1. Profile yourself
2. Don’t be a loner
3. Befriend random strangers
4. Browse for likely friends
5. Find your friends in groups
6. Google for friends
7. Speak up
8. Approve away
9. Gossip in public
10. Broadcast yourself
Bonus: Feeding forums for fun and profit

My first real knowledge of MySpace came during a 2006 SxSW Interactive seminar, on the topic of spreading the word about your startup, when one of the panelists stated “you will get more traffic from MySpace than from anywhere else”. Wow, I thought, that’s a pretty strange thing to say - isn’t MySpace the place where teenagers go nuts with HTML and produce ad-hoc, mostly ugly, hard to read ego-feeding profile pages? Ok, so maybe I didn’t get what MySpace was all about, or how powerful it was. And what the heck, it was free, so I went ahead and created a default profile, linked it to AustinMash!, and left it alone to focus on other things. Needless to say, my basic profile page referred exactly zero people to this web site.

That was in March, when I was still pretty busy building out the site. Later on (sometime in April) I went back to MySpace and took the time to study how it worked and what could be done with it. I saw how users modify the basic, default profile page by inserting HTML and CSS Stylesheet code into form fields that are provided to allow you to write about your interests and hobbies. Most ’spacers get their code from third-party web sites, whose sole reason for existence is to provide such code so the ’spacer can modify their page without knowing any HTML or CSS. In fact, it seems one of the reasons a lot of profiles are so cumbersome is that novice ’spacers will insert more than one set of code from, perhaps, different suppliers, whose code will then collide to produce a mess of a page. Or, they might thinks it’s cute to choose the same color for their scroll bar and it’s background, which in effect makes the scroll bars invisible, which when attached to a super-wide and long page, makes the profile almost impossible to navigate. But whatever, this is the ’spacers page, and the only ones who would care would be their friends, supposedly.

Ah yes, friends, that’s what was missing from my profile. Now, you must understand that the word “friend” takes on a different meaning in MySpace. A MySpace friend is merely another profile with whom you have mutually agreed with to call each other friends. It matters not if you actually know the owner of the profile; it matters less if the profile is even of a person. Yes, there are profiles that have been set up to just convey an idea, and generally, if you request to be their friend, they will automatically agree (”approve” you in MySpeak). In this manner, these “concept profiles” can amass thousands, perhaps millions of friends, and you show off your affiliation to the concept by including it in your friends list.

For example, one of my friends is Beer. Beer is my friend. Beer is listed alongside my other friends, some of which are real people I actually know and hang out with in real life. I am also a friend of Austin, by the way.

Another thing about MySpace friends is that they are visible to anyone who views a profile. If you land on an interesting profile, you can see their list of friends, and by clicking on the friend’s picture, you go to that person’s profile. Very often they will have similarly interesting profiles and list of friends, which you can click on to explore more profiles, and so on and so on. This is why friend-jumping can be such a vast time-sink.

Having friends on your MySpace profile is important for several reasons. First of all, if you don’t have friends, you’re obviously not popular and therefore not very interesting. Second, a couple of important features are available only with friends: the bulletin and the comment. A bulletin is a message that is broadcast to all your friends at once, and a comment is a message that you leave with one particular friend. Comments are important because they appear on your friend’s profile, and they contain a link back to your profile. So, by leaving a comment for a friend, anyone who lands on the friend’s profile might click on your picture and by taken to your profile. If your friend receives a lot of comments, however, your comment will soon scroll off the page and your link will be gone, unless you comment again.

With this basic understanding of how MySpace works, you can start to appreciate how to use it to promote your goods or services.

1. Profile yourself
You start by creating a profile that augments what you are promoting. Include links to your web site, of course. Try to create an environment, convey an attitude that represents your business. However, you have to consider how you want to separate your personal life from your business life. Is your new profile going to be based on you, as an individual who happens to run a business, or are you trying to represent only your business as it’s own entity? MySpace is geared towards individuals, but that doesn’t stop thousands of businesses from setting up their own profiles. You may want to consider taking the personal route. The rest will flow more naturally and not seem so contrived that way. Making this decision now will help guide you in your future interactions with ’spacers.

My MySpace profile was set up to mimick this site. It uses the same color scheme, has links to this blog, and incorporates the Skyline graphic. Unfortunately, due to the constraints of what you can do in your profile (for example, you’re not allowed to cover up the banner ad at the top, and Javascript code is blocked) I could not make the Skyline clickable and functional, and it’s placement was a problem – I couldn’t place it at the right height on the page, and even if I could, it wouldn’t look right. In the end, I just made it a static image at the bottom of the page, but since the image file is from the same server AustinMash! runs on, the Skyline is guaranteed to show the same ads as are displayed on the site.
Besides these items, I included pictures and some facts about myself to humanize the page. Although my profile is heavily linked to my web site, I represent myself as a person - an Austinite who runs a web site for and about Austin, Texas.

2. Don’t be a loner
Once your profile is ready, you then go about adding friends to it. You can start with your real-world friends by searching for their profiles by their e-mail address. You can find your friends one at a time from the “Search” link near the top of your home page, or if you use Yahoo, GMail, Hotmail, or AOL address books, you can find them all at once from the “Invite” link (click on one of the “Import From…” links).

You can also search for concept profiles using keywords, if that makes sense for what you’re trying to do.

3. Befriend random strangers

Asking people you don’t know to be your friend is a form of promotion in itself. When a ‘spacer receives a friend request from you they see your picture, which is linked to your profile. The prospective friend will then very likely visit your profile to see if you are worth adding to his friends list. That right there increases your profile views. Of course, like most promotional efforts, focusing in on a relevant target audience is half the battle. With 119 million profiles on MySpace and climbing, random friend requests will not be as effective in promotional terms as a targeted approach.

Here are a few tactics to find the right “friends” for you.

4. Browse for likely friends

Use the Browse feature. MySpace allows you to search for profiles based on many criteria (hint: use the “advanced” browsing tab). You can search by gender, age range, geographic location, interests, and many other factors. You can sort the results by last login time, which puts the more active users first, and moves the abandoned profiles to the end of the list.

Browsing for AustinMash! friends is fairly easy, as I can specify "located within 5 miles of zip code 78701". There are a few 'spacers in Austin: looking just for the ones between ages 30 and 35 within 5 miles of downtown yields 3000 profiles, which seems to be the maximum returned in any query. Who knows what the actual number of this "small" sample realy is?

5. Find your friends in groups

There are also thousands of “groups” in MySpace, which can also be searched for by using keywords. Groups are sections of the site where group members can discuss topics of interest to the group in a forum. In my experience, the forums I’ve seen are not heavily used, with rather shallow discussion threads. It is likely some groups are more active than others, although this is not important at this point. What is important is that each group has a list of members, and presumably each member is interested in the topic of the group. So, by finding groups related to your product, you will find ’spacers who might react favorably to a friend request from you.

A major drawback to this method is that there is currently no way to sort a group’s member list by any criteria. If a group has thousands of members, finding the most promising targets is, at best, very time consuming. But, the ’spacerSphere (the cloud of third party services dedicated to servicing ’spacers) is growing all the time, and there already or soon may be companies offering data mining services for this purpose.

I belong to a few Austin-related groups, such as Austin!, Austin Music Exchange, Austin Party Boats, Progressive Austin, and Austinites. As a member, my profile is listed in the membership rolls, creating another avenue for Austinites to find my site.

6. Google for friends

Another way to find appropriate ’spacers is to google for them. In Google’s search box, type in “MySpace” and your relevant keyword(s). The results will include profile pages with your keywords, plus blog postings that mention them. Oops, did I forget to mention the MySpace blogging feature? Yes, ’spacers can maintain their own blogs within the MySpace system. These are rather limited blogs, however, in that they do not provide RSS feeds, categories, or archiving functions. They are isolated and not a part of the Blogosphere as we know it, but this is not important at this point. What is important is that ’spacers will write about what interests them, and you can find those posts through Google. This results in a highly targeted set of users you will very likely approve you as a friend.

I found some of my profile friends after posting my ROT Rally blog entry. I found 'spacers that had written about the rally, and I added to their blog comments to let them know where they could find another perspective on the event (and more pictures, of course). I also still receive friend requests from people who were there or are otherwise interested in bikes.

7. Speak up

By the way, once you land on a ’spacers blog post that is in line with your thing, feel free to leave a comment for the post. This not only makes the ’spacer’s blog more interesting to others, it will leave a permanent link to your profile (and perhaps to your web site) from that post, which will accessible to everyone else who reads it in the future.

My Google Analytics stats show people are landing on my blog directly from the blog.myspace.com domain, which means they are clicking on the links I left in comments on other ’spacers blogs

8. Approve away

By and by, over time you will receive friend requests yourself. Some of these might well be from a real-world long-lost friend, who noticed your profile in one of their friend’s list of friends. Some of these will be from bands or other entities looking to promote themselves. And, some of these will be spam, or from profiles set up solely to lure people to porn sites or other malicious sites. Yes, like the internet at large, MySpace has its share of miscreants.

