More importantly…you can now search our site. We are particularly excited about search. EC and I were starting to have a hard time finding specific content on our site - we continue to curate lots of content across thousands of topics. Search makes it much easier for us to understand the breadth and depth of content on our site. 

 This is only the first release of search. Future versions will identify topics that match your search terms, allow you to sort by rank/relevancy, filter by topic and category, etc.  

Please try it out and give us feedback!

p.s. (1) The current search is sorted by time; (2) if we don’t have matching results from our site, we’ll automatically search Twitter for you and show you recent Tweets that contain links, and (3) for exact results please use ” ” around your keywords.

So there are two reasons why I thought I would blog about reporting…

1. Building a business: After talking with some entrepreneur friends I’ve come to the opinion (accurate or not) that if you aren’t obsessed about the metrics of your start-up then maybe you need to rethink whether you have the right personality to build a business from the ground-up (this of course assumes that you are one of the main guys/girls of your company). I’m not making any judgement calls here; I’ve just found that getting your start-up off the ground and working to turn it into a real business (with lots of users) requires an obsession with metrics. You need to know what’s working or not (with the product, monetization, marketing, traffic sources, etc.) and iterate intelligently and quicklt on all of these “programs”. This requires a different mindset than when you are in the actual process of developing your product.

2. Google Analytics: Google is a great free product and a great product for starting your company but it has its limits. For transparency, I became intimately involved in the Omniture product (the enterprise version of Google Analytics) while at eBay – I kind of miss it but it’s super $$$. Here are some things we learned after taking quite a bit of time to implement and use Google Analytics. Thought this might be helpful for others (and hopefully I am correct!).

a. That funky 0:00 Average Time on Page.

• I’m sure you’ve seen this and said “huh!?” In order to calculate time on a page, Google needs both a T1 and T2. T1 is the time when you enter a page and T2 is when you go to another page on that site. When you go to the next page, that page pings Google and provides it with a T2. The issue is if a visitor only visits one page on your site (recorded as a Bounce), Google can never get a T2 for your visitor.
• Implications: If you look at the Content reports, the Average Time on a Page summary EXCLUDES 0:00; however, if you look at Average Time on Site, this value INCLUDES 0:00. So this will likely mean that your Average Time on Site will be less than your Average Time on Page. The differences in values can definitely make you scratch your head. My next step is to see if I can easily get the Average Time on Site when Bounces are excluded – I am not confident that this will be easy to do.

b. Event tracking and bounce rates

If you implement event tracking be aware that your bounce rates will decrease. On pages where event tracking is implemented, the page pings Google effectively giving it a T2 mentioned above. If you are going to implement a lot of event tracking I recommend that you take the time to map out how you are naming your Category, Action and Label and to understand how your site has been created. We have tracking at the .jsp and tag level so this created a little bit of complexity. ps – we had some issues implementing event tracking (EC said the Google instructions were wrong). I don’t have the exact details but if you are having some issues even though you believe you are following the instructions let us know and we’ll see how we can help.

c. Path analysis

Oh I do so miss Omniture for this! Unfortunately you cannot see, in aggregate, how people got to a group of pages and what they did after they left that family of pages. You can only look at how people entered and exited a specific page. For BlazingStreams we have “Article Pages” – I would love to see how, in general, people got to our article pages and what they did next but unfortunately I can only see this by clicking on a unique article. This type of reporting becomes valuable when, for instance, you can identify page types that drive additional click-thrus or page types that are particularly popular with certain traffic sources. Our site is very dynamic so looking at a specific page (unless it’s the Homepage/static) isn’t very useful.

d. Advanced Segments

After trying this, I’m not sure it’s going to be that useful for me beyond the basics. The important thing I learned is that Advanced Segments does not function like the filters in the Content section. My goal was to understand which categories of content people are most interested in (Sports, Health, etc.) and from this create segments based on Category type and track their behavior as a group.

