Wikipedia

Rachel Sterne, our third Sources Go Direct panelist —

We've already announced the first two Sources Go Direct panelsts, Nick Denton and Fred Wilson.

Nick is our contrarian -- I'm expecting him to say that while distribution is now electronic, news flows much as it did when distribution was on paper. Or something like that. ";->"

Nick is also a focal point for a wide-ranging and often emotional debate about how sources are used to get information that companies are reluctant to share. Many of us, myself included, have a strong interest in knowing about Apple's products in development, as much as Apple has an interest in controlling how much we know and when we know it. I think it's good that people like Nick are trying to get the information we want, when we want it. I can empathize with Apple's perspective, having spent many years as a commercial software developer. But I've often been frustrated at how much the tech press seems to serve the interests of industry at the expense of users. It's good, imho, that Nick is pushing the envelope here, and helping strike a different, healthier balance. I expect some of the people in the room to disagree, respectfully of course.

Fred was the first VC to use the web in a personal way to create new relationships with entrepreneurs and other investors, to learn about new tools, and to share what he has learned. All this has allowed him to do venture capital in completely new ways.

Rachel Sterne, CEO of "citizen journalism" site GroundReport provides a platform for 5000 independent writers and editors who contribute their work to produce something analogous to a newspaper as Wikipedia relates to a pre-Internet encyclopedia.

In the early days of news on the web, Salon boasted that they were sending a reporter to Yugoslavia, a sign of their maturing to become a more substantial news organization. I was skeptical, thinking that we, the world wide web, were already there. Our network wasn't that well organized in 1999, but thanks to the work of Rachel and others, we are there today, and the dream of 1999 is being realized in 2010. Scott Rosenberg, one of the founders of Salon has already registered for the event. It'll be interesting to hear his perspective. Jay Rosen, who Rachel says has inspired her work at GroundReport will be there too, of course. ";->"

As mainstream journalism pulls back, as international bureaus close around the world, it seems Rachel and Co may be building the distribution system that gets us the news we need.

So we have three very different perspectives on our panel on Wednesday, but in no way do they cover the entire spectrum. That's why our session will add some of the elements of a BloggerCon-style unconference. We will have a "monitor" with a wireless mike available to help you add your point of view to the discussion (which will also be webcast, the backchannel will be on IRC and Twitter). You can ask questions, but you can also simply comment. We don't draw a very bold line between the stage and the room, we understand that there will be 125 incredibly smart, experienced and knowledgeable people in the room, and we want to tap into as much of that as we possibly can.

The session will last one hour and fifteen minutes. After that we will switch format to an "open newsroom," an idea I've wanted to try for quite some time. Bring your laptop, netbook or iPad, we'll provide wifi and refreshments. The discussion will continue and we can all write our blog posts and do it in any collaborative fashion that makes sense to you. If it goes as I think it will, the newsroom will be every bit as valuble as the panel discussion. It's an experiment, so it'll be new, that's for sure. ";->"

We've set up a website with links to all the resources for the event at go.hypercamp.org.

Tickets are free at Eventbrite and we'll webcast via Ustream.

TomTom: Why smartphones won't destroy our business — TomTom's senior VP of market development says portable navigation devices are alive and kicking--and getting smarter, with Wikipedia-like consensus and intelligent routing.

25 Free Google Analytics Alternatives —

In my last post, I had a little rant about the Google Analytics Opt-out add-on. Obviously, I am a little disappointed in the direction, but I have a general rule that I like to live by, “Don’t just complain about the problem, give me a solution.” There is an inherent difficulty of providing timely content and following this rule in the same post. Basically, the amount of time to research a solution or alternative would make the original content stale. So, I posted the rant. Now, I am here to give you a list of various free web analytics tools that you can use as an alternative to Google Analytics. This is not a recommendation of any specific tool as I have not had the opportunity to really try them out yet.