If the request is of either of the first two categories, go ahead and approve them. If you are not sure, don’t worry. Just visiting a profile of the third category is generally safe in itself - MySpace has gone to great lengths to ensure malicious code cannot be placed in profile pages, and seems to promptly remove obscene profiles. If you do land on one of those, it’s still fairly easy to tell this is not someone you want to add as a friend, and you can block all future friend requests from them if you need to. Actually, I have seen a diminished number of these types of requests lately. I guess the bad guys decided it was not worth the effort, maybe because most ’spacers were savvy enough to ignore them.

This brings us to the issue of the fine line between promotion and spam. You know about spamming - don’t do it. It will backfire on you, or at best waste your time. Problem is - what is spam? You will have to use your own best judgment on that, although you are not the final authority: the recipient is. In general, if you are providing real value and content to an audience that is likely to appreciate it, you are probably not spamming. Just try to err on the ham side of the line, not the spam side.

I "promoted" my ROT rally blog post to all the Austin related 'spacer groups I could find. Most of them removed my submission fairly quickly. Ok, so maybe not everyone who's a part of the Austin community is into rockin' and rollin' with biker babes and more. Duly noted, and I will try to be more selective in my group posts from now on. The last thing I want is to be blocked from any groups I may have appropriate content for in the future.

9. Gossip in public
As you gather friends, leave comments on their profiles. Comments can be nothing more than “thanks for the add” (meaning, thanks for adding me to your list of friends) or “have a great day”. Sometimes friends do this just to say hi, but because newer comments move the older ones off a profile, a lot of people seem to do this so their profile link remains on their friend’s page. Some of these profiles are getting hundreds of views a day, so staying connected increases your own visibility. And if your comment is interesting (you can include a picture, if the friend allows it), you can increase the chances some of those visitors will click through to you.

Also, leaving comments on your friend’s profiles makes it more likely they will leave comments on yours, which makes your profile more interesting.

This is something I need to work on more. I have left a few comments on my real-life friends profiles, and some have commented back, but I am not making enough of a time investment in this yet. I also had to remove a few comments from my profile, mostly because they were a response to my comment or an e-mail or something, and they didn't make any sense just sitting there out of context. The upshot is the comment section on my profile is pretty weak right now.

10. Broadcast yourself
The bulletin feature allows you to send the same message to all your friends at the same time. Think about this a second - this message goes to ALL your friends: real-life, ’spacers, concepts, bands, and anything else you may have in your friend list. This is one reason you should decide early on how you intend to use MySpace, and what kind of profile you want to maintain. Will you send personal bulletins - “great news - my sister’s no-good boyfriend finally moved out and took his ratty friends with him”, or will it be business - “overstock sale, special MySpace promotion next 24 hours only”? So, while bulletins can be a great way to stay connected, some up-front planning might be in order if you are concerned about maintaining a certain image. That said, if your strategy is to humanize your business, by all means tell everyone all about your bunions!

Bonus: Feeding forums for fun and profit
I’ve mentioned the group forums, where members can talk about topics of interest to the group. These are moderated by the group leader, and are either public or private, depending on the leader’s intent. But with millions of groups (the “other” category alone has over 1.5 million groups), participation activity in any particular group can be spotty, and your submissions there are not likely to receive wide viewership.

A better bet is the global MySpace Forum, which is much more active and has heavy participation. There are 22 main forum categories broken out into 80 sub categories, currently totaling over 1 million topics containing 12 million posts, and as of right now, the most recent post in each of the 22 categories is no more than 20 minutes old. That’s some lively discussion going on there folks.

With the exception of a couple of MySpace-specific areas, including one devoted to helping you customize your profile, the categories and topics are those you might find in any general purpose online forum, which is to say, it runs the gamut of possible interests. Surely one or more of them will be appropriate for postings in your field.

The MySpace forum works like most, with someone introducing a topic by asking a question, and people responding as they see fit. One difference from other forums, though, is that the high level of participation means the topic turnover rate is also high, and your responses may not have the longetivity you would expect in less popular forums. Keeping yourself visible on these forums would require an ongoing, dedicated effort.

So, is MySpace a good way to promote your business? Depends on the business and on you. The forum, the bulletins, the commenting system, and the groups are just tools you can use to spread the word about your endeavors. Like most tools, these can make you more efficient if you let the tool do the work, as opposed to trying to force it (like, by spamming). And also like most areas of life, you get out of it what you put into it. Once you’ve decided MySpace contains the people you’d like to reach in your promotions, you still need to invest the time necessary to be an active participant in the community if you expect to be noticed. Being online, social networks are no longer limited by geography, and while the opportunity for individual self-expression is unprecedented, they nevertheless continue to be ruled by the same human dynamics that have existed for centuries. Some things never change.

Today, I went to Google’s blog search tool, typed in “ROT Rally”, and there, at the very top, first on the list, was my blog entry!

Who would have thought I’d somehow get top billing at Google? Yeah, it’s a narrow search, but I’ll take it !!

Top ‘O the heap !

Yes, I think my Summer had schizophrenic traits, as I was exhaustively busy on several fronts, while others, such as this web site, were left to cool their heels. Days and weeks went by all full of activity, yet no progress was made on AustinMash! It’s not what was planned, it is what happened. And in case it matters, said activity was not of the leisure kind. No, this Summer did not find me out for day-long rides in the hill country, nor lounging on a boat, nor skipping town for exotic locales. Not a single group ride since ROT Rally in early June, not one day at the lake, not one sleepless night banging on the keyboard in all of Summer – how did that happen?

Probably the biggest time-sucking activity was moving to a new house. Wait - the moving part certainly took much longer than I would have thought - but there is an implied mountain of time in that statement, which was spent on a few related activities such as actually finding the house to move into. We were already living in a house we liked, which had a number of appealing features (think 3 car garage and super large yard adjacent to a greenbelt) which was purchased at a very reasonable price. This made our house hunt more difficult, as anything we found had to be measured against our current situation, and our features-for-the-price benchmark was pretty tough to beat. When we did find something that moved us to present an offer, we were typically late by a day or two – already gone! The best houses go on and off the market at lightning speed. Very frustrating. This is how several months of weekends were taken up by nothing but house hunting, followed by weeks of moving, fixing up the old house to sell, and settling into our new place. Yep, between the move and other stuff going on, it was once again proven that today’s most precious commodity is time – demand for it grows unimpeded, and new supply is sharply constrained :)

Normally my life outside AustinMash! is not a subject for this blog, but I include a portion of it here as an illustration of how personal life can interfere with business life, despite your best intentions. As it happens, AustinMash! is not my primary means of financial support. If it was, I would naturally not have the luxury of leaving it alone while other concerns capture my attention.

It has been interesting to see, however, that even with no active promotion on my part, AustinMash! continues to enjoy a steady flow of traffic. This is no doubt due to my previous efforts at SEO and some promotional initiatives with lasting effect, such as participating in forums and other blogs. The bulk of my visitors arrive from a search engine – mostly Google and Yahoo, in that order, and the top search terms used to find my site relate to the ROT Rally and Biker Babes – go figure. After that, the posts related to my experiences with flash-based video and WordPress issues seem to get attention. Oh, I even get visitors from people looking for Gary Hoover info.

Speaking of finding stuff, I’ve discovered a couple of very interesting marketing and promotion related blogs. The first is written by Guy Kawasaki, the original evangelist for Apple. He writes about what he knows, and he seems to know quite a bit about in-the-trenches marketing, software companies in general, and startups in particular. He is also relatively new to blogging, and is not shy about sharing his discoveries with the rest of us. Plus, his writing is just cool. Check out, just for starters, The 120 Day Wonder: How to Evangelize a Blog and The Art of Distribution .

Another blog I just discovered (through Guy’s RSS feed, actually) is Pronet Advertising which also has a wealth of practical advice. For example, in the How to get on the digg homepage post, I learned there is a new way to code the digg button on my blog, that allows readers to digg an already submitted story directly from the post, and which I will be implementing shortly.

Hmm, there are enhancements to the digg process that I was unaware of. Boy, you take your eye off the game for a moment, and all of a sudden the rules are changed (what - no celebrating with props anymore?) and it’s a whole new thing out there. Ok, that’s an exaggeration, but the point remains valid - the blogoshere is still young and evolving, and it pays to keep up.

