Dashboard

It’s a relatively simple, free online tool that allows collaboration and analysis. First you create a project, then specify your company/website, your competitors, and add team members as you go along. The basic dashboard looks like this:

Clippings

The clippings are news items that either mention your brand or your rivals. You can rate each clipping anywhere between Very Positive to Very Negative, depending on the sentiment of the article. Any team member can add to this, and you can subscribe to these clippings via RSS feed. A bookmarklet is also available to make things easier.

Comparison Matrix

To compare your site or product’s features vs the competition, it’s also possible to create a comparison matrix, which is essentially an AJAX-based table of items that you can put checkmarks on or not. Its simple and intuitive, and gives a bird’s eye view of how you square up against others.

Traffic Graph

Using Alexa traffic data, Competitous plots your sites daily traffic rank trend against your competitors, in the same graph, using different colored lines. It’s not the most detailed or accurate comparison out there, but it has its uses.

People

You can invite other people to collaborate with you on a certain project by inviting them thru email. Whoever creates the project is assumed to be the project manager, and therefore has sole authority to remove existing users from the project. However, all members can invite new users or cancel their own invites.

All these features are rudimentary, but very useful if you’d like to organize your competitive analysis in one place, and share it with others. If you’d like a more advanced tool, the same company behind Competitous has launched RivalMap, and I’m sure I’ll also be looking at that in the near future.

This study was conducted in the UK and with a sample of 1,346 individuals ages 16 and up. Of those who participated, 65% said conceded that the economic woes will change the way the spend money. However, 56% have stated that they will not change their spending online, with some even saying they’d like to spend more on the Internet. The report attributes this to “a perception that there are more bargains to be had online, through the increased ease of shopping around and comparing prices between retailers.”

About 62% said they try to read other people’s reviews before buying something. Breaking it down into sexes, 64% of women were more inclined to read online reviews, compared to 58% for the men. People are researching and comparing carefully across different sites, and among all considerations, price tops the list. Also, there were actually more women than men who said they were likely to lower their overall spending while the economy recover. Other reasons why people prefer to shop online are the convenience of 24 hour shopping (67%), and lack of crowds (68%), especially during the Christmas period. Hopefully, this means we can still look forward to a merry Christmas this year.

Let’s review the list of currently supported languages, which has grown considerably over the last few years:

Arabic
Bulgarian
Chinese (simplified)
Chinese (traditional)
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Finnish
French
Greek
German
Hebrew
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Spanish
Swedish
Thai
Turkish

If your native language doesn’t appear on this list and you’d like to Google to do something about it, just head on over and post your thoughts on the Adsense Help Forum.

So what does it have that Google Analytics don’t?

Developer API - Advanced users will rejoice because the Clicky API allows them to extract traffic data into several common formats. That way, it’s easy to integrate, analyze, or store data within your own application.

White Label - Brand the service as your own and put up a reseller account. Use your own domain name, logo and CSS. They also have a separate White Label API, so that you can automate the user and site registration process from within your own application.

Dedicated iPhone Version - Do you worship Steve Jobs? If so, Clicky is a match made in heaven for you because it has an optimized iPhone version, enabling you to view your stats on the go. For the rest of us, Clicky was also kind enough to make a generic version for other mobile phones.

Others - Also notable features include visitor geotagging on Google maps, the ability to track outbound links and downloads, widgets, the option to get stats via RSS, an official WordPress plugin to integrate code, and many more.

Now that we know the pros, what are the cons?

If you’re doing Internet marketing or other advertising campaigns, you will miss Google Analytics’ Goals and Conversions, as well as Campaign Tracking features. Clicky says it will have these features on its roster soon, but there are no dates available on which to expect them, so don’t hold your breath.