First, let’s get some basics covered. According to Wikipedia, web analytics is “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.” To make that a little more clear, we collect data from our users in order to optimize web pages to generate more revenue or pageviews. There is also a professional association for web analytics that is backed by some major players in industry.

Below is the list of the free web analytics services that I found so far. If you know of other solutions that are not mentioned or I have miscategorized something, please let me know in the comments and I will try to update this post in the near future.

Log File Analyzers

Log file analyzers are the original analytics tools and summarize activity based on the http web logs. These tools are limited to whatever data is contained within the log files. If you are looking to capture more advanced analytics or analytics for ecommerce (which requires custom tracking), you will need to look at the other software and services that are available.

Analog – Their own description says it best: “The most popular logfile analyser in the world. Combined with Report Magic, you can generate even prettier reports.

AWStats – This is one of the oldest products available. If you have a hosted web site, you are likely using this in some way.

Deep Log Analyzer – This is a freemium tool that has a solid set of basic reports. The free version does not include custom reporting or report exports.

GoingUp – Free log file analysis tool and a whole bunch of other tools. They seem to focus more on SEO tools.

JAWStats – Free and open source companion to AWStats. AWStats gives you excellent data and JAWStats gives you pretty reports.

W3Perl – This is a free tool that works with FTP, Squid and Mail servers in addition to the standard web server analysis.

Webalizer – This has been around for years. It is for more technically savvy users, but they do provide a “simpletons guide to web server analysis.”

WebLog Expert – This is a freemium package for log analysis. The free Lite version provides only basic reporting with no customization.

Remote Hosted Services

Lastly, there are the hosted services similar to Google Analytics. Hosted packages typically require you to include a few lines of simple JavaScript code in all of your pages. In the hosted services, they will capture the data so all of your traffic information will be in the service provider’s database on the service provider’s server.

Clicky - Real-time data, but only free under 3000 daily pageviews. For most bloggers, 90,000 pageviews per month is a huge number, so that limit is not a huge deal.

eXTReMe Tracking – The free offering provides very simple analytics without any advanced functionality like segmentation. They have a paid version as well.

FoxMetrics – In addition to real-time standard page tracking, this tool is based on event tracking which allows you to track almost anything on your pages. There is very little information available besides the home page.

GoStats – This is one of the freemium packages. The free version gives you that visible hit counter. The premium version an hide the hit counter and give you some simple analytics.

IceRocket Blog Tracker – IceRocket is best known for blog search, but they have a nice, simple, and free analytics package. Like some of the more complete packages, Blog Tracker includes referrers, search keywords and geolocation reports.

Reinvigorate – This offers real-time tracking, a nice visual design of the reporting and a desktop client. They are in a private beta and there is not enough documentation to figure out how deep the analytics features are.

Site Meter – This is a freemium service that is fairly well known. The free version gives mostly basic statistics and requires a site counter to appear on your pages. They have several premium tiers based on traffic.

stat24 – This is a freemium service, like a few others. However, the free version is very limited. There are a few premium tiers based on traffic that are not too expensive.

StatCounter – A fairly simple free product, unless you have more than 250,000 page views. Be aware that they consider themselves a web page counter, and do not mention analytics on their site even though they do provide what is considered basic web analytics.

Woopra – A freemium service that captures real-time data and offers a desktop client. This is one of the few desktop clients available. It is free up to 30,000 monthly pageviews, but it only maintains 3 months of historical data in the free version.

Yahoo! Web Analytics – This is Yahoo’s offering of their IndexTools acquisition and provides real-time data and some advanced reporting capabilities. Obviously, you need a Yahoo account to use it.

Self Hosted Software

Self hosted software packages require more technical knowledge because you need to install and configure everything. This would include creating the database tables, installing the server software and modifying your pages to track statistics. You also need to be aware that analytics data can get large fairly quickly so you may need to purchase some extra disk space.

FireStats – Trac is free for non-commercial usage, but their restrictions on commercial use are vague enough that most bloggers would require one.

Grape Web Statistics – Another free and open source tool, and this is one of the newer tools available with v0.2 beta 2 recently released.