Although this setup worked great for its intended purpose, it left a lot of unanswered questions related to what users were doing on the site. For example, I started to see, in the report page, a large number of page views from the same person. I mean, page views in the 60-90s in the same day, and again the next day, and the next. Since there are only about 40 pages in the whole site, this was pretty weird. I can appreciate someone being so mesmerized by my site they keep re-reading everything, but come-on, over 200 page views in 3 days? I had to go dig into the server log files to see that this user was not going through all the content at all, all requests were the same, for the blog home page! The logs also showed all the requests were being referred to from BlogSlides . Aha! I had recently added my blog to their index of blogs, and their unique feature is that they automatically cycle through a series of blogs in the same browser window, hence the name BlogSlides. Sure enough, the logs showed this visitor loaded the main blog page at regular intervals all day long. Ok, so this minor mystery turned out to be someone who left his BlogSlides window running, and by doing so created a bunch of bogus requests for all the blogs in his slide show, not just mine, providing another example of the unintended consequences of someone trying something new. Anyway, I found my answer through tedious scanning of my log files, not through my automated visitor counters. This would have been a lot easier with dedicated Web Site Analysis software.

So, I knew my hit and click counters were not good at providing the kind of deep analysis you can get from web analytics software, they were never intended to be, and creating such a system was never a reason for AustinMash!’s existence. All along, I’ve thought that if detailed visitor stats ever became important to me, I would have to shell out several hundred dollars for a decent and robust solution, something like WebTrends .

Then, a little while ago, an interesting e-mail appeared in my inbox – it was an invitation from Google to try out their new Analytics solution, which was, of course, free! Apparently I had asked for an invitation some time ago, probably when I set up my AdSense advertising account, and then forgot all about it. So, here was Google, one of the most impressive software developers of today (Google Maps, Google Finance, Google Spreadsheet, need I go on?) inviting me to try their latest creation. Guess how long it took me to add their tracking code to my pages? Not very, I’ll tell you that right now.

The hardest part in adding their code (about 4 lines of JavaScript) was in deciding where it should go. In my case, since I have made the commitment to have the Skyline appear on all publicly accessible pages, it made sense to put the Google code next to the code that generates the Skyline Ads area map. Although Google says it may take a day, within a few hours of uploading the new code to the site my personal Analytics page was showing visitor data, and a few minutes after that, I was once again impressed with Google’s software and user experience prowess.

Screenshot 1 - Default View

Now that the tracking code has been active on the site for a few weeks, there is enough data to take a good look at most of the features Google Analytics offers. Screenshot 1 shows the default view when you load the application, the “Executive Overview” Dashboard view. This screenshot shows the overall page layout for the reports within Google Analytics, with collapsible report links on the left, a date picking calendar below that, and the reports on the right, with help text below them.

Screenshot 2
Three Dashboard Views

Screenshot 2 shows the three pre-configured dashboard “views”, which seem meant to be specific to the role of the person using Analytics. Ok, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here. I should mention that Analytics supports the ability to monitor multiple web sites (you set up “Website Profiles” to define them), and that a user with administrator privileges can set up additional users who can access specific profiles only, or all profiles. You can set up more than one profile for the same web site, each with its own set of available reports, which is how you restrict users to seeing only the reports they should be seeing. There is a lot of behind-the-scenes power in Analytics, with features to help small to mid-sized businesses make the most of their online efforts.

Fully expanded Nav bar,
showing all available reports

Now, I am not going to sit here and bore you with a frame-by-frame description of every feature of Google Analytics. I took a lot of screenshots which pretty much speak for themselves, so look them over and you’ll get a sense of the kinds of data this program gives you access to. However, I will mention a few things that are not apparent in these static pics.

Visitor Location Map - Austin has the biggest marker!

First: Browser Compatibility. My own experience is that you pretty much need to be using IE for Google Analytics to work properly. The pages will load in Opera, but all charts are empty, no data gets loaded into them. Firefox support is better (as you can see in Screenshot 1) but other pages do not work, such as the site overlay reports. I switched to IE for the rest of the screenshots.

Site overlay - Each link has metrics data
(very small bars for my site, small data sample size still)

Second: Visitor Counts. Google Analytics gathers visitor information by running JavaScript in the user’s browser when they load a page (client-side method). Although this allows for capturing a wealth of data (such as length of visit, connection speed, and screen resolution) that would not otherwise be available, this collection method inherently leads to lower visitor counts than a server-side method, such as my own hit and click counters. This is because JavaScript must be running in the user’s browser! There are two sets of visitors that are not counted in Google Analytics: automated spiders, or robots, that don’t use a browser at all, and users who switch off JavaScript while they surf.

Visitor Source Pie,
with two slices highlighted

Whether the exclusion of spiders from your Analytics data is a good thing or not depends on your need for that information, and whether you can get it some other way. Of course it’s there in your server log files, but going through them is pretty tedious. In my case, those visits show up in my hit counter data report, and I can trace a particular visit or set of visits to a specific search engine, or I can deduce I’ve been visited by a badbot based on the origin, network used, or pattern of requests. Knowing that I get regular visits from Google, Yahoo, Bloglines, Pluck, IceRocket, and other legitimate search and aggregation sites lets me know my latest content is available for others to find.

An example of a powerful
cross-segment report. Here,
we see the breakdown of
screen resolutions for Firefox users.

You may be wondering how many people really go around the internet with their JavaScript turned off. I didn’t think there were too many of them, but early on I started getting complaints that the blog page layout was all messed up for some folk. It took a little while and exchanges with several complainants for me to realize the problem was they had JavaScript turned off, and since I was using JS code to position the sidebar to the right side of the page, of course it looked terrible for them. I’ve since modified my templates so they don’t rely on JavaScript to position the sidebar, but this experience demonstrated there are a fair percentage of visitors who will not be counted by a client-side data capture method. This is not that big a deal for me, because I am not using Google Analytics for total traffic counts, and I am assuming this exclusion will not skew the report percentages too much. Also, since it’s impossible to buy pixels without JavaScript running, these visitors wouldn’t be in any of the e-commerce related reports anyway.

Visitor Location Pie
with pulled out slice

Finally: Impressions and Opinions. The default date range is the past 7 days when you first load Google Analytics. This range is easy to change via the calendars to the lower left. You can quickly select a standard week, month, or day; a column of days (for example, all Tuesdays in the month); or you can specify an ad-hoc, custom range via the “Enter Range” icon. When you click that icon, two calendars expand into being next to it, where you merely click the start date in one calendar, and the end date in the second one. When you click “Apply Range”, the two new calendars collapse away. Any time you change the date range, the currently displayed report or dashboard is automatically redrawn for the new date(s). From that point on, all reports will use the newly selected date range, unless you change it again. This immediate and “sticky” response to your changes is intuitive and makes it easy to get the report you want. The tool does its job quickly and efficiently, so you can too.

Date Range calendars expand
and collapse on the page - nice

Notice I said the date range calendars “expand into being” and “collapse away”. They do not merely pop into existence all at once, or even more ghastly, open in a new browser window. No, they very pleasantly expand from and collapse into nothingness on the page, a very nice touch. As a web developer, I can appreciate the extra work that goes into implementing such niceties, and although it is arguably just eye candy, little touches like this go a long way towards enhancing the user experience. Likewise, all charts draw themselves over a very short time interval (line graphs trace a path across the grid, and bar graph columns grow from their base to their final length), another nice touch. Ok, pie charts do pop into being all at once, but you can pull out a slice of the pie by clicking on an item in the legend.

Some of the search queries
that led someone to AustinMash!

A couple of gripes: The dashboard and certain reports lack one-click drilldown capability, and the login process could be better integrated with other Google services. When you first load Google Analytics, for example, you may see you have 25% of your visitors being referred to your site by “other”. It should be possible, right there, to click on that pie slice and see the data for “other”. As it is, you have to go to the detailed report (Marketing Optimization/Visitor Segment Performance/Referring Source), and set the display list size to something greater than the default 10 lines. A drilldown click from the dashboard would have been much nicer. Also, Google does not have a single login and authentication mechanism for its various services. Maybe this is by design, but it seems inconsistent with the company’s otherwise user-centric implementations. Perhaps it is a consequence of trying too much, too fast, as various divisions race to provide new applications on their own. One would hope Google will make the effort to tie everything together, from a user account perspective, at some point in the future.

Most visited content, with bounce and exit data

On a happier note, a technically interesting aspect of the reports is the seamless way flash animations are integrated into the page. All the pie, line, and bar charts, plus the geo maps, are Macromedia Flash mini-applets, while the textual data, navigation, and help text are just that, regular HTML text on the page. The calendars are HTML as well, yet all the pieces are interact with each other and are integrated into a well-honed, solidly built web app machine. I like that. Actually, as far as I can tell, this entire application, with all the reports and various date and range picking controls, are really all on the same HTML page. All that happens when you click on a report is that different chart mini-apps get loaded and fed the proper data in the report area of the page, without the whole page refreshing in the browser. Very slick, and in my opinion, the way all web apps should work from now on. Yes, I know Google Maps and Google Finance, as well as numerous other “Web 2.0″ sites (like Flickr) use the same approach. Google just seems to have mastered the art and they are not shy about showing it off. Kudos!

