Social Network Standards

The web community is hot on the trail for social network standards. On the surface this sounds like a great idea. Provides web developers and thus companies to focus on the content and not so much on the technology (software) to provide a platform for their tools and thus applications. The standards dubbed OpenSocial will let a software developer write one program that can then be used on any network ranging Facebook to MySpace or even Google. There are many services out there already with the best known being Plaxo and Linkedln. Very nice graphical user interface (GUI) for a very easy user experience and thus productivity with their offerings is very high.

Today we are watching and listening to Google and Microsoft face off to take each other on in the market for the allmighty advertising dollar. So, how do you attract the ad dollars you ask? Simple, it's about traffic. He/She who owns the traffic commands the ad dollars. Today it's the PC and tomorrow it will be bluetooth devices to mobile telehphony. For that matter, where is CISCO on this topic? Hmmmm.

We digress. Fundamentally we support standards. Most of the benefits far out weigh the risk. Did I say risk? Social network standards could lead to a higher risk of personal information being leaked out on the web. We have already seen what can happen with institutions that are hacked or stolen from internally by disgruntled employees who can walk right out of a building with 1000's of records if the controls are not there. Even if they are we have seen theft occur so nothing is without flaw.

The standards must be accomponied by a serious limit on the actual data collection process especially for pre teens and the under 18 group as well. This group is by far the most vulnerable and frequently attacked for innocent looking requests for information. The more we do now the better we can defend and prevent serious comprimising of the network itself.

Web Traffic Analysis

This article will outline a few different methods to analyze your website's traffic.

Everyone is familiar with the flashy javascript visitor counter that appears on many a poorly designed website. While having a visible counter on your homepage or index page can be a huge source of embarrassment or ridicule, there are ways of placing a visitor counter in such a way that only you can see it. Nevertheless, this method only records the number of hits to your website, and is obviously a poor method of analyzing visitor traffic.

Another method is to use your ISP's statistical package. Most business friendly ISPs provide this service free of charge, although some will try to bill you for it. There are a few statistical packages available online such as Analog, Getstats and wwwstats. Using these softwares you can get a greater and deeper understanding of your website traffic beyond what a mere counter can achieve. Some data of interest would be the number of distinct hosts and the total data transferred. The number of distinct hosts roughly correlates to the number of different people who visited your website over the time period. While it does not tell you what they do, it is a better way of counting visitors compared to counters which log requests instead. Total data transferred can have implications for your web hosting package or ISP costs, and is important that you take note of this as well.

A more in-depth analysis can usually be obtained by using web traffic analysis software, which sometimes come with your web hosting company or publishing platform. You can find out where your visitors come from, how they discover your website, which pages are the most popular, which search engines are the best for your website, which banner ads are showing the greatest income, which web browsers to optimize your web pages for and even find out where bad links or errors are occurring in your website.

Through the smart use of web traffic analysis, you can find out pertinent data which can help you fine tune your website and web marketing strategy. Without doing analysis, your website is hindered from achieving its full potential, akin to driving blindfolded. Web traffic analysis is the compass to the ship that is your website. Let web traffic analysis show you the direction your website should take and what you should do to improve your business, affiliate marketing website, or blog.

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