Open Web Analytics – An open source, PHP-based solution. It also has built-in support for WordPress and MediaWiki.

Piwik – Another open source tool that “aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics”. Probably the most mature open source package.

SlimStat – This has recently been rewritten to be faster and smaller than previous versions. It also has an XML API.

TraceWatch – Another free and self-hosted platform. It does not seem to have segmentation, but it does have path analysis which is typically not available in free tools.

Other tools that you may have heard of that I did not list for some reason:

• BBClone was  last updated March 1, 2008 and only describes itself as a web counter on steroids.
• Crazy Egg offers heat mapping tools that are very useful, but not pure web analytics services.
• Enquisite is now known  as EightFold Logic, and seems to be more of an internet marking firm. I could not find a product link anywhere.
• Mint is mentioned in a lot of cases because it is really cheap (currently $30) and self-hosted.
• phpMyVisites has become Piwik and is no longer being updated under the phpMyVisites name.
• 103bees is described as a search engine traffic analysis tool. There is little documentation available, you cannot currently register except for a notification list, and it looks like a premium tool with a free trial.

In my research, I did come across an interesting list at SixRevisions that is over a year old, but it includes some other tools that I did not mention and it has some good links as well.

Related posts:

• Google Analytics Throws A Bone To Privacy Zealots
• Irony Is Still Free
• Google Shows Us The Future

Why do you blog if not for money? —

Blogging is just one form of content creation and creative expression available to us all on the Web.  The term blog, or weblog, has been around for twelve years.  People were journaling and posting articles and other content on the Web long before that.  People have been self-publishing in other media for hundreds of years.

Plenty of people have advice on the best ways to write a post, getting traffic to your blog, making money from your blog, and so on.

Some people will give you lots of advice on the topic(s) that you should focus your blog on.

It seems like we’ve got this whole blogging thing covered.

But then there’s one other little question that’s the most interesting of all…

WHY?

Why do we blog?  Why do we write? Why do we spend hours upon hours slaving in front of computers?  Why do we wring our brains madly on a regular basis trying to think of new and interesting things to say?  Why do we get frustrated when the words won’t come?

Some people create content in order to make money directly off their blogs by selling advertising, using affiliate links to sell stuff (I do this through my book reviews but I try not to be a PITA about it), selling their own products, etc.  That’s fine.  It’s pretty obvious that some people are trying to make their living directly through selling stuff on their blog and that’s cool.

Then there are tons of us who aren’t focusing on direct monetization, including a huge group of people who aren’t in it for the money at all.

That is what I’m interested in learning about.

Why do we blog?  More specifically, why do YOU blog?

Yes, it’s reader participation time and I’m writing this specifically for YOU. I’m being nosy today and I want to know why you do it.  What are your goals, dreams, aspirations, hopes, and wishes from this powerful medium:

• Are you burning with the desire to get things off your chest?
• Are you trying to change the world?
• Are you bored and in need of something to occupy your mind?
• Are you communicating for someone who can’t speak for themselves?
• Are you using your blog as a platform or stepping stone for bigger and better things?
• Are you using the blog as a way to connect with like-minded people?
• Are you channeling an alien intelligence?
• Etc.

Many of the items in this list apply to me (although I can’t prove that I’m channeling an alien intelligence… yet…)

I’m really curious about this.  I think introspection is a powerful tool and we can learn a lot by examining why we want to do things.  I think we all learn from seeing these ideas in print.

Please share your thoughts in the comment section so we can all learn from this.  If you write your own post about this, link back to this post and I’ll create a link back to you in this post.

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Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

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• Are questions getting in the way of publishing something?

The US Air Force, Pratt & Whitney, and Boeing are jointly developing a hypersonic aircraft that can travel faster than existing cruise missiles. It's powered by a crazy-sounding "air-breathing hypersonic engine that has virtually no moving parts" and reached a speed of 3500 mph in a recent test.