You can compare data from
two time ranges, to measure the
effects of a marketing push, for example

But wait, there’s more! Not only does Google dress to impress, it is also a well behaved, soft-spoken host, which only serves to enhance its popularity in the increasingly crowded internet party scene. After exploring the available reports, it becomes apparent why Google spent the resources to buy the company that developed the core technology, and to enhance and distribute this remarkable tool for free. It’s all there in the “Content Optimization” and “E-Commerce Analysis” sections. As a Google Analytics user, you have the ability to track the effectiveness of various AdWords campaigns, and to analyze the effectiveness of your site in converting visitors into revenue-generating sales. You can define “goals” (such as showing a customer the payment receipt, successful transaction page) and “funnels”, which are paths a visitor would take through your site to reach a “goal”. Then, the reports help you understand how and why visitor landings translate into income. This helps you make more money, some of which you will then spend in more AdWords advertising (with a greater knowledge of what works and what doesn’t), which of course is good for Google.

Another cross-segment report
Where are my Google visitors
coming from?

It seems clear Analytics is one way Google hopes to address its primary weakness, which, as numerous analysts have pointed out, is that despite all the cool technology it produces, Google has very little ability to “lock in” users. In one sense, Google is like the genius kid who enters a hyper-competitive graduate program way too young. Because his peers, such as Microsoft and Yahoo, and Amazon and eBay to a lesser extent, are entrenched and have a built-in ability to keep its users coming back, Google has to be that much better at everything it does so that people will prefer to hang out with it instead of the older kids. So far it has been able to do this, but at the cost of running full speed everywhere it goes, trying to be Mr. popular in all circles to make sure its parties are always well attended. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to relax a little and not worry about everyone running out the door when the cool new frat house throws its first party? Or worry that folks will get tired of the music and beer and just drift back home to Yahoo and MSN? You bet it would, and if Google’s customers come to rely on Analytics to manage their business, there is much less chance they will eventually migrate away from AdWords or any other revenue-producing service that may be offered – such as the new Google Checkout service.

Some reports help you visualize
how visitors navigate through your site

So, even though Analytics can be considered strategically important to Google, and the AdWords integration is what makes it so, the user experience was not compromised to put these features front and center. Much to Google’s credit, the default views and reports were chosen based on what the users would find most useful, not on what would further the company’s goals. The genius kid doesn’t go around shouting how great it is, it merely does what it does very well, confident that it will pay off in the long run.

I believe that it will – how many Web 1.0 startups when nowhere because they neglected to put the user first (RealNetworks, for one, comes to mind)? Google absolutely needs tools like Analytics to become ingrained in its customer’s business processes, but it seems to understand that providing super-easy, hyper-helpful user experiences is the way to go about it. Despite the muscle under the outfit, Google’s charm and graciousness exudes a confident and understated vibe. This is my kind of party!

Most of my Texas visitors
are from Austin!

Some notes on the data in the screenshots: These of course are actual reports generated from real data about AustinMash!. The spike in traffic on June 15th was due to my blog posting on the recent ROT Biker Rally here in Austin. Since Google Analytics has just started gathering data, most of the visitors are “new” to it and not “returning”. You will note there were some visitors referred to my site from MySpace, I will be talking about my experimentation with that site in a future posting.

Finally, I am gratified that the bulk of my visitors are from Austin. While it’s great to see people in Russia or Saudi Arabia are checking out AustinMash! (and because the data gathering is client-side, I can be fairly sure these are real people and not robots), it has always been my intention to make this site primarily for Austinites. I am very pleased to see my promotional efforts are on-target, that I am doing the right things as far as reaching my intended audience. Very cool indeed.

Most reports include the ability to further graph a metric over time. Here, we see the time distribution of the 23 visitors using Dialup access during this report period.

The browsers people use, and their operating systems. The purple up-arrow icons create new floating graphs with Data-Over-Time, To-Date Lifetime, or Cross-Segment reports. Very powerful stuff.

They were everywhere!

The annual Republic of Texas Biker Rally descended upon Austin again this year on the first weekend in June. The numbers are huge: an estimated 40,000 bikers came to Austin, and spent over $36M (collectively, not each). Let’s do some math: this means each biker spent, on average, $900 during the 4 day event. Some of them stayed at cheap hotels, others with friends in town (no money spent on lodging), yet others booked rooms at the better hotels downtown. Some bikers camped at the rally grounds and cooked their meals, but most of them probably ate at local restaurants (that’s what, 9-10 meals Thurs-Sun?). Many probably did some shopping, both of the touristy kind, and of the biker kind, buying chrome and leather for themselves and their steeds (and their bikes). Every last one of them bought some gas while they were here, and virtually all of them drank some beer, that much can be assumed. So, $900 each? Sure, sounds about right, with $3-4/beer and $2.75/gal gas. Keeping man and machine fed and happy probably accounted for half of that total. It’s no wonder the city of Austin suggested to the rally organizers that they expand the Friday night party downtown, that they broadcast biker-friendly messages on the traffic alert signs along the highways, and that they provided security and road closures for the Parade. It’s no wonder the hotels go out of their way to cater to this unique clientele - I mean, do they block off entire floors of their parking garages for the musicians during SXSW, or provide them with buckets of water and wash rags to clean up with when they return from the festivities? (although, maybe that’s not a bad idea).

You know the numbers are huge when you drive around town and see hotel and restaurant parking lots virtually filled with chrome and paint and rubber, row after row after row of handle bars and front tires all in a line, all attached to a unique machine, the pride and joy of someone inside.

Carlos and Charlies hosted a few riders

There are those who ride, and those who wish. Some may wish more than others, all the way from “next year, yeah, that’ll be me, too” to “damn bikers making all that noise and tying up traffic and riding here and there and going who knows where and doing who knows what - damn bikers - look at them, doing what they want, having fun and enjoying life - damn bikers” Whatever, dude.

Enough bikes to go around

Let’s do some more math: if we assume 75% of the 40,000 bikers are riding two-up, with only 25% riding solo, that’s about 25,000 bikes. If they all got together at the same time (good luck arranging that!) and rode in standard 2-line formation, with each bike 8 ft long, and with a 10 ft gap between bikes (kinda close, but ok for slow speed, around town riding), you would see a continuous stream of bikes 42 miles long, which is about the distance from Georgetown to Buda! (of course, if they were riding on I-35, the gap between them would be closer to 20 ft, or 66 miles total). Hey, get this: a loop around Austin, that starts in Round Rock, goes down Mopac all the way to 290, cuts over to I-35, and back up to Round Rock is about 43 miles. So, theoretically, we could have all gotten together and formed one continuous unbroken ring of bikes around Austin, riding round and round. That would be pretty wild, huh?

I’ve been on some rides with friends where we might get 20 bikes together, and we generally move as one long, continuous vehicle as we navigate around town and out into the hill country. Riding like that is great fun, as I enjoy the juxtaposition of engaging in an inherently individual activity (there’s not much conversation going on at 60+ mph) in a group setting. Of course, we interact non-verbally along the ride, moving as one entity up and around the hills outside Austin, and then we’re back to being just people at the numerous stops along the way. It may be an odd dynamic, but it’s very satisfying when you’re enjoying life outdoors with people you like.

The finish-line crowd

This year I once again joined the Friday night bike parade from the Expo center to the downtown party. Talk about a continuous vehicle! This is no theory, it is a fact that there was an unbroken line of bikes from East Austin to Congress Ave. This is the ride of rides. The police blocked off all the intersections, so we got a smooth, uninterrupted flow into the heart of Austin. The route took us through neighborhoods where residents line the streets to watch the riders and hear the bikes (unspoken rule: when a kid waves, rev the engine!), down MLK to 11th street, and over I-35 down to Congress. We got a great view of the Capitol as we rode in, and if it was fun riding past the people in the neighborhoods, it was unbelievable downtown! It was like we were finishing the Tour de France, with jam-packed people on both sides and us riding between them, everyone waving and cheering. Wow - and we weren’t even tired from our ride, like Lance must have been! This is unofficially the longest bike parade in the world, and since the Guinness World Record people are reviewing the count as we speak, it may soon be official. Who would have thought that I’d have something in common with the Tour record holder? Woo-hoo!

So Friday night was a blast, seeing 6th Street, Congress Ave, and several more blocks in the area packed with people and bikes and music. Saturday was all about the riding, yet we kept it local and elected to be by the lake.

Yes, damn bikers are taking over…!

This year I didn’t attend the actual rally on the Expo grounds, I’ve done that a few years in a row already. Maybe I’ll go back next year just to be amazed how much bigger it is. It’s cool to peruse the vendor booths, they come up with the wildest stuff for your bike or for your body.

By Sunday everyone is pooped out and packing up, so it’s a slow day of recovery, both for the rally-goers and for the town. As the weekend draws to a close, normalcy makes an attempt to retake Austin. The blitti-ta-blatta of the stragglers and locals keeps it at bay, however - that is to say, keeps Austin weird, for a little while longer at least…

As I was writing that last post, I tried again to generate a Flash movie that would play on computers that did not have Macromedia Studio 8 installed. At the end of the day it still didn’t work, and I was noticing weird behavior, in that the final SWF file would play on my laptop when it was in the folder where it was “published” to from Flash 8, but not after I copied it to another folder on the same drive!

