semwired

We all know the importance in today web of social networks. Nowadays even seo firms consider specific actions such as social media optimization when working on linkbuilding strategies.

The ongoing democratization of the web is leading the internet towards a collaborative juggernaut which autonomsly decides what’s interesting and what it is not… finally the silent majority of the modern world has got a media to express itself. Therefore, a successful internet entity, whether it’s a company or a personal website, has to be able to manage its presence and reputation on social network platforms, also considering this as a standard metric for feedback.

Beside all this gibberish philosophical intro, the bottom line is: can we track traffic (and other metrics) coming from the main social network platforms with Google Analytics?

VKI studios came out with another great extension for firefox which basically appends at the end of each page report a list of social bookmark website in which the page has been mentioned.

By this time, the report includes the following social bookmarks:

• Reddit
• Stumble Upon
• Digg
• Delicious
• Sphinn (SEO social bookmark)
• Mixx

It also checks the page status on Yahoo Website Explorer. I hope this will come handy, but more importantly, to have your pages on one of these social bookmark

This plugin is available only in english and requires GreaseMonkey.

Since I’m constantly trying to improve my workflow I’m always looking for new add-ons and extension to customize my Firefox installation.

Last time I wrote a list of the most useful Firefox SEO extensions, this time I’ll go through all the Firefox extensions for Google Analytics I’m currently using on my machine.

The main purpose of this extensions is to ease user’s life and also getting a better overview on Analytics: access quickly to custom reports, quickly identify domains, import and export data as fast as possible.

WASP: If it is not the best one from the lot, probably is the most complete of all. It’s not Google Analytics specific, you can use with pretty much any online marketing and analytics solution on the market. It comes with a standalone crawler and it can also provide detailed information about the data being collected trough Query String and Cookies by web analytics solutions (called “tags”, “trackers” or “web bug”) not only by Google Analytics.

GA: this tiny bit of code just tells you if Google Analytics is running on the page you currently visiting. Not big deal. Still useful for those who need to do some reverse web-engeneering… Here’s the author’s homepage.

Fire Analytics: Google Analytics gets as close as one click away with this extension. Set up your personal Analytics account and and flick through your stats straight from Firefox.

Better google analytics: awesome compilation of GreaseMonkey script to enhance your Google stats. It comes with media and social metrics, import&export of tables and dates.

Goal Copy: This extension basically is a work around for those who have a bunch of accounts with the same goals and want to manage them in the easiest way possible. It’s more for the pro-user with an intense use of Analytics, but it might come handy for the most as well.

Google Analytics Notes : this one is for those who have loads of accounts to manage and need to distinguish in between account leaving some notes around. Basically it adds a ‘Show Notes’ button in the GA menu ba. Here’s the author’s page.

Counterpixel: The tool tries to find counting/measurement pixel of tracking software from different services and companies. It’s a good alternative to Ghostery, which I have already mentioned on this post.

Gmail Filters made easy

Some time ago Google has made available a new feature by which you can upload filters with an XML file.

The good thing about this is that you can just write down a single file and define all the filters in there and then load them at once.

The file structure will look like this:

<entry>
    <title>Mail Filter</title>
    <apps:property name='from' value='semwired@gmail.com'/>
    <apps:property name='label' value='semwired mails'/>
</entry>

You can easily download, share and upload new filters from Settings -> Filters.

How much would you pay a friend for giving you a single advice for a movie?

Not much I guess. After all it’s just a few words. But try to see from the perspective of a business in which word-of-mouth is crucial to a long-term growth.

Netflix is giving away 1.000.000$ to anybody able to provide a fully working algorithm to give users reliable advice based on movie already seen.

It’s quite an interesting topic. No matter how much research we able to do but it’s really hard for a computer to beat our best friend reccomandation.

Here’s a more  detailed explanation but if you dare to go through a massive pdf with a proper scientific essay on the topic.

Btw, if you’re into movies and struggling to find out something cool, check the 10 best film search engines by CNET.