"This is truly transformational technology," Brink said. "This engine can be considered the next step in aviation. It's as big of leap as it was when we went from propellers to jet engines."

You can read more about scramjet engines on Wikipedia. (via @bldgblog)

Tags: flying

Top 10 YouTube Videos About Printing 3D Objects —

A world where we download objects off the Web the same way we currently download our data? If this futuristic notion is one day going to come true, it's thanks to 3D printing developers like FormZ, ProtoPulsion, Z Corp, Print2 3D, and Thing Labs. Our selection of the top videos mostly come from these companies.

The number one video in this collection, however, is more ideal than real. The Star Trek Replicator according to Wikipedia "...can create any inanimate matter, as long as the desired molecular structure is on file, but it cannot create antimatter, dilithium, latinum, or a living organism of any kind. In theory it seems to work similar to a universal assembler." In the real world, today's developers have countless innovations they must achieve before 3D printers can come anywhere near Star Trek's replicator. But once it does become possible, what's the first object you'd most want to download off the Web?

Sponsor

1. Star Trek Voyager: Tom Paris orders Hot Plain Tomato Soup




2. 3D Printing a human head on a Zcorp Z450 Printer




3. 3D printing for architects




4. 3D Printer from Thinglab in London




5. What Can You Make With a 3D Printer?




6. 3D printing demo -- ball bearings!




7. Interview with cheap desktop fabricator inventor




8. ProtoPulsion uPrint Personal 3D Printer




9. formz 3D Printing




10. 3D printing in 4 simple steps: Shapeways

Discuss

A few years ago, Terry Jones sold his London apartment so that he could single-mindedly pursue a rather radical idea. What if a database worked like Wikipedia—it was not only readable by everybody, but also writeable by everybody?

The problem with databases today is that they are silos of data. Even the databases on the Web are separated from one another and must speak to each other through highly-defined APIs. While most developers equate the flowering of machine-to-machine APIs with the open Web, Jones sees them as controlling. So Jones created a new kind of database called FluidDB (and a company, FluidInfo) with a much more flexible database language which can essentially create database mashups and allow developers to pull data together in unanticipated ways. FluidDb is a shared database for applications. “Imagine if applications with related data were no longer forced to store it in unrelated places,” says Jones.

In his demo at TC Disrupt, he showed an app he threw together called Tickery which is based on FluidDB. It allows you to put in any two Twitter account names and compare the overlapping set of people they follow. But Jones also pulled in data from other sources besides Twitter, such as TunkRank, which sliced the results by influence, and an app he built called Wemet.at which lets people indicate which of the people they follow on Twitter they’ve actually met in real life. He pulled in data from other sources as well, including CrunchBase.

Once in FluidDB, which acts as one giant repository, the data becomes more malleable. Anyone can add to it or query it in any way, even in ways unanticipated by the designers of the database.

On stage, Jones used Tickery to winnow down the overlapping people several investors are following until he ended up with one profile: his own. That was his way of announcing a new $800,000 round of seed funding from betaworks, Founder Collective, RRE, Roger Ehrenberg, and Joshua Schachter. Previously, he raised $540,000 from friends, family, and Esther Dyson.

“The future of data is a writeable future” says Jones, “where any person or application can come along and add information without asking for permission, where data is social, where data that is related lives in the same place.”

Q&A

Chi-hua Chien, Kleiner Perkins: How do you get people to put data i?

Jones: You can make your data more valuable by storing it in a context where it is more useful. Also a flexible permssion system in FluidDB, so you don’t have an edit war like in a wiki.

Who else has the guts to ask a question?

Yossi Vardi: I am concerned that it has some terrifying privacy consequences. I mean it is good, but we will have to kill you.

Jones: the best answer to that question if it was a question is that FluidDb has been written to be extremely simple. There is not a lot that can go wrong. Not a lot in FluidDB, tags

Don Dodge, Google: Security and privacy are fundamental issues for anyone building applications. The hard part is making the developers feel comfortable with it

Jones: I think that is an evolutionary process. The fact that I’ve met John Borthwick, I don’t really care if that is public

Vardi: Is Ron Conway here? Two years ago, he said nothing exists outside Silicon Valley. I want to hear his view. Actually, he told me , he said he was blind, now invested in 20 companies in NYC.

