down: software running on a Web browser in a large monitor with a broadband connection. It must work on Mac, PCs and Linux. And just like the HTML standard accelerated the adoption of the Internet by making the killer app of the Worldwide Web, Web 2.0 will accelerate the adoption of an open source, standardized code execution platform, because it will clarify the advantages of such a vision with the common folk. The only challenge to it happening is global agreement on what it should be. Otherwise, Microsoft will always be successful in inserting enough FUD to keep people off that platform, and on something that's commercially supported, highly tested, slick and good enough. Web 2.0 is succeeding in great part because Microsoft created the potential by building the MSXML object into Web browsers, and Google let the cat out of the bag with Google Maps. And now, there's no taking it back.

Web 2.0 is to the Internet exactly the same as what HTML and the Worldwide Web were to the Internet--not the end unto itself, but rather a killer app that has probably about a decade of life in it before technology changes so completely that the issues become moot.

Alexa Rank #6,545 in 6 Months

So the Alexa debate rages on. John Battelle in The Search Blog called for an Alexa we can trust, so we Alexaholics can stop having to qualify our discussions with "Alexa data is bad, but...". A competitor appeared on the scene in the form of Compete.com, who I met at the TechCrunch party in NYC last month. And meanwhile, the Alexa features get richer, the site gets slower, and they respond to validity criticisms directly. They added the ability to compare 5 different sites, similar to the Alexaholic site (I guess they got tired of traffic being poached), 5 levels of smoothing, and permalinks for easy emailing of reports.

In an earlier post named The Cobbler's Children Have Shoes, I praised Connors Communications for treating their in-house client, HitTail, with the same treatment as "real" clients. In that post, I also included 2 Alexa screenshots: one of HitTail's diversified organic growth, and one of a startup whose only exposure was a single TechCrunch article. I did this so that after our impending TechCrunch coverage, I could compare the post-article effect. My hope was that with a product that really delivers what it promises, whether getting "crunched" could result in a new baseline traffic plateau, or whether the effect would just be squandered.

HitTail pre-crunch	Site-X post-crunch
HitTail post-crunch

The answer was exactly inline with my hopes. We have a spikey new high, which I'm confident will level out to a new high baseline plateau of traffic levels. I also have some renewed faith in the accuracy of Alexa data, although I feel its data skewing is still very real--albeit consistent. This is an important and interesting time to take this new Alexa snapshot, because from June of this year to December represents the full 6-month life of the HitTail.com domain and service, and you can witness the rise from a non-existent domain to Alexa rank #6,545.