As for pricing, Clicky has a free and paid offerings. Of course, the free account has several limitations, including tracking support for only 3 websites and up to 1,000 hits per day. This makes it suitable for only the small, startup blogs. If you’d like full functionality, support for up to 20 sites, and hits from 10,000 - 50,000 a day, you’ll need the premium plans that range from $3.99 to $16.99 per month. You can get 6 months off if you pay for a year’s worth of service upfront. For people who have a large blogging network that gets plenty of traffic, you may also consider a custom plan that supports up to 200 sites and 300,000 total daily page views.

Is it worth it? It all depends on your needs.

Downtime started around 1pm EST. It seems it affects only some accounts and not others, although I’m not sure what makes one vulnerable. Probably an upgrade gone wrong. In any case, here’s a quick solution that worked for me:

Log in to Gmail or your other Google accounts first. Then, try logging in to Adsense. You should be able to get in fine.

Since AdSense holds some of our online revenue, it was a little disconcerting to see it go down. I initially even thought my account got hacked (whew!). I hope they fix it quickly and make the system more secure and stable.

If there’s one huge problem that a smart webmaster should fight as hard as s/he can, this is it. This can never be stressed enough: grab any and all good opportunities that you find on the web as soon as you can. And once you start, do not give up so easily.

I’m going to tell you a real-life story to illustrate my point:

K. started surfing the web because she wanted to have some fun and research her favourite subjects. As time went by, she naturally made friends with other Internet users, joined forums, mailing lists and became a loyal visitor to various sites in a specific niche.

One day she realised that there was a certain type of website missing in that niche. So, she decided to fill this gap with her own web project. It was totally amateurish… yet it soon became pretty successful, because of three major factors:

1. She was a sort of pioneer, because she detected a need in her niche and was the first one to do something about it.

2. She really knew what she was dealing with and even devoted part of her time to expanding her knowledge on the subject, so she could improve her website on an ongoing basis.

3. She had good networking skills, so it wasn’t hard to spread the word about her site.

However, she wasn’t able to make a single cent from that site and eventually took it down. Why did this happen?

* She stopped investing in networking and promotion.

* She believed that the niche was about to collapse, so she lost the motivation needed to keep her site up.

* She thought a site like that couldn’t be effectively monetised.

This is what happened afterwards:

• She eventually realised that the webmasters which persisted and kept their sites alive are now recognised as true authorities in that niche, because they’ve been around for a long time. Consequently, they don’t have to spend much — if any at all — time with promotion.
• The niche never collapsed. Much on the contrary: it’s still growing and there are no visible signs that it’ll be stopping any time soon.
• Several new monetization techniques have been made available to webmasters, even to those who deal with smaller sites and restricted niches.

Talk about missed opportunities!

Had she persevered, now she wouldn’t have to use her own story as an example and alert for other webmasters.

InternetNews reports that in a session at the Interop trade show in New York, Mozilla, Opera, ACCESS and Bitstream came together to discuss what it should be like and the barriers to an ubiquitous mobile web. On the one hand, there are those who advocate having the same browsing experience on the mobile phone as with the desktop. On the other, some want to look at their inherent differences and offer a unique experience.

Kiyo Oishi of ACCESS Systems thinks that a dominant screen size is not likely to emerge in the handset market, saying, “There will always be three or four screen sizes and that is a challenge of the mobile industry.” And, though having a mobile phone is very common, having one with a decent browser is not. Lacking in mobile browser maturity, the panelists agreed that its important for the industry to come up with standards, similar to what desktop browsers went through.

Additionally, because screen real estate is so precious in handsets, browsing should be kept as simple as possible. “Less is more, especially in a mobile environment,” according to Anna Chagnon, CEO of Bitstream. “Have really good features but don’t get overly complicated in the UI or what users will do with it.” Opera, for its part, suggested that mobile synchronization capabilities and developer support are also crucial.

The success of the iPhone and the debut of Google’s Android have revitalized interest in mobile browsing. Now, its up the industry as a whole to sustain the momentum.

According to Yahoo!, APT is “designed to simplify the process of buying and selling ads online while connecting all the market players — publishers, advertisers, agencies, networks, partners and developers — from a unified platform to do business more efficiently and effectively”.