Jones: FluidInfo is in NY because of the vision of John Borthwick and Andrew Weissman

Bijan Sabet, Spark Capital: It is nice to see an entrepreneur who has committed so much of his life to a product. We like to see that. I think the privacy thing is an important issue.

Jones: We will opensource FluidDB so that people will be able to open the code and develop confidence that it is robust. It is very easy to use FluidDB in an incremental way as long as you have meta data

We took Esther Dyson’s Flickr photos and calculated the white balance, show me the photos that are overexposed.

We are only a few hours away from kicking off the first ever TechCrunch Disrupt conference and we are thrilled to announce the 20 startups that were chosen out of hundreds to present their applications over the next few days. We will also hear pitches from the two StartupAlley companies that receive the most votes over the next two days.

These startups will battle it out over three intense days, with one of these startups eventually taking home $50,000.

Audioo: The Audioo platform allows users to auto-stream, publicly share, and store voicemails from handsets and services including Google Voice.

Appbistro: Appbistro is an application marketplace for Facebook pages.

Art.sy: Art.sy is the destination to discover and share original fine art online.

Betterment: Betterment is intended to be a replacement for your savings account, allowing you to invest in two portfolios.

ChompOn: ChompOn allows any business to run its own social flash sales.

Compass Labs: Compass Labs is a social e-commerce ad network for Twitter.

Fluidinfo: FluidInfo is a Wikipedia of databases – a shared online always-writable cloud database.

Geotoko: Geotoko is a promotional campaign management platform for geo location based services.

Keenkong: Keenkong is a social media monitoring engine that extracts why people are talking, what are they talking about, who they are and then segments messages accordingly.

Live Matrix: Live Matrix is a guide to video events and streams taking place on the web.

Movieclips.com: Movieclips.com is an online database of movie clips.

NoiseToys: NoiseToys is a software company uses games and competition to encourage users to share and discover music.

Off & Away: Off & Away is an online travel site that offers exceptional travel experiences in fun and unique ways.

Publish2: Publish2 allows newspapers to create a comprehensive, customized newswire for print.

Soluto: Soluto’s software aims to detect PC users’ frustrations, reveal their cause, learn which actions really eliminate them and improve user experience.

Textingly: Textingly provides a texting address, a web management console and apis for businesses to create immediate, two-way dialog with their customers.

Tickreel: Tickreel is a web filter that makes the web less of a black box and significantly improves how users consume the web.

UJAM: UJAM is a cloud-based platform that allows users to create new music or enhance their existing musical talent and share it with friends.

VideoGenie: VideoGenie allows companies to customer-source video testimonials.

WeReward: WeReward is a mobile incentive platform that rewards consumers for check-ins or performing tasks.

A First-Ever Look At The Top Blogger.com Wordpress.com & Typepad.com Blogs? —

My friends at Postrank unveiled yet another cool public tool this week. Postrank Labs now allows you to compare and contrast three separate websites based on their engagement scores. Consider it kind of a Compete.com view of a given blog or website’s engagement rather than traffic.

Something I noticed about Labs was that it also delineated out five subdomains within each website and scored their respective engagement score. This was the first I’d ever seen someone have the ability to determine differences between subdomains. Certainly, the information is there and accessible somehow (otherwise Postrank wouldn’t have it), but I’d not seen it yet.

I’m sure some techy is going to make fun of me for not tapping into publicly available API data and cross-grid hexing some morpheous node to flip on the sphincter, but I don’t know how to do that, so put a sock in it and get back to your World of Warcraft, dork.