There was another clue, however, that I did not pay much attention to at first: the file size of the Flash FLA document was considerably smaller than the previous versions of the document I had created a few days ago, even though they all had only the one movie FLV file in them. It seemed like the FLA document no longer included the actual movie, so it must be referencing it externally, which would explain why the movie would not play when it was in a different folder. Ok, the file sizes don’t bear that out: 376 Kb vs 208 Kb for the FLAs does not equal a 2.3 Mb FLV file.

Whatever the case, to test this theory I copied the FLV file to the same folder I where I was putting the SWF file. Lo and behold, it now played! Was is even more puzzling is that both versions of the SWF file, with an internal and external movie reference, are the same size at 35 Kb.

I uploaded all the files to the web site, created a new test page, and verified that it played over the internet on the other computers in the house. I tried it at work, and it played there too. It was fixed.

I suppose it’s possible the FVL movie file was always externally referenced by the SWF, so that the 35 Kb size is only for the player. But remember, this movie played on my laptop from the web site over the internet, before I had uploaded the FLV file. It also played on my local (laptop) version of the web site, again without the FLV file in the folder that had the SWF file. So, how did that work, and why did it stop working, forcing me to upload the FLV? Undoubtedly I changed a setting somewhere when I was tinkering with it trying to make it work. I wish I knew which one it was.

One difference is that for the first attempts, I used Windows Explorer to drag the FLV file from where it was created to the Flash 8 application window. For the last version, I used the File/Import menu to import the video. However, both of these methods activated the same Video Import Wizard, so I don’t think that made a difference.

Ah! I just figured it out! In the non-working flash document, the “contentPath” for the imported video was a full path and file name pointing to another directory, while in the working version, the same parameter just listed the file name! So, the FLV movie was externally referenced, and it needs to be a relative path from the SWF file, preferably in the same folder, otherwise it won’t find it when you upload it to a server. Man, I wish Macromedia would have been a little clearer on that. I suppose in the end this was a bonehead rookie mistake on my part, since I didn’t even find anyone else with this problem in the forums. This also explains why the movie played over the internet on my laptop, because it was looking for and finding the content on my hard drive! Live and learn, I guess.

Anyway, the low-footprint, Flash-based version of the video is now available and should work for everyone who has Flash Player 8 or higher. I just hope I haven’t overhyped this short clip by talking about it so much. It’s really just a small sample of the goings-on at Eeyore’s Birthday this year, just something I wanted to share. Enjoy!

In fact, it was confusingly complicated and surprisingly difficult. At this stage in the digital evolution of media, I had expected a seamless experience. Why does video have to be such a pain?

Particularly frustrating was that the process at first seemed to go very smoothly and painlessly. The video was up on the site (I decided to make a dedicated page for it so I could track viewing counts) and I moved on to other things, only to find out later at least some people couldn’t see it.

Recording the scene was very simple. My digital camera, an HP Photosmart R817, has a button next to the main shutter button. You press once to start recording, and again to stop. This was my first time using this feature, and I didn’t know how much memory was going to get chewed up with the video, and since I wanted to leave room for more pictures I didn’t let it record for too long. I should not have worried. When I started recording, the counter said 175 shots left, and when I stopped after about 20 seconds, it said 165 shots left. No problemo, and now I wish I had captured a longer clip.

Once I got home and transfered the mpg file from the camera to my laptop and opened it in Media Player, I was shocked that it had recorded audio as well, and it sounded fairly good! This was great, because at the same time, I had used my cell phone’s note recorder feature to capture the audio just in case. As it turned out, the quality of that recording was considerably crappy. Hmmm, a visual tool recorded better audio than a voice-centric device - go figure. The only problem with the video was that the file was 15 Mb huge - kinda fat for downloading.

Quite coincidentally, I then happened to come across a review of Macromedia’s Studio 8, which includes Flash 8, and it said the new version could now convert movie files into Flash-based movies at high quality. Hey that’s cool, I have Studio 8! I looked in my programs menu, and sure enough, there was the “Macromedia Flash 8 Video Encoder”.

As a first pass to try out the technology, I used the default settings all the way to creating an HTML output page with Flash 8. The process involved encoding the original MPG file into a Flash Video File (FLV), which resulted in a 6.2 Mb file. Then, that file is imported into a new Flash Document, a player skin is chosen from the templates, and the document is “published” to an HTML output, which includes the movie SWF file, the skin SWF, and the HTML container page.

The resulting SWF Flash-based movie was only 35 Kb, and it looked just as good as the original footage - pretty neat stuff. The only problem was that the bottom of the scene was cut off, so I had to go back into the publish settings and set the Dimensions to “Match Movie”. It’s odd that this was not the default setting.

The last step (or so I thought) was to copy and paste the Macromedia-generated HTML code into a new blank page that integrated into the web site, upload everything, and make the links to it in my blog post. It all worked great on my laptop, and I was happy with the result. Until, of course, I got reports that the movie was not viewable over the internet.

Since I was at work at the time I first heard about it, I tried it from there, and sure enough, the video did not show in the browser, all I got was a large blank space on the page - what the heck? This was several days after I had posted the links, and my hit counter showed the movie page was being viewed. So, did this mean people wanted to see the video, but the page was blank for them? That was pretty bad. On top of that, one of the drags about having a day job is that I can’t just fix things on the web site when they crop up, I have to wait until I get home that evening. The thought of people getting a page that did not work gnawed at me the rest of the day. Bummer.

When I got home, I noticed that the video didn’t work on my laptop when clicking on the link in the blog post, whereas before it had. After trying a number of different things, I discovered that if the domain of the HTML page and the domain of the SWF page do not match, the movie does not show. I assume this is some kind of security feature in Flash Player. What was frustrating, though, is that only the sub-domains were different, and the security was apparently not smart enough to handle that. The links in the blog post pointed to http://austinmash.com/drums.php. Within that file, the path to the movie clip was http://www.austinmash.com/Images/drums2.swf. Normally, whether you include the “www.” in the address or not, you get to the same place. But no, Flash didn’t see it that way, no sirreee, no how no way!

So I added the “www.” to the blog links, added a note on the movie page itself so the user makes sure the address is correct, and made a comment on the blog posting apologizing for the snafu. Then I went to bed. The next day at work, I tried it again, and the movie was still blank! What the heck? Again, I had to wait until I got home before I could do anything about it.

This time there were no easy answers. I tried a number of different settings for both the mpg-to-flv and flv-to-swf processes, and while they all played on my laptop, they did not on the other computers in the house that did not have Studio 8 installed (of course, they did have Flash Player 8. Otherwise, the page shows a link to upgrade the player, and not a large blank area). Online research was not any help, I did not find anyone else complaining of this problem, much less a solution to it. So, after spending way too much time trying to get the flash-based movie to work, I gave up and decided to just show “regular” video and not worry about the bandwidth it might eat up.

I was still unwilling to post a 15 Mb clip, though, so I looked into ways to compress that, and I wanted to give users the option of using either Quicktime or Windows Media player. Theoretically, both players can show mpg files, but the reality was that they both did a poor job with that format, so I had to find ways to convert the movie to their respective native formats, WMV for Windows and MOV for Quicktime. That’s when things got really hairy. First, I had to find an app that can do the conversion, then figure out the best settings for the video and audio codecs, and then write appropriate HTML code for the players. Oh what fun.

I spent several hours downloading and trying a few video conversion apps. Most were hard to use and assumed a level of codec familiarity I did not have. Why does video have to be so complicated? I finally ended up using a program called ImTOO MGEG Encoder , which not only handled all the relevant formats, it is configured with default profiles for each, taking a lot of the guesswork out of the process. It produced 4.1 and 4.8 Mb files for the WMV and MOV formats, respectively, with little or no loss of quality. Cool.

Then instead of making two pages, each with one of the two players, I made one page with Javascript to write the appropriate code for the player the user clicked as their preference. This dynamically adds the players to the page, which gets around IE’s new behavior that forces users to click on a control to use it, which was implemented as a response to Microsoft getting sued for seamlessly integrating controls in web pages, because someone else thought of it first and patented the idea. I also removed the blog comment about the “www.” in the address for the movie page, as that was obsolete now.

Anyway, what should have been a straightforward video clip posting turned out to be a mutli-day effort, with a less than optimal solution. I’ll continue to play with Flash to see if I can make it work, but this technology seems to be rather flaky still. While I was writing this post, I went back and tried again. I found a player parameter called “allowScriptAccess”, which was set to “sameDomain” by the HTML generator. I changed it to “always”, as per the documentation, but that didn’t help. Also, I published to a new SWF file, which played on it’s own while in the directory it was created in, but not after I copied it to my local web site directory! It’s the same file, just it won’t play from a different directory like the previous versions did - that’s flaky behavior, folks. Why is video so frustrating?