This is what the dashboard looks like:

APT uses an auction-based model to automate inventory allocation for efficiency and higher yield. The platform allows a dynamic pricing structure, such that you can choose between offering CPM, CPC, CPA, or other ads, depending on advertiser needs. Its analytics component allows real-time optimization of an ad’s creative across all properties, including direct campaign-to-campaign comparisons, and reports on audience reaction. In the future, it claims that it will be able to have the ability to make guaranteed inventory prediction forecasts.

Among the innovations of APT is that it will allow for the cross-selling of ads between sales forces. For those who have been bothered at one time or another by competetive or distasteful ads appearing on their website, APT has quality management tools that let you create appropriate customized filters. Lastly, developers will be happy to note that it is an open platform and the API with be made available soon.

During the first roll-out of the ad platform in the fourth quarter, Yahoo! will team up with newspaper publishers from the Newspaper Consortium, including MediaNews Group. In all, this represents almost 800 news websites. Yahoo! is expected to open the platform to other publishers in early 2009. For more information, go to the APT website.

One friend was concerned about using dynamic URLs, since (as she told us) “search engines can’t cope with these.” Another friend thought that dynamic URLs weren’t a problem at all for search engines and that these issues were a thing of the past. One even admitted that he never understood the fuss about dynamic URLs in comparison to static URLs. For us, that was the moment we decided to read up on the topic of dynamic and static URLs.

After several explanations on the subject, they drew these conclusions:

Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems.

(…) Although we are able to process this URL correctly, we would still discourage you from using this rewrite as it is hard to maintain and needs to be updated as soon as a new parameter is added to the original dynamic URL.

And this was when the problems began. Reactions among webmasters, SEOs, programmers and Internet marketers have been varied, but most of them can be summarised in the following points:

• Some people say there’s nothing wrong about Google team’s statements. For an experienced webmaster or programmer this whole URL rewriting matter can look irrelevant. But for a beginner it would be wiser not to play with URL rewrites indeed, because they could do something wrong, thus affecting their Google rankings.
• Others have gotten annoyed at that article. Some even seem to have taken offense at it. They claim that this time the Google team just put up a bunch of silly stuff and that Google underestimates webmasters. It’s been also implied that Google once again is trying to tell people how they are supposed to run their own businesses.
• Regardless of their views on this subject, everyone seems to agree that Google team’s article looks confusing and poorly-written.

What do you think? Will you stop using dynamic URL rewrites because Google said you probably won’t know how to deal with them?

1. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

If you don’t have the time to test each and every plugin to see what’s best, then YARPP is your safest bet. It’s easy to install with no editing of your WordPress template required. However, it’s in flexibility where this plugin really shines, with plenty of options to suit your every need. As for result relevance, YARPP delivers. Additionally, you can tweak thresholds and how things are computed, if you wish.In the works for future versions are the inclusion of post dates, RSS feed support, and sentence-aware excerpts. Due to its tagging support, the latest version’s compatibility is limited to WordPress 2.5 and up.

2. WASABI

WASABI’s installation can be a little more involved than YARPP, but a guide is handy on its dedicated web page. A few people have extended its functionality, which now includes the ability to allow manual correlation of entries using keywords, for those posts with witty titles whose relation to the contents are not readily apparent. There is a version which permits the use of WordPress’ built-in excerpt field, and another with the very useful feature of generating suggested links if the user encounters 404 errors. All of these are available on the WASABI PB Wiki page.

3. Aizattos Related Posts

Aizattos is a simple related posts plugin that works right off the bat, which makes it ideal for people who don’t care much for figuring out the technical details. It is said to have evolved from the WASABI plugin, but the two have taken on different paths since. Aizattos can generate related links without requiring you to add any special tags to the posts, and it’s this no-fuss characteristic that makes this plugin a favorite among many bloggers. However, for some reason the developer has taken it down from the original download site, but a fan has made it available again for others to use.

Try to install any of these three and see how it affects your blog’s page views and ad earnings.