Jimmy Z

This is Part 2 of my E-Myth vidcast series. The past few days I’ve had a lot of fun documenting processes and practices as Brian and I have focused our work on our business rather than working too hard in our business. We’re already seeing some results. I share what we’ve done in this vidcast.

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Seriously, I’m interested in knowing how your company/organization documents its processes, procedures, etc. What kind of “operations manual” do you use?

This is my first video blog/vidcast entry (even though I accidentally call it a screencast in the video). I hope you enjoy watching.

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One of the big ideas of the Web 2.0 movement is that the web browser is a viable platform for building rich applications. Common examples of this included Gmail, Writely (now Google Docs), and one of my favorites - Gliffy. This idea has been proven pretty well, and Apple has made Safari the platform for developing iPhone applications, even though there are rumors now that Apple will be opening up some kind of SDK.

A lot has happened since Web 2.0 has become a major buzz word. New trends are becoming apparent every day. One trend I think is especially interesting is that Web Apps themselves are now becoming platforms for new applications. For example, Facebook has opened up to developers to build cool apps that run in the Facebook social networking environment. The Google Personalized Homepage offers another platform for people to develop small widget applications. More companies are following.

The opening up of APIs isn’t a new concept in itself. Web services was a major push of the Web 2.0 movement and we saw a flood of ‘mashups’ that mostly didn’t go anywhere. However, web services and web app platforms are now finding value. In September, Facebook, Accel and Founders Fund launched a Facebook fund to give investment money to the most promising Facebook App ideas. Why code up a new social network application, when you can build your application inside one of the major social networking applications?

Twitter is becoming a platform for new age communication. In a “Scaling Twitter”presentation at RailsConf, Blaine shared that 90% of requests to Twitter were through their API. People are using Twitter for purposes beyond telling your friends about every mundane detail of their lives. Phil shared some ways that people are extending twitter by creating Twitterbots. Twitterbots are using Twitter as a platform to send messages through SMS, email, RSS, etc.

Seth Godin talks about his vision of Web 4.0 in an interview with Gerhard. He basically describes the web that is focused on events in your life. For instance, because you have a smart phone, and the web knows you have a meeting in San Francisco, and it knows that the plane is delayed, it will alert the people you are meeting with that you will be a few minutes late. It seems like something like this would revolve around messaging. While I doubt Web 4.0 will be exactly as Seth envisions it, the world is moving towards faster, shorter, more frequent communication. I believe Twitter is going to remain a big player in this new style of communication.

I think we’re going to see more and more web applications becoming platforms for new applications. What do you think?

Tagged with: webApps

It’s been a couple of weeks now since I wrote my last post on category cleaning. I thought I’d post the results of that activity here.

One of the keys to improving anything on the web is to track your visitors with a good analytics system. I use Google Analytics on this blog, so I ran some reports to see if my changes have had the effect that I wanted.

I compared 2 time periods: Sep. 4 - 13 with Oct. 2-11. Both time periods are Tuesday through Thursday intervals because I wanted to minimize time-of-week variances. Oct. 2 is the first whole day that had the categories changed.

General Site Statistics:

Overall, it appears that my blog is performing better, with higher Pages/Visit, a slightly lower Bounce Rate, and a higher Avg. Time on Site.

I wanted to see how the change affected my categories specifically. Here is a report for my “Web Services” category. It seems to align pretty well with a few of my other categories.

From examining my ‘Navigation Summary’ report for that category page, it appears that people are now clicking from posts within this category and then to other related posts.

Another side-effect from changing my categories is that Google is hitting a bunch of pages not found. Check out this list from my Webmaster Tools report:

The list is pretty long, but I don’t think it should affect my search rankings too drastically. There should just be a period of time before Google removes these pages from the index. If I had the time, I could configure redirects from all of the missing categories to related categories, but I don’t have the time for that.

Tagged with: analytics, blogging