The final result is here.

Um, yeah - OK

Weirdness, weirdoes, everywhere – and not a dudley in sight! YES! Feast your eyes on color and movement, on sights strange that stimulate, on sounds and smells and feelings that move and penetrate – look around, walk around, and immerse yourself in the wondrous creativity of your fellow hipster – YES! This is what I’m talking about! This is Austin, exposed in broad daylight, its inner flower child arms up to the sun, spinning, laughing, and stopping to pierce you in the eyes and flash you the wickedest, sexiest smile imaginable – YES!

Who wouldn’t be seduced into returning time and again to celebrate another year of life? Thus it was such again this year, only this was the first time I experienced Eeyore’s Birthday as a civilian. Actually, I missed it last year and the one before that, but until then, I was a volunteer at the event for, oh, maybe 10-12 years?

Is it love, you think?

When I was first asked to participate, I had never heard of it before – What? You mean you are having a birthday party out in a park - for a fictional character - out of a kid’s book - and not even for the title guy? What’s up with that? How weird… (duh!) But it was Scott Sexton himself who turned me on to it over a game of pool at the Crown and Anchor, by putting it this way: “Dude, you volunteer for two hours, and you get free beer the rest of the day!” Well, who can pass that up? It was only later that I learned the annual bash was a fund raising event for Austin non-profit groups – all of a sudden I realized I was signed up to do charity work – but what the hell, it might be fun anyway. Little did I imagine…

Hula hipsters

So, for much of my formative years (my 30’s), once a year I got to sell beer tickets for a couple of hours, got free beer the rest of the day, and hung out and grooved and learned first-hand why Austin is one happenin’ town. Selling beer tickets was wicked fun, as you got to mess with people on a continuous basis, and they still kept coming and lining up to get messed with – whoohoo! It’s different, walking around and seeing the madness, and then dealing directly with individual weirdness, one on one, up close and personal, while money changed hands and IDs were checked. Yep, the situation was ripe with opportunity for merriment. Oh, you want 20 tickets? I’m waaayyyy too drunk to count that high – but hey, I can count to 4 five times – how’s that? What? No way this is you in this picture – and how do I know this is what Hawaiian drivers licenses look like? The best was when they asked for a large number of tickets, and I’d do some obscure folded-ticket math and hand them their change in one big flurry, and they’d start to leave with a little should-I-trust-this-guy puzzled look on their faces (until they realized I got it right). NEXT! Those were the days..

And these are these days, and they aren’t too shabby either. Going as a civilian had the obvious drawback of no free beer, but it did allow me to more fully enjoy everything going on. I hung out at the drum circles longer, I listened to the band for a while, I visited more parts of the park – or hmmmm, maybe I just remember visiting more parts of the park?

Anyway, the drum circles were different this year, in that they had actual drums – there was even a full drum kit in one of the circles. Before, everyone used plastic buckets and lids and pieces of metal and anything else that made noise when hit with a stick, plus maybe just a few bongos, and it was incredible how well they worked together. It was pretty good now with the drums, too, maybe just louder and more melodic.

Itchin’ to march to a different drummer?

If you’ve never experienced a free-form drum circle, it’ll be hard to imagine its impact on you. You can watch the short video I made, but what’s missing from that is how, after hours of continuous, persistent, ever-changing rhythmical variations-on-a-theme, with passages that ebb and flow and break down and rebuild and merge and synergize and escalate into a frantic crescendo, the pervasive percussion gets inside you, becomes part of your metabolism, and carries you the rest of the day. You fall asleep still tapping your toe and nodding your head to the beat that was – especially if you’ve had free beer all day!

A fair fight, a cool lady, tie-dye tikes

There were at least three established drum circles throughout the park that day. I really enjoyed the one up on the hill, in the woods behind the port-a-potties. These guys were rockin! Watch the video. Other events included a face painting booth (in case you showed up too “normal”), kiddie sword fighting, a maypole weaving attempt, egg toss and other organized games, hula circles, Eeyore petting, and splashing puddles (courtesy of the storm the night before).

It’s been said Eeyore’s Birthday is one of the last remaining events that are still true to its origins, and has not been corrupted or “toned down” to appease the up-tights. One reason it has endured, no doubt, has to be the attitude of the organizers. They’re a great bunch of people, who just want to put on a great party and have fun doing it. As a many-time volunteer, I can attest to the laid-back and open nature of the organization, that still manages to get the key work done.

Then of course, there are the party-goers themselves. Eeyore’s Birthday is a different event for different people. Those that sit in the woods by the drum circle get a different event than those whose small children play with Eeyore, which is also different from the experience of all the teens and 20-somethings running around – full of energy and creativity and expressionism. Yet these events all occupy the same space and time, their experiences interwoven, each adding richness and harmonious diversity to the others. Everyone has a good time, regardless of their perspective. Does it get any better than that?

This does not mean I’m abandoning this project - this fun, educational, enlightening, and empowering journey I’ve started. No way, it just means I’ll have to go about my business in a much more focused manner, and at the same time rely less on activities that require my physical presence.

Actually, when I look at the timing of everything, I can hardly believe my luck. I decided to proceed with this project when I still had a job, and I managed to build the bulk of the functionality in my free time and on weekends. Then, I got laid off, but with plenty of notice, so I knew it was coming. This removed all time constraints, and I was able to devote as much time as I wanted on AustinMash!, technically, and on the various marketing and networking activities I engaged in. Then, I finally did get a job offer, but with a start date two weeks out – so again I had plenty of time to plan – and take a little vacation to boot! (yes, I was out of cell phone range for 5 days. One word of advice: when the resort lists high-speed internet access, ask if it means wireless in the room, or if it means they have three PCs in a little “business center”, one of which is broken, and on which they limit your time to 15 minutes a day. I still haven’t decided if this was a good thing or not). So, now my week days are once again someone else’s, but that’s ok, since lately I’ve been thinking it was time to move on to the next phase of marketing, and start advertising the site. The real challenge, really, will be in continuing to develop AustinMania! while at the same time have some kind of a life.

Another change is that I am going to focus less on selling ads, and more on building a site that I and others will hopefully enjoy. I’ll work on my original goal of making an entertaining site, and I’ll let the traffic take care of itself (ok, I will be boosting it from time to time through advertising). Then the ad sales should take care of themselves too, once the traffic is there. The good part is that this is fun, so I can just keep working on it and see what happens. Do you want to see what happens? Stay tuned – same Mash-Channel, same Mash-time!

Another look at Gary’s name reveals the level of success he’s had, since he founded and sold a company bearing his name, one that you’ve heard of. If your first thought was that his products sucked, then don’t think Hoover the vacuums, think Hoovers the business information company. You know, the one he sold to Dun and Bradstreet. Curiously, his talk didn’t mention that business except in passing. Instead, he focused on his earlier success, Bookstop, Inc, which was the first book superstore, and which he sold to Barnes & Noble in 1998.

Certainly, the story of the start of that business ties in well with his first two keys: Curiosity and History. The successful entrepreneur is curious to a fault, always seeking new knowledge, always wanting to know more, about anything and everything. This last is really the important part – he cited examples such as Michael Dell and Bill Gates, people who constantly broaden their knowledge of the world outside of their “business”. Oh, and by the way, Gary knew the person who purchased books for Gates to read, so he is familiar with his quest for knowledge – just another example of the torrent of information that spews forth from Gary’s talk that can whoosh past you if you don’t pay attention.

Something else I picked up on as I listened: Just as vision remains vapor if not implemented, the satisfaction of curiosity remains cerebral without the context of history to give shape to the information. Ok, that’s nice, but what does it mean in real terms to the person in the trenches? To quote Gary “the difference between winners and losers is that the loser spends 100% of his time on tactical issues, the winners spend 99%” with the rest spent on big-picture, step-back-and-look-around-you type activities.

As Gary gave examples to back up these two keys, to me, the bigger point seemed to be that the successful entrepreneur will actually believe the facts in front of him. When your car is slowly sinking to the bottom of the lake, it’s too late to be thinking – gee, I wonder of those big orange signs and flashing lights were something I should have paid more attention to? Or, as Gary himself put it, don’t let the train of change smack you in the back as you peer down the tracks in the wrong direction, searching for a glimpse of the future.

Closely behind curiosity and history is the third key, Geography, which also ties in with history to help shape the information you get as a result of your curiosity. “Keep in mind the spacial relationships of things” said Gary, and “keep track of space and time”. It’s all part of the theme of seeing the larger picture.

