ClustrMaps – Hit Counter Map Shows Locations of All Visitors to Your Site
A few days ago you will remember how I created a weblog entry regarding one of the latest releases from Google to help webmasters get some more statistics from the web sites they may have under their control through the usage of Google Analytics and free of charge. Back then I mentioned as well how I was trying to set up an account over there to check, first, how it would work and, secondly, to get some statistics on elsua. That way, I would be able to get to know you a bit more about where you may be coming from, how much time you spend over here and so forth.
So far I have been using Miarroba for which I still have got an account and have got some really useful data that I will be weblogging about every now and then to give you some further stats. And the same would happen with Google Analytics; once I start getting some results about those statistics I will be surely sharing some comments over here as well with a couple of screen shots so that you can get to see who you all are.
But in the mean time and while all that data gathers itself further how about some instant feedback directly available from my weblog template? That would be neat, right ? Well, it looks like there is a way now. Check out ClustrMaps. A new beta offering that allows you to have a web site counter that will graphically tell you where the visitors are coming from and place them as a red dot in a worldwide map. Pretty amazing, eh ?
Indeed, lately, there has been a proliferation of different online tools that would help you get some online awareness for whatever the type of web application you may be using. And ClustrMaps seems to be a pretty decent attempt at that. In fact, I doubt there would be a much easier user interface to get that kind of information directly from whatever the online service and have it added into your web site with such ease of use.
Again the interesting thing about ClustrMaps is the fact that groups of people, whether they are teams or communities, or whatever other group gathering, have now got the opportunity to explore further web presence in a much more powerful way while navigating and visiting web sites. So, for weblogs, for instance, team / community members would have an opportunity to see right away where those hits are coming from and somehow that may also help out define the type of content shared in those weblogs in order to suit the needs from the audience, if they would want to accommodate that, that is.
Certainly an offering worth while considering and adding to your web site if you are planning to get some instant feedback on web presence from those folks who may be coming forward and visit your weblog, for instance. I have now got mine added into my weblog template and it looks like that it will get started providing some data from tomorrow onwards so I will be looking forward to getting some more information about elsua’s visitors, you folks. I bet you would also be interested as well in getting your own and add it to your weblog. So you may as well go ahead and do it ! And the sooner, the better !
Technorati Tags : ClustrMaps, Metablogging, Counter+Map
Swicki – Community-Powered Search at Its Best
If you have been visiting my weblog going through the direct link as opposed to the actual syndication feed you will have noticed by now a couple of changes on the actual weblog template itself. The most notorious one and the one for which this weblog post is meant is Swicki. And the reason why I think it is worth while mentioning is because this is a relatively new offering that tries to fill in a gap in the searching world out there. That gap is the one of a community-powered search where community members help build up a common set of keywords and their results from a community perspective as opposed to an individual perspective, which is what you would get with traditional search engines. In short, and like it is mentioned on the web site itself:
Swickis harness the collective intelligence of and strengthen your community.
Pretty neat, eh ? But it gets better, folks. Now consider the fact that most of those community members may be dispersed and may have an already existing connection through the usage of particular collaboration tools to share knowledge like Wikis or weblogs or even Instant Messaging, but were missing the fact that they didn’t have a common repository of keywords they could search on from all of the different resources they would be using. Now with Swicki things are different. The circle will be closed since community members would have the opportunity to collaborate offline through Wikis and weblogs or in real-time with Instant Messaging and, finally, with the chance to put that altogether into a dynamic search engine that community members can refer to back and forth and help it grow further as time goes by.
And that is the real power from Swicki. Not the fact that it may be another powerful search engine, but the fact that it establishes a connection between the different community members by allowing them to build that powerful search engine based on their sharing of sets of keywords. And that would be the main key success factor from this, so far beta, offering. Worth while watching it how it evolves for sure, which is why I have decided to include it in my weblog template and continue to use it more and more. And later on in time I will be weblogging about it some more to share with you folks what my experience has been so far.
Thus if you are part of a community and want to build up that community-powered search engine I would certainly recommend you give a try to Swicki. It will help you build those stronger links and trust levels and become much more integrated with the rest of your fellow community members. So you may want to go ahead and create your own Swicki now !
Technorati Tags : Swicki
