Tracking visitors and blog hits: Feedburner and Google Analytics

With nearly 50 posts on my blog, I got to wondering if anyone was actually looking at it. Not that that is the point - the point is simply to get into the practice of using Web 2.0 applications and, like the subtitle says, "keep up with new technology and the evolving web." But still, it'd be interesting to know, right? And, investigating how to do it is a learning experience in itself.

After a bit of searching around, I put my blog into Feedburner (another Google aquisition). While I was at it, I also added a bit of HTML code to my www.ericbolstridge.com pages so they can be tracked by Google Analytics. My GoDaddy hosting already supplies decent tracking and report stats, so I don't know how useful that will be, but I signed up for it anyway to see if it would provide any additional information.

Since registering with Feedburner, by the way, my Blog has one hit (and I think that was me).

YouTube Partners

So, I've found out a lot more about the whole YouTube Partners thing. Apparently getting the extra features a partnership can provide can be as simple as applying to be a partner! This doesn't seem to be heavily advertised by YouTube, but there are instructions and loads of YouTube video bloggers talking about it, like this guy.

I think Arlington County should qualify - I've uploaded about 100 videos and we generate original content on a regular basis that is viewed by thousands (well, cumulatively maybe). I'll go through the application and we'll see! Heck, my personal YouTube account gets hits in the thousands, too, so maybe I'll see if I can be a partner on that side, too...

The YouTube "in crowd"

I found out that the state (er, Commonwealth) of Virginia signed up and has started posting videos.

They don't exactly have the whole thing figured out yet it seems, as some of their videos are unsynched and aren't quite YouTube "friendly," but whatever. The thing that really struck me was how when you go to their channel page, the main video plays automatically. Funny thing is, I was just talking to John Lisle, the PIO of Arlington's Police Department about this exact thing - the ACPD has a YouTube page of their own and John was asking me about how to make the video on the channel page play automatically (like the VA state channel). I didn't think it was possible, but now that I saw the VA state page doing it, I knew there was something to what John had said.

As any good internet researcher does, I turned to Google. I typed in "auto-play video on youtube channel page." This got me some good hits and basically what I learned is this: YouTube will work with celebrities, large companies, politicians and any other big powerful organization and give them a "super" page that can have its own fancy background, an auto-play video, and a couple other features. It's not something mentioned on YouTube's pages, in any of the account settings, or even in their help. Interesting....

So, I sent a friendly message to the VA state folks (linky on their channel page, of course). I offered a suggestion about encoding their video to help with the synch issue and inquired about the auto-play video... all in the interest of inter-governmental partnerships, etc...

I got a reply back, and long story short it is indeed a big Google who-you-know thing - the whole VA YouTube thing came out of a meeting between Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Governor Tim Kaine. Within two days, the VA YouTube page launched.

Google Snippets Redux

Ah, well. I thought I had solved my http://www.geocities.com/ericbolstridge problem, but when I Googled "Eric Bolstridge" this morning it came up as the fourth result (behind ericbolstridge.com and this blog). Last night I posted links to some items I sent out to my Freecycle group. The links were to photos that I was hosting on my geocities page (since they have the oh-so-easy upload). I'm guessing that the few people that hit those links made my geocities site jump up in the ranks. So my brilliant "No Snippet" Meta Tag didn't work after all.

Looking into things, I'm now theorizing that Google is getting the site from Dmoz, the open directory. I listed my geocities pages with them way back in the day. So, I sent a correction to them, asking that they remove the site from their listing. We'll see what happens.

Google Snippets

A big part of this whole getting myself online thing was a motivation to get my old college Geocities website out of the top spot when people Google "eric bolstridge." Well, I've definately done that with my new pages, this blog, as well as updating my IMDb profile. But what really did it was simply going to Google and looking into how to force the solution.

Google bots troll the internet grabbing snippets from sites, and it doesn't update those snippets too often for unpopular sites. That's why my old Geocities page still had the old description. So, I added a tag ([googlebot metadata=nosnippet] or something like that) to my geocities page that would make the bot not list the site. Then, I requested the Google bot please re-scrape my site. A couple days later, the site is gone from Google. Yay!