The division and comparison of subdomains is interesting, even exciting, because it gives public relations professionals, marketers and anyone else trying to determine which blogs are more important, impactful or influential the ability to do so within Wordpress.com, Blogspot.com (Blogger.com) and Typepad.com blogs. If a blog is run from one of those services and is “hosted” or contained within the Wordpress.com servers, for example, it appears as blogname.wordpress.com. When you typically run traffic or engagement reports on the domain, you get results for everything on Wordpress.com which is essentially useless.

Being the general pain in the ass I can be, I asked Carol Leaman, Postrank’s lovely (and patient) CEO, if I might get my hands on the sub-domain data for the three services mentioned. She gave me that and then some. (So much so that I can’t possibly cover it in this post. Hint.)

Without further ado, here’s a listing of the top 10 blogs, based on cumulative Postrank engagement scores (look here to learn what that encompasses) for the last three months, of each of the three major blogging subdomains. To access more of the lists, you or your developer (provided they aren’t tied up with Lord of the Rings … heh) can apply for and access that data through Postrank’s API.

Rank	Blogger.com	Score	Author	Topic
1	althouse.blogspot.com	583664	Ann Althouse	Legal
2	stacievaughansblog.blogspot.com	462474	Stacie Vaughan	Product Reviews
3	globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com	371812	Mike Shedlock	Investments
4	press-gr.blogspot.com	329717	Tolis Voskopoulos	Greek Politics
5	shakespearessister.blogspot.com	298527	Melissa McEwan	Politics/Pop Culture
6	claycord.blogspot.com	288925	Mayor of Claycord	Contra Costa Co. News
7	googleblog.blogspot.com	285463	Google Staff	Official Google Blog
8	theimmoralminority.blogspot.com	284178	Gryphen	Politics
9	sbynews.blogspot.com	271342	Joe Albero	Salisbury (Md.) News
10	spoilerslost.blogspot.com	264054	Dark UFO	Lost/TV/Pop Culture
Rank	Wordpress.com	Score	Author	Topic
1	citizenwells.wordpress.com	206361	Citizen Wells	Legal/Current Events
2	riverdaughter.wordpress.com	171672	RD	Politics/Current Events
3	rebloggingns.wordpress.com	166652	Reblogging Staff	Pop Culture/Gay Issues
4	aculturedleftfoot.wordpress.com	166082	Yogi’s Warrior	Arsenal Football Club (Soccer)
5	educar.wordpress.com	137065	Paulo Guinote	Portuguese Education
6	ahestan.wordpress.com	111565	Hope Hosseini	Middle Eastern Issues
7	tennisplanet.wordpress.com	85610	Tennis Planet staff	Tennis
8	theophylepoliteia.wordpress.com	83526	Not Determined	Romanian Politics/Society
9	panosz.wordpress.com	80576	Panos	Greek Politics
10	pequenosdelitos.wordpress.com	77266	PD	Portuguese Adult/Pornography
Rank	Typepad.com	Score	Author	Topic
1	sethgodin.typepad.com	274481	Seth Godin	Marketing
2	economistsview.typepad.com	179591	Mark Thomas	Economics
3	justoneminute.typepad.com	140983	Tom MacQuire	Politics
4	daryllorettecafe.typepad.com	118310	Daryl Lorette	Personal Blog/Issues
5	failedmessiah.typepad.com	93754	Shmarya Rosenberg	Orthodox Judaism
6	timesonline.typepad.com	93562	Daniel Finkelstein	London Times Columnist
7	atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com	85972	Pamela Geller	Politics/Religion
8	delong.typepad.com	69298	Bradford DeLong	Economics
9	illinoisreview.typepad.com	61757	Dennis LaComb	Conservative Politics
10	wilwheaton.typepad.com	59339	Wil Wheaton	Celebrity Blog/Writing

I found the lists interesting and have some thoughts that might bubble up, but I’m more interested in hearing your reactions. What do you think of the top blogs in each platform. Any surprises? Any anomalies? The comments are yours.

NOTE: Some of the blogs contain content that might be offensive or unsuitable for your tastes. Click through at your own risk.