Web X.0

Favorite posts on WebX.0

As a blogger, it often feels like I'm writing into a black hole without having a clue as to what my audience (ie - You) finds interesting or boring.

Over at outbrain (disclosure: I'm a founder of the company) our community members are constantly rating blog posts they find interesting. I thought it would be cool to look up our aggregate data, filter results for WebX.0, and find those posts that you, my audience, (or at least the subset of outbrain users... ;-) find most interesting.

As of today, these are your top-5 WebX.0 posts:

1. "What business are you in?" is the current winner! Average score: 4.75 out of 5
2. "Making money from fantasy sports" - Hmmm... interesting choice for #2... Average score: 4.5
3. "Google, Yahoo and stock prices"; Average score - 4.4
4. "Free idea - Affiliate links to RSS readers"; Average - 4.0
5. "The future of newspapers"; Average - 4.0

Cool! Next up I'll take a look at those posts you thought were worst... ;-)

Interested in getting some insights like this on your blog? Drop me a note: galai [at] outbrain [dot] com and we'll see what we can do.

Search queries vs. search referrals

Don Dodge talks about discrepancies in reports of search market share. Apparently, Google has an estimated ~45% market share of search queries (according to ComScore), but many site owners see more than 70% of their search referrals coming from Google.

Why such a big discrepancy? Don speculates:

Search referrals are different than number of searches performed. Rich, Jeremy, and I are measuring search referrals to our sites, versus market share for the number of total searches performed.  You have to ask yourself, how important are searches that didn't lead to a referral? Meaning, the searcher didn't actually click on a result.

Sounds to me like a very Microsftian way to asking this question... isn't the real reason this -

The quality of Google's search results is superior to the other engines, thus for every X queries conducted a lot more clicks/referrals (=good search results) occur on Google than do on the competing engines...

Am I missing anything?...

Free idea - Affiliate links to RSS readers

(note - this post is a bit nuanced, so if you're not into RSS readers, etc you can probably safely skip it... ;-)

Here's a simple and sweet idea I'm giving out for free to all the RSS reader companies in the world. I offered it to Mark Fletcher of Bloglines about a year ago, but haven't seen it implemented yet. I'd really love to see this done by one of the RSS readers/aggregators/whatever they're called:

It seems like the biggest barrier for mainstream adoption of RSS readers is subscribing to that 1st feed. I know this, because I evangelize Bloglines to a lot of people, but then when they finally sign up for an account they're usually clueless about what to do with it next, and why they should even ever use it. 

Now, as a blogger, I'd be more than happy to endorse an RSS reader on my blog so that new users that are wondering what those RSS links do could subscribe to my feed.

But simply linking back to an RSS reader site is pretty much useless for my readers, and doesn't have much value for me (blog owner).

So I thought it would be awesome if I could post a link that "primes" the recommended RSS reader with my WebX.0 feed. So when a new user clicks on my "We love Bloglines!" link they go to the Bloglines signup page. Once their account is active, my feed is already automatically subscribed to. Cool!

Value to me (feed owner) - I easily got a new subscriber. This link is 100x more valuable to me than a stupid link back to the homepage of some random RSS reader site.

Value to user - their account already has one feed they're interested in, making that 1st feed hurdle that much easier.

I think this could be a sweet and cheap (aka - 'viral'...) way to build a lot of affiliate links back to the RSS reader company that does this first. The implementation is probably super simple... they'd just need to add a referring feed URL in the link (something like: www.bloglines.com/signup.jsp?sub=www.webx0.com), and support it in their account setup process.

Please someone do this... you're guaranteed a ton of free incoming links from the blogosphere!

2c