December 2010 Archives

I don't try to post every day. That might be good for building audience numbers, but I'm much more interested in working out new ideas, and so I post when I have something to say. At year-end, it's curious and a little upsetting that so many of the year's most-viewed posts are from the past. So here's a quick list of posts from 2010 that I'd like to see people discover.

• Five Modes of Listening
  I keep seeing dismissive references to "just listening" this year. Every time, I want to say, "of course you don't 'just' listen. It's a metaphor; don't limit it with a simplistic interpretation." Breaking out five modes of listening expands the definition in one dimension; how many more can you think of?

• Tell Me Your Metrics…
  The latest on measurement silos and the clubs who work in them. This is why we started AnalyticsCamp. Have you gone out to lunch with an analyst from a different specialty yet?

• And Not Or and What's Just Outside Your Focus?
  Expanding our interpretation of the listening metaphor is just one example of applying divergent thinking to find more opportunities. I don't have anything against focus, but if nobody explores the edges, we won't discover anything new.

• Applying Social Network Analysis to Social Media
  Not only is SNA different from SMA, we're really just getting started at using them together.

• The Importance of the Analyst, Learning Curves for Social Media Analysis, and Can Analytics Be Taught?
  When people complain that the software doesn't automate the analytics role, ask them when software ever replaced insight. Analytics is a power tool, which works best in the hands of a skilled specialist.

• Whose Ethics Apply in Social Media? and Ethical Standards for Listening Vendors
  Big, unanswered questions. What will happen in 2011?

• Social Buzzword Bingo
  I went for a humorous approach, but the point is that social is a seriously abused buzzword, especially in the hands of trendsetters who are unaware of the existing language.
  

And then there's the draft folder, which tells me there's plenty left to do in the new year.

Another year gone, another post or two in the archive. And now it's time to see which posts got the most attention this year.

1. Monitoring Social Media Before You Have a Budget - May 2008 (#1 in 2009)

2. Visual text analysis - April 2007 (#4 in 2009)

3. Sentiment Analysis is Not a Mood Ring - March 2010

4. Human vs. machine analysis - April 2007 (#7 in 2009)

5. Corporate social media specialists - September 2007 (#5 in 2009)

6. 5 Manly Things - February 2009

7. Comparing Social Media Analysis Platforms - March 2010

8. Professional-Strength Social Media Aggregators - June 2010

9. New Dashboards Blend Analytics Sources - September 2010

10. Guide to Social Media Analysis - June 2007 (#9 in 2009)
    

It's interesting to see the year-to-year changes in the list. Four current-year posts appear this year, up from only two last year. Still, half the list is not only old posts, but old posts from the 2009 list. Clearly, a list of free stuff is popular, but some of these are surprising—I guess there's no correlation between the effort required to write a post and its enduring popularity.

Some of the biggest ideas are stuck in draft—or hidden in business plans—but there's another list of my favorite idea posts of 2010.

AnalyticsCamp went well last year, and we're doing it again on March 12.

Mark your calendars and start working on your session plans. This should be good.

Comic courtesy of xkcd. It comes as a shirt, too. Maybe we'll come up with a prize for wearing one to AnalyticsCamp.

Ugh. Yahoo is killing off Delicious, the social bookmarking service that I've used since 2005. This is inconvenient. I don't need to spend my time rebuilding stuff that already works.

First priority is saving all the bookmarks. Frank Gruber posted a list of backup options to cover the basics. At least I don't have to worry about losing the bookmarks entirely. The challenge here is to replace what Delicious does in my publishing workflow. Just saving links doesn't meet the requirement.

I don't have the answer for that, yet. So far, I'm collecting names of services that might work. Here's what I've seen mentioned:

• Diigo
  
• Google Bookmarks
  
• Kippt
  
• Licorize
  
• Pinboard
  
• Rinnku
  
• YourVersion
  
• Zootool
  

Any other suggestions? I use Delicious to support dynamic content on multiple websites. Replacing it kind of matters to me.

I don't suppose anyone thought of offering Delicious Pro accounts. I do pay for some of the other services I'm using. Would revenue make a difference to Yahoo?

Update 12/17: Now Yahoo says they're selling Delicious, not shutting it down. That would be better.

Note to self: Figure out which other Yahoo properties I use. Migrate. Don't look back.