Gary spent so much time on the first three keys, that I feared the BiGBreakfast event was going to morph into the BiGBrunchAndLateAfternoonSnack seminar. Don’t get me wrong, I could have listened all day (in fact, after the talk, I just listened to him as he informally answered various people’s questions one-on-one. His approachability was refreshing, and even just watching how he handled no-particular-question, just-want-to-ramble-on-and-on type people was an education in itself). As it happens, the next four keys are closely tied together. They are Clarity, Vision, Consistency, and Purpose. Each one is important, and the successful entrepreneur will pay attention to each one individually, but in reality it is the implementation of the four as a group that propels the business, or so it seemed to me. Oh, and there is only one right answer to the purpose question: your purpose as a business is to provide a product or service. <-- note the period at the end of that sentence.

The test for the successful implementation of the next key involves closing your eyes, or better yet, using a blindfold. Ok, I guess this test is safer if done as a “thought experiment” ala Einstein, but the idea is that you place yourself in a business sightless, and when you remove the blindfold, you should be able to tell where you are. If you can’t, the business fails the uniqueness test. If you are not Unique, there’s little reason for your customers to come back.

There was one more key, Passion, and for those of you keeping track, that makes nine keys. What can I say? Maybe my note-taking needs work, maybe I heard more than was said, maybe – who knows? Whatever, the last key was simple: love your work. ‘Nough said.

Gary’s talk was very engaging, and even better, he continued to spill valuable nuggets during the all-too-short formal Q&A afterwards. For example, responding to a question about business metrics, he mentioned the ideal way to create a business plan is to oscillate between Word and Excel. Use Word to describe your ideal business scenario several years in the future. Use Excel to crunch the numerical realities of such a dream. It is guaranteed the two will not jive, so modify both to bridge the gap. The resulting documents become part of your business plan.

After the breakfast, I attended the BiGMarketplace, a vendor exhibition of BiGAustin client companies. From solar-powered backpacks, to beef jerkey and scrapbooking, the selection was varied and interesting. The “memorable name” award should certainly go to Dancing Dingo Organic Bath & Body, makers of fragrances for both man’s best friend and his boss (or wannabe). I bought a bottle of Dog De-funkifier™ to keep both happy in my household, only to discover a $2-off coupon in my goodie bag when I got home. Oh well.

As I was pondering my next move, which included considering if I should switch web hosts, a sudden realization struck me – I already had all I needed to implement the beginnings of a user-generated community – a WordPress blog! All I had to do was to make a new, separate database, re-install WordPress with a new blog name, and presto, a new blog was created on the site! The main difference in functionality vs my regular blog is that when a new user registers, they are by default granted “contributor” level access, which means they can create new posts themselves (subject to approval by me before they are published). I also opened up commenting privileges so anyone can comment, and they appear right away without moderation. I can always go back and remove inappropriate comments if I need to, and since the initial goal is to encourage use, this should be ok for now.

I made a few changes to the sidebar from the one this blog is running to better fit the community aspect of AustinMania!, such as listing all the authors and removing the blogroll. Also, I tweaked the entire user registration and login process to “hide” the fact AustinMania! is really a blog, it’s supposed to look like just a community website. I added helpful instructions to the e-mail that sends the initial password, and to some of the registration pages, and removed certain pages or sections from the admin console to simplify it for people who have never blogged before. For example, the dashboard seemed fairly superfluous, so it’s gone. I will probably continue to tweak the admin pages over time so they better fit the theme of AustinMania!

The best part of this is that it is up and running, anyone can contribute, and I can continue to tweak it and add features. I still intend to bring to life my “grand vision” of what AustinMania! can be, but at this point I am not sure if it will evolve from this WordPress platform, or if I will build an entirely new RoR application. Perhaps in the end it will be a hybrid. Whatever the case, I am glad I was able to implement something that works today, and I didn’t let the bigger ideas get in the way of progress. I hate it when that happens, don’t you?

These flights of fancy, regarding features and usability flow, soared high and far, but they always came back to earth crashing amid the realization of the amount of work required to pull them off. Now work in itself is not a bad thing, the problem is the implementation delay when the task at hand is extensive, and hard to implement piecemeal. So, as a stopgap, a static page was created for AustinMania! that asked visitors to send in contributions via e-mail. This was hardly ideal, but at least it was real.

Meanwhile, my ideas for AustinMania! went in a direction that I started to get excited about, something fairly unique (as far as I know) but still based on existing and recognizable trends in cyberspace. It was unlimited in depth, supported and expanded on the original business model, and would be pretty cool to boot – if I could ever get it done. Again, the same brick wall of feasibility sprang up and cut the fancy flights short.

By and by, at some point I decided to see what all the fuss over Ruby on Rails (RoR) was about. I watched the famous “Creating a weblog in 15 minutes” video , and was impressed by the apparent ease of use, robustness, flexibility, and speed with which the application was created. The part when the presenter merely adds a date/time field to the underlying database, and then reloads a page in the browser that is running the application, and lo and behold, the UI automagically produces a date entry form field for user interaction shows how well all the pieces (model, viewer, and controller) are wired together, automatically, by default, with no real effort on the part of the developer. This is a serious time saver, here.

Ok, that’s all well and dandy, but I like to have ultimate control over how pages look and function, so anytime I see auto-generated code, I start to loose interest. Surely, the developers of the framework do not share my vision of how things should work, and I definitely do not want to be constrained by their views, so no thanks. But wait – this video was not yet over, they were only 7 minutes into it (and already the app was functional). Sure enough, the next thing that was done in the video was a tweak to the templates used to generate the pages, and I saw that they were made with simple, clean HTML code with a few extra tags thrown in. With a few keystrokes, the default tabular layout was replaced with a list-based layout, using regular HTML, and the UI instantly re-rendered with the new look and functionality. Wow – total control over the output, and auto-wiring to the database, and simple controller action definitions. And, um, this is open source, and free for me to use? Yep, I was SOLD!

So I downloaded the necessary pieces and very soon, I had a rudimentary working application. I also added a “UserEngine”, which I found in the rails engines repository , and which also means that within about 5 minutes after downloading it, I had the major pieces allowing new user signup, existing user login, and account maintenance. Even better, one line of code at the top of every password protected page (or just one line in the header template) implemented this role-based access control mechanism for that page. It is no small wonder there’s a fair bit of hype surrounding this framework, the productivity gains are impressive!

But then came the final test – would this actually run on my web site, on my web host’s servers? Well, there’s the snag. Most of the articles and documentation I’ve seen that talk about deployment assume your RoR production app will be hosted on your own server, over which you have total control. There are instructions for how to deploy to the maybe 2 or 3 web hosting companies that have Ruby installed and supported, and, supposedly you can “make it work” on other Apache servers. But the documentation on that is a work in progress, and assumes the ability to edit the .htaccess and other server configuration files. As regular readers of this blog know, I have no such access on my web host. So at first glance, it would seem I cannot run RoR apps on my web site.

But then again, as is also known to those who follow my story, I created a workaround for my lack of appropriate server access by using PHP header redirects. This was done so that this blog could use custom Permalinks for individual postings. Would this technique also work with RoR? Well - no, it didn’t work, at least not right away. It’s possible I do not yet understand well enough how RoR works, so this may still be feasible, but it will take more experimenting.

So I’ll continue to explore RoR and ponder my deployment options. In the meantime, I’ve come up with a relatively simple way to enhance AustinMania!, still far short of the big vision, but at least a lot more interesting than a static page. Check out the next post for details…

Lining up for SPAM!

Appropriately enough, this “pandemonious potted pork festival” is held every year on April Fools day - I mean, who would believe you if you said you were headed to a SPAM cook-off? Well, I went, I witnessed, and I wondered - why here, why Austin? Oh sure, it’s cool and fun and wacky - SPAMALYMPICS, anyone? - but how did this start?

According to the web site, the initial impetus was to have an alternative to the all-too-common chili cook-offs. Only in Texas do you get tired of chili cook-offs, I suppose - and only in Austin does someone come up with an alternative crazy enough that their neighbors will voluntarily be a part of it - for 28 years and counting. Jeez, what’s the shelf life of SPAM anyway?

Now, the official SPAMARAMA site says nothing of this, but I discovered there is another linkage between Austin and SPAM – and no, I don’t mean we have an overabundance of lazy-assed porno pushers and medical miracle misfits. Did you know that SPAM is produced in Austin? Yep, there’s even a SPAM Museum, right there on SPAM Boulevard. No - I’m not kidding you! Of course, I’m not talking about Austin, Texas, but Austin, Minnesota, the corporate home of Hormel Foods . Talk about weird! Is this some kind of comedic karma? Or, more sinister-like, some machiavellian marketing?

Anyway, if you want to go ask someone at Hormel, just get on I-35, go north for oh, about 1100 miles, hang a right at Bancroft, MN, and wait another 20 miles. You’ll find yourself smack dab in SPAM heaven. Whoopee!

Keepin’ it Weird

The weather was pretty awesome this past Saturday afternoon, and in between dodging ham-hatted SPAMaholics and hog-nosed porky people, I had a pretty good time. I missed Nathan’s Stupid Drama , but I did get the CD, and yes - the rumors are true - this guy can play the acoustic! I’ll have to catch his act live sometime.

