Micro-Blogging With Tumblr

This past week I spent some time setting up a site using the micro-blogging (or tumblelogging) tool Tumblr. The service is extremely easy to use and definitely worth checking out if you are either looking to get into blogging but don't relish the idea of writing long posts or are simply looking to create another site as an outlet for smaller bits of information.

Tumblr allows you to create six different kinds of posts: Regular Post, Photo, Quote, Link, Conversation, Video. These posts work exactly as their titles suggest, Tumblr simply gives you an easy template in which to input them and then styles them nicely for presentation on your page. Photos can either be uploaded to your Tumblr site or pulled in using a link. The same is true with videos which can either be embedded or pulled in using a link. Quote and Conversation are two interesting micro-blogging categories that are perfectly suited for Tumblr. While it may seem pointless on a regular blog to create an entire post that is simply a quotation, on Tumblr this is perfectly acceptable.

Tumblr has a bookmarks bar button so you can easily share something on your Tumblr site that you find while browsing the web. Clicking on the button displays a pop-up window which gives you the option of which category to put your newly found content in. It makes posting to Tumblr very fast and efficient.

While it may not look like it at first glance, each post on Tumblr has a permalink that is usually revealed by a tiny black box with an arrow in the right hand corner of a post on rollover. This ensures that your posts are still submittable to sites like Digg and Del.icio.us. Tumblr also features built-in RSS capabilities for your site so readers can easily subscribe to your work.

There are currently five nicely designed, minimalist templates you can choose from for your site. The colors of the various elements on these template is easily editable using the color menu below the theme select. Tumblr also gives you the option to completely customize your site. This is very nice if you know CSS and HTML.

Unique Visitors May Not Be So Unique

When website visitors are tracked, either for the purpose of calculating audience size or to keep track of the number of advertisements you are serving, one of the most interesting metrics to look at (at least traditionally) is the number of unique monthly visitors to your content. According to a study released by ComScore today, however, your unique visitors may not be unique at all.

Most services that track web metrics count unique visitors by using cookies. According to ComScore's study, these internal web analytics softwares will on average over-count your audience by 250%. Which means that your audience is actually 150% smaller than you think it is - based on the numbers these analytics packages give you. What's worse is that if you have a technology-savvy audience (i.e. majority of the seo, smo, smm, audience) then your audience maybe overstated by a factor of 1,250% per month! The latter of the two facts is because technology-savvy computer users delete cookies quite frequently and therefore,

These 'serial resetters' have the potential to wildly inflate a site's internal unique visitor tally, because just one set of 'eyeballs' at the site may be counted as 10 or more unique visitors over the course of a month. The result is a highly inflated estimate of unique visitors for sites that rely on cookies to count their audience.

The conclusion, as Fred mentions, we ultimately draw from this is that,

You cannot rely on your own analytics data. You need third party data as well. That's not to say that third party data (primarily panel data) is perfect either. You have to triangulate between all the numbers to get a decent view of what's actually going on.

Geeks.com Does $99 v1 Extenders

Linksys v1 Media Center Extender | $99 (Geeks.com) Geeks.com has Linksys v1 Media Center Extenders for $99 again. It’s a nice pick up it you don’t plan on upgrading to Vista right off the bat as v1 Extenders will no longer connect to Vista. I believe they are referbs, but it doesn’t seem to note. If you search their website you will find that they do sell referbs, at a price of $124.99, which is noted on the ad as the regular price.

Happy buying, remember it doesn’t work with Vista.

AnandTech Looks At CableCARD in Vista

ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner: AMD and Dell Bring CableCARD to PCs (AnandTech) | AnandTech has an article up about CableCARD in PC’s. It gives a nice overview of where Media Center started, and where it is now. Not much new in terms of information on CableCARD and Media Center. If you have been watching my posts over the last year you will basically know everything they have to say on that topic.

They do however give a overview of Dell’s CableCARD ready machines. They also go through their problems with getting a TWC to correctly install the CableCARD.

Very long article, but worth the read.