Technically Speaking

twittermoms as profiled by TechCrunch earlier this afternoon has been with Lookery for about a week now. Already they have some pretty nice demographic data.

As I noted in my comment, this is only some of what you can see for FREE. That is empirical audience analytic data!

So the question for you people out there reading this - How come you haven’t signed up your site for Lookery? OH you run a Wordpress blog? Well we took care of that for you also with a WP Plugin for Lookery!

Technically Speaking, we don’t bite, and we go down as easy as Google Analytics. When you sign up you have the full access to your data as outlined here, so what are you waiting for?

Dumb it down

That was a term that an old band of mine used. What we meant by that is, sure any bunch of musicians with a bit of talent could write the next 6-9 minute “Metallica‘isque” opus, but here is the question that you need to ask yourself - “Why?!?”. Is it to satisfy your ego? Is it to impress your fans? Trust me, your fans don’t care.

The general listener (the fan) of music doesn’t care if you wrote a 3:30 hit song or if you wrote the 6 minute song with massive amounts of changes, breakdowns, and segues. Fans do not care. Even the 70% of the crowd that are other bands who are your competition and watching, they do not care. About 1% of the audience gives a hoot that it took days to complete the song. Only 1% of the audience will ever care about the 90% it took to write the 6-9 minute song.

How does that apply to the startup world or to technology in general?

Well case in point. Companies that are successful have a pretty simple idea and concept. Twitter is a great example. Simple idea. Simple concept. When they started out, they had no idea beyond a communication tool. Make sure it worked, and see if we can get some people to use it. Everything else came later.

Of course they had no idea it was going to take off in the massive fashion that it did. But at least they were able to dumb it down enough to be useful and simple. Great concept and great introduction to a world that only 1% cares how it works, what the API does, etc.

Play to your main audience and not the 5 nerds in your basement playing D&D with odd shaped dice. That’s the ticket and the point of “dumb it down“. Technology is impressive only when you make it apparent to your audience what you are doing. Leave the 5 nerds in your basement because they are the 1% that you can address at a later time.

What is this snowglobe thing?

I just logged into my Facebook account a few moments ago, and I was already thinking about posting the above, and saw Yan tweet something about TSA taking a snowglobe from some old man at the airport. I saw the same thing happen a few weeks back in Denver!

TSA - Here is a note for you - Akmehd ain’t going to be carrying a snowglobe! Trust me. Hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings is so 2001. It’s not going to happen again. Akmehd and his group of terrorists are not that stupid.

Further more, why is it every time we all talk about terrorists, we instantly call them “Akmehd” or some other racially profiled Arab name? Don’t you find that a little disturbing that we call every terrorist “Akmehd” or something similar. Makes you think how warped the news media is, driving that thought deep into our head.

“Arabs are bad” “Akmehd is a suspect” “Terrorists will fly planes into buildings again” - Crazy stuff! But it’s the truth, we already racially profile thanks to the mainstream media. Seriously - Bill, the terrorist is not going to make a snowglobe bomb.

For those of you that haven’t caught the new HBO series - “True Blood” - you really need to watch it. It’s a well written show that shows just how racist we really are. Kind of tongue in cheek, but if you have watched, you know where I came up with the last line above about “Bill, the terrorist“.

Technically Speaking, that felt good!

Everything pretty much sucks online these days. It’s the same garbage recycled 25 times over and I still get PR stuff from all sorts of places and people. I know, not one of the big dog blogs, but yes, people still beg me to write about the product that has already been done but done better.

Finally today, someone that actually matters or rather something that matters contacted me. The company is a startup out of San Diego (my #1 favorite city) and is called Collarfree. They are currently running a contest that taps into what does really matter in the next few months - the 2008 general election for the President of the United States.

The contest they are running is called “Keep Politics Positive” which is an oxymoron, but I hope that people realize the days of dirt slinging politics is old news. No one is interested in that anymore. I think it’s great that a t-shirt startup came up with a positive spin on the election.

The contest format is simple. Graphic designers from around the world submit stylish, pro-candidate t-shirt designs into Collar Free’s voting system on a daily basis. The public votes on their favorite shirts for either Obama or McCain. The shirts are then ranked and displayed based on their win percentage, calculated by totaling the positive votes for each design.

This is a leading a trend among online communities called “Crowd Sourcing,” which is the concept of bringing together a large group of people to create a product. Collar Free posts competitions for designers from around the world and allows the public and consumers to select the products they love most. This innovative design process increases demand, reduces risk, and engages customers, in part because shoppers and designers find it fun.

This company is based out of San Diego, CA and was founded in April 2008 by Jimmy Hendricks and Patrick Dillon.

Technically Speaking, I’m so glad that there are startups that are actually doing worthwhile cool stuff still out there. I wish these guys luck and hopefully they can leverage past the 2008 election and have a successful run.

[ This is cross posted from our CTO's blog ]

Today I created a simple plugin that allows you to easily add the Lookery Audience Analytics tracker to your Wordpress blog.

Lookery’s Audience Analytics is like Google Analytics + Compete.com but instead of measuring your site’s “pageviews” and “clicks” Lookery helps you analyze your site’s audience.

We’re working on some great analytics that should be out real soon. Despite being quite early we’re already seeing sites such as ThisNext and ReadWriteWeb signup as early adopters.