In a classic “if-someone-had-told-me” moment, I did enjoy the irony of watching contestants do all they could to hold on to the stuff as they ran the SPAM Can Relay – “Can’t spill the SPAM - Can’t spill the SPAM - Can’t spill the - DAMN, I spilled the SPAM!”

Spam SPam SPAm SPAM!

Mmmmmm…..

And then there was the obligatory SPAM eating contest, which was probably the most obvious Hormel-driven event that day. In one masterful stroke, conclusive proof was presented that not only is the stuff in the can edible, it really is filling - the contest lasted for several minutes! If SPAM meat was as insubstantial as we have come to believe, the contestants would have chowed down in no time. Instead, the assembled masses got to witness long, agonizing moments of chomping, chewing, and strained swallowing. “Better you than I”, they must have thought, “better you than I, to find SPAM’s not naught!”

Yes, spring has sprung in Austin. The weirdness blooms and the fun beckons, and it’s time to get out and enjoy all the town has to offer. What a cool place to be!

How do I know badbots are visiting? A couple of ways: First, I am using a free service called IP2Location , that shows the general location of a computer based on it’s IP address. According to this, I routinely get visits from the Netherlands, Germany, France, Taiwan, and other “interesting” locales that – one would assume – do not have very many people interested in an Austin specific web site. Hmm, I just got a “visitor” from China, apparently from the FUJIAN region – wherever that is. I have to assume these are robots and not humans. One giveaway is that the server logs show only certain files are requested, and not others that are necessary for human enjoyment of the site. For example, the home page is index.php, but when that page loads in a browser, as it would when a human requests it, a number of other files are required: a javascript file, a stylesheet, and several images. The Chinese visitor, as an example, only requested the root page (index.php) and the javascript file. That’s it - no images or styles. Without them the page would be meaningless.

The other way I know some of these are badbots, and not helpful search engine bots (which I also get a fair share of, btw – Google almost nightly, plus Yahoo, Inktomi, AOL, and others) is that I’ve started to get comment and e-mail spam at my brand-new site. The comment span appeared first – I received 4 comments to various blog postings at the same time, each with what seemed to be just a random collection of words strung together into something that looked kinda like sentences, but really weren’t. Intermixed with the random words were links, also with random words, but the weird thing is at least some of them seemed to point to a legitimate site like news.yahoo.com. I have to admit, I do not understand the purpose of this. Why would a spammer link to a yahoo site? Maybe if I had examined the source code I would have figured out the trick, but I just deleted the comments instead.

Getting protection from comment spam was pretty easy – all I had to do was enable the Akismet plugin, which is very effective (so far) at keeping comment spam away from me. I did have to register at WordPress to get the digital certificate to enable this plugin, but that was pretty painless and only took a few minutes. Hmm, I wonder if there were technical reasons for this, or if WP has stolen a page from the Microsoft playbook. Remember when MS tried to force everyone to get a Passport account? Supposedly you could not get anything out of MS web sites (and even some software) without a Passport. Thankfully that didn’t last very long, and although I managed to get by without a Passport, I now have an unused blog over at WordPress, just to keep spam out of my comment queue. Oh well.

Combating the other scourge, spam e-mail, took a little more doing. The primary line of defense for this is to keep the badbots from finding your addresses in the first place. I was negligent in this regard when I created the Contact Me page, and posted my 6 addresses in plain sight, both to humans and to robots. I knew I would have to come back and fix this, and now that the spam is here, it is time. Actually, it is a little late, because at least one spammer already knows the addresses. So far, I’ve received only one form of spam, so if I cross my fingers tight enough, maybe he’ll not bother to share them with anyone else.

There are a number of ways to hide e-mail addresses from robots, while making them visible to humans, each with varying levels of visitor convenience. There is a nice summary of these methods here .

Since one of my design objectives is to make this site fun and entertaining, visitor convenience ranks pretty high in priority. This means e-mail addresses need to be actual mailto: links, with text that can be easily copied and pasted if the user prefers to do that. Thus, address hiding methods that require any user effort were not considered, such as an images that looks like text (requires users to manually type in the entire address), or text descriptions (in the form “erwin AT austinmash DOT com”), or deliberate address munging (like erwin@REMOVE.austinmash.com).

I also discounted methods that rely on replacing regular text, like “@”, with the equivalent HTML or HEX character encodings, like &#64;. The theory here is that the badbots go hunting for @ symbols, and if they don’t find one, they go away. However, given the declining cost of bandwidth and CPU cycles, and the fact this is easy to decode, I am not about to assume spammers are not smart enough to also be on the look out for &#64;.

There are more elaborate schemes that rely on encryption, CSS tricks, Forms, or user action before revealing the addresses (as if it was a state secret or something). Most of these have maintenance drawbacks, and are just not worth the effort. Simple yet Effective, is my motto. So, I settled on a Javascript approach.

The basic concept is to have Javascript write the text to the page in chunks, such that any one chunk is not enough for a badbot to get anything useful. The end result on the page, however, is a complete e-mail address with mailto: functionality and easy-to-copy-and-paste text. Also, it can be done in a way that is easy to maintain, and if necessary, can even be generated with server-side code.

There are a lot of examples of this technique on the web, but most take an approach that seems convoluted and inelegant to me, such as this: My e-mail address is <script>document.write(“me”);document.write(“@”);
document.write(“here.com”)</script> I suppose this is fine if this is the only address on the page, but I have 6 addresses on my contact page. So I came up with my own technique, which I think is more flexible and re-usable (although it’s pretty likely this has been done before, I did not run across any examples like this in my research).

First, I declared a number of functions to write certain portions of each address, with the intention of reusing common functions (chunks of text). Then, where I wanted the address to render to the page, I just called the functions in sequence.

This is the first part, the function definitions. I placed this in the <head> portion of the page, but it just as easily could have been in a separate .js file.
<script>
function hrf() {document.write("<a href=mailto:")}
function d() {document.write("@austin")}
function d1() {document.write("mash.com")}
function d2() {document.write(">")}
function erwin() {document.write("erwin")}
function press() {document.write("press")}
function sales() {document.write("sales")}
function h() {document.write("help")}
function s() {document.write("submit")}
function payments() {document.write("payments")}
</script>

Then, each time I need an address on the page, I do something like:
<p>Feel free to send me a note at:
<script>hrf();erwin();d();d1();d2();erwin();d();d1()</script>

Here is another part of the page. Note, I am reusing most of the same functions
<p>If you have any difficulty buying pixels, please use this address:
<script>hrf();sales();d();d1();d2();sales();d();d1()</script>

If you want to see the end result, just see my Contact page.

If at some point I create a new page that also has e-mail addresses, I will probably go ahead and put the function definitions in an external file that both pages can access, and will probably re-name the functions to make them less ambiguous and likely to collide with other functions of the same name. Also, I may go ahead and combine d() and d1() – the badbot already knows my domain name, so there’s probably little gained by trying to hide it.

The biggest drawback to this approach is that it won’t work for visitors that don’t have Javascript, or have it turned off. This was not a big issue for me, because without Javascript, the whole site is pretty useless and probably impossible to read anyway. This is a conscious decision on my part, and I’m ok with it. I mean, Disney can spend millions of dollars on Disney World and have some of the greatest rides in the world, but they can’t do anything about someone who refuses to get on because it may mess up their hair, or whatever. Hey – it’s their loss, right?

Oh OK - for the non-scripters, I added a <noscript> tag that says my address is erwin (at) austinmash (dot) com. There you go, you sit here and watch everyone else have fun.

I don’t know how long it takes for an exposed computer to be eaten up by the piranhas of the internet, but I do know a new web site will start to get nibbles in a few weeks. I hope my new boots are thick enough for the coming onslaught.

On the same day, more than 280 pages were requested, which means that, on average, each visitor clicked on almost two other pages besides the one they landed on. Not too shabby, sez I ! Some folks might sneer at these numbers, and harrumph that they get as many hits every time they sneeze – well, that’s great, but how long has their site been online? How long have they been promoting themselves? My public debut – in person at a local event, was only three weeks prior to that, so no one besides my wife and a few relatives and friends knew the site existed before then. Consider also that I had purposefully not advertised the site online anywhere – that everyone who knew about did so by word of mouth, and yes, I was pleased with the traffic.

I quick query of my database also reveals that before that date, a total of about 200 unique visitors had come by, so in one day the “audience” grew by about 50%. How did I do that? By registering my blog at a number of blog aggregators and feed services. It seems that people came to check out the newbie, and judging by the almost triple hits-to-visitors ratio, apparently they liked what they saw enough to take a look around. Cool!

As of now, a grand total of 475 unique visitors have darkened my URL (see the PixelList page for current stats), and if you subtract the roughly 5-10 robots that stop by nightly (mostly the same ones), that’s maybe 450 humans on this planet who are aware of my site’s existence. Ok, not earth-shattering or cyb