When I first came in I took a look at the stats for my blog on Blogger itself. When you click on "stats" you first get a page with the overview of the statistics for your blog over a day, week, month, or all time.
When you start clicking around you will see how many page views you received from which specific traffic sources (specific URLS and websites).
Blogger Stats also allows you to see who is viewing your blog. It tells you what countries their IP addresses are coming from and which browser and operating system they are using.
I really like Blogger Stats because it provides you with clear and concise information along with tables and graphs.
Another similar tracking system for websites is StatCounter. StatCounter provides in depth analytics about specific websites. When you first enter your URL, the website proveds you with a summary overview.
This tells you how many page views, unique visitors, and returning visitors have viewed your page within that day,week, month, quarter, or year.
If you look at the toolbar on the left hand side of the page you will see many different options that will show you even more detailed statistics about the clicks that your website got.
In the screenshot below, the tool bar with all the different options is circled. The image on the desktop is a analytic chart of Visit Length. This chart measures how long visitors stayed on the website for.
Other options to view your stats include: came from (where your visitor found the link to your site), keyword analysis (what key words were searched to find your website), visitor paths (shows the websites visited before they got to your site), country/state/city/isp (self-explanatory- also shows what network visitors were on), etc.
I posted the link to my blog on my social media outlets and watched as the numbers started to come. I also went through my twitter followers to delete people who don't post often and to interact with some of the people I follow in hopes of gaining some of their followers.
After this I continued my hunt for applications or tools that could be used in the field of Journalism. I found a presentation called 'Good Tools for Digital Journalism" on SlideShare:
Good Tools for Digital Journalism
View more presentations from Erin Cubert
This presentation led me to explore two different tools:
Ping.fm is a service much like TweetDeck that allows you to post something to your multitude of social media sites all at the same time. Ping gives you the option of many more social media sites than TweetDeck does; however a lot of them are older social media sites. For example, I ended up getting onto my Myspace (which I haven't used since sophomore year of high school) and Xanga (I can't even remember the last time I used this).
While Ping has many more options, it does not have the same interactive element that Tweetdeck does. It is not as organized as TweetDeck in the sense that TweetDeck allows you to organize all of your social media sites and the action that goes on between your friends/followers.
The second tool that I found in the presentation listed above was Mixx.com. According to the website, Mixx Channels
"give publishers an easy way to cut through the swirl of social media and create an engaging experience with their brand and design."
I was not able to try it out myself because ti said "we are no longer taking new registrations at this time", but from what I could tell, it looked slightly similar to Storify.
The next thing I came across was a presentation called "Multimedia Tools for Journalists" on DigitalJournalism.org. This presentation is awesome!
Many of the tools and programs in this presentation I have already come across and played around with before. However, I did have a LOT of fun playing and just reading about other programs and tools that were listed in this presentation.
For journalists who are on the go all the time and have a smartphone, YouMail could be really cool, useful, and time efficient. The application turns voicemails that people leave you into text messages, allowing you to receive a voice message in places where you normally couldn't. It also allows you to block or play a disconnected message to people you don't want to talk to without having to change your phone number through your carrier. Lastly, it allows you to see missed calls from when your phone was turned off.
Ning is a website that allows you to create your own social media website. At first I didn't see how this could be useful; then I took a look at some examples that were on the website. Keep A Child Alive and Autism Speaks are both social media websites that were created through Ning.
There is a lot of freedom within this site to be creative. I am still not sure about how you could use this in journalism because it looks like a format similar to a website, which news organizations already have. I was thinking Ning could be used for a supplement site to a news organizations website. Maybe an interactive social media site for children?
The downfall of this really cool program: There's only a 30 day free trial,and then you have to pay. (And nobody wants to do that .)
The last thing that I looked at briefly and definitely need to spend more time with is SwiftRiver. They have an application called Sweeper that according to swiftly.org allows users to:
"* Combine many feeds into one: then curate, filter and translate
* Count and archive Twitter mentions
* Mashup content from Email, Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, News sites, RSS/ATOM etc.
* Automate the addition of context to data: Location, priority, influence, reputation, tags etc.
* Structure unstructured data
* Buffering against an excess of crowdsourced data
* Set-up pipes of conditional logic for automating data processes
* Collect and manage realtime data from SMS while completely offline
* Translate real-time content from social media on the fly
* Datamine real-time content aggregated by you or your team
* Keyword monitoring from Twitter, Posterous, Blogger, Google News and Wordpress
* Native integration with Ushahidi and Crowdmap"
This particular program is only about a year old but seems to be aimed at organizing sources found through crowd-sourcing.
Lastly, I found this music site, that has no journalistic purpose; it is just a cool free music player called Spotify. It is a huge music catalog that allows users to listen to music for free, create playlists, and chat with other users about music. All of your songs and playlists are saved to your account so that you can access your music on any computer, phone, etc.
Thanks for your sharing. I realize a lot of useful things from this article .visit here :spotify family plan
ReplyDelete