I love your feedback. Please let me know how we can improve our analytics and our new Wordpress plugin.

» Amplify your Wordpress Blog with Lookery

[ End of our CTO's cross post]

Now the millions of Wordpress blogs don’t have an excuse. It’s quite easy to start viewing great statistics about your audience. Whether you love stats or only casually follow them, you should always have another point of reference. Lookery gives you that for FREE. All you have to do is sign up for an account.

And if you love that money, well we are also an ad network! We serve over a billion ads a week to sites within the social networks such as MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, and the list goes on. We also serve ads outside the social nets. The combination of the two means we are a powerful force in the ad network world. But if you are in it for the love of statistics, well you have come to the right place.

There have been some detractors to our business over the past few days since our coverage of our recent closing of funding of $2.25 million. That’s quite fine, as we welcome the opportunity to educate our users and our potential new users. In the next few months we will be quite busy letting people know that Lookery isn’t the evil doers that have left a bad taste in the mouth of many online.

It’s not the first time that personally speaking I have been related to the dark side or being pointed out as evil. I usually smile at the challenge of speaking to that ignorance of not knowing it all. The worst thing that I have always seen in the human character in general are the people that are willing to go out and spread the word of evil only because they are not educated in regards to what they speak of. See for example the Salem Massachusetts witch burnings. In other words, you know them well - the mister or miss know it all that in the end really only has a vague idea of what they are really talking about.

Misinformation has always been a challenge to overcome, but we are in love with the opportunity and challenges that lie ahead. While we will always have an ad network for the money that our publishers love to receive monthly, what good is running ads if you have no idea what your audience wants, likes, or is really coming to your site for? That is why you have to love the free opportunity that is available to you to study the analytics that have always been there, but now we make it visual.

Technically Speaking, I cracked a smile at the person that accused Lookery of being evil; honestly do you think it’s the first time I’ve been associated with evil in my life? Take a number, sit back, and become educated on Lookery’s goodness.

Lookery spent the last few days in Boulder, CO and thanks to the people at TechStars for letting us use their cool space called the bunker. It was great meeting some of the Boulder startup people on Thursday evening at our get together we had. Also nice to finally meet in person was Gnip’s founder Eric.

Being the virtual company we are, as I mentioned jokingly in my last post about “Lookery East” and “Lookery West”, it was great finally having all of Lookery in one location. The about 10 miles west of the Mississippi puts me in the Lookery West “office“; virtually of course.

During our time in Boulder, VentureBeat was the first to finally cover our latest funding round of $2.25 million. They always do a great write up since Matt only hires the best writers to cover the beat.

Other coverage you can read of this is GigaOm’s coverage by Carleen Hawn - which tells the story of how to go really lean and do funding in a way that makes sense, and also another PaidContent post by David Kaplan who did correct the post, as it originally stated we “troll” for data which is a bad implication to crawling for data. We don’t “crawl” for data folks, companies and private sites give us data!

Why would companies just give us data?

Because we do not break privacy boundaries. All the data we have is anonymous. I guess that is one point I really want to stress. We are in total compliance with all the privacy laws. The above blogs did great coverage, but there are always comments about privacy and the data we collect. I’d like to address that now.

People, you know the type, will always say we (Lookery) can identify you and where you live and who your children are and what kind of car you drive, you sexual preference, what you like to eat, etc.. etc.. from our data. No we can’t. ASL (Age, Sex, Location) or AGL (Age, Gender, Location) data is what we collect. The two terms you will often see(ASL and AGL) are what we do. We are not the bad guys that get all the press that you read about lately. Those companies that collect that kind of data scare all of us.

To address the question, companies either just love us or they want some money! Data is worth love and money to many. The money part, you really should contact us and speak to one of our data sales experts.

The love part is - who wouldn’t love to see data about their site and use it to drive more traffic? It also becomes love once you can show advertisers what is driving traffic to your site. And of course that can lead to money for your site. So love and money. Anonymous data. You just gotta love it - especially for blogs and site owners - who would love to just make some more money!

What can a regular web site or blog do to take advantage of the data that is out there today?

Why they can easily sign up and start running the JS code today. We already have announced in the past few weeks all the great data you can see for FREE about your site.

There really should be no fear factor in putting the JS code on your site, as noted in this blog post - it’s a cookie! That’s it. A simple cookie that you already are using (I’m assuming you are if you are a site that loves some stats!) - Google Analytics!

Here are some cool stats about my blog, and I get this information for free and so can you by signing up for a Lookery account, and placing a simple javascript on your site(s). My site’s stats are right here in the Lookery network pages.

The above screenshots are the August 2008 stats for my site. Since my readership is no where near one of the big dog blogs, there is still little data for September 2008. But of course, you can check that out at my network page link above!

Oh and if you are a blog/blogger that maybe wants to see what drives the big dogs, you should check out ReadWriteWeb. They are one of my favorite blogs to read with their great blogger crew that is headed up by blogger/writer extrodinaire Marshall - no last name needed.

Technically Speaking, if you haven’t installed the Lookery cookie (JS Code) on your site yet, you are soon going to be left behind all of your peers in whatever type site you have. The adoption of the Lookery cookie has been phenomenal thus far and we’d love to be able to show you the free data that is out there about your site!