For example, based on our website model this means I want any page associated with a Category ID I am interested. For example, for Sports I want any Category, Topic or Article page associated with our Sports ID. When I entered a request to pull results that contained our Sports IDs, Google Advanced Segments pulled every page related to a visit that viewed at least one page with the Sports ID. So if EC looked at an Article Page associated to our Sports ID, Google Advanced Segments will also show me that he looked at the Homepage and any other page during his visit. So in order to get the data I’m seeking, I am now filtering the information from Content and recording it in Excel (not ideal but you gotta do it).

I’ll post more info about reporting that might be useful for others as we come across it. If I’m thinking about my reporting wrong – let me know!

Cheers!

So, what are the ‘biggest’ changes we made?

Follow Your Favorite Topics

You can now personalize the content you get from BlazingStreams. Here’s how it works:

- Click the  sign located next to each topic or category throughout our site to add it to your BlazingStreams homepage.
- For each topic you are following, we will show you the 3 highest ranked articles (ranked by us) for a given time period (currently we are tweaking the time period based on user feedback). While there may be many articles on Twitter for a given topic, an article must pass through our quality filters to be added to our site. This means you may find articles on a topic on Twitter or other websites that you won’t see on our site. We are constantly working on improving our filters to make sure we identify content that you will like.
- You can view all the latest articles for a given topic by clicking the “View all” link displayed for each topic you are following.
- You can remove a topic from your homepage by simply clicking the  sign.
- There is no limit to the number of topics you can follow on your homepage.

p.s. You need to sign-up for BlazingStreams to personalize your homepage.
p.p.s You can also follow our Twitter accounts if you prefer to get your information that way; the list of our accounts is on the top of every page of our site.

We know there’s a lot more work to be done to make this feature really really excellent, but we hope you find the first version to be valuable (and if you don’t please let us know how we can make it better).

Hot! Topics and Articles

You can now see what topics are hot on Twitter and read relevant articles for these topics. How do we identify whether a topic is hot or not? Like many sites, we use trending topics identified by Twitter. The problem with only using these topics is that you only see what ‘the masses’ are talking about. While knowing what the general population is talking about is definitely interesting, you don’t necessarily get to see what’s hot for specific interests you may have like Sports or Music. (As an aside, right now the hottest Twitter trending topic is ‘Follow Friday’ which usually is the case…every Friday.)

So to give you more insight into what’s hot for your specific interests, we also use our own topic system to identify hot topics. We identify topics with the highest growth rates overall and for each category like Sports. For these topics we find the most relevant article(s) based on the quality filters I mentioned earlier.

This means if you are a Sports fan, we want you to know that #Yankees is a hot topic (which Twitter tells us) AND that people are also talking about the San Diego Padres maybe trading Adrian Gonzalez.

So those are the big changes. We’re excited to have you try our improved site but we need your help. Tell us what you think…Love it? Hate it? Don’t even care? Leave us feedback here on our blog, Tweet us @BlazingStreams, or email us at feedback@blazingstreams.com. Your opinions and suggestions really matter to us.

Please also tell your friends if you like what you see. We’re a super young company and appreciate your help to spread the word.

Thanks for using BlazingStreams!
www.blazingstreams.com

When we started working together I got tired (read lazy) typing BlazingStreams every time in my emails so I started abbreviating it as ‘BS’. EC said he didn’t realize that the abbreviation was BS until he saw my emails; we had a good laugh. EC is Spanish/French and also doesn’t really pay attention to those things. We asked ourselves – could we really be a credible information/news site with the nickname of BS? How would people respond to our Twitter accounts if they were named ”BS_News” or “BS_Diabetes.” It IS kind of funny but clearly has its downsides.

We each did a little thinking about what our name could/should be, but at the end of the day EC and I are very pragmatic people. We left the name as is to focus on building out the tech and product. Online businesses are such a contrast to consumer packaged goods where branding is a key factor in consumer decision-making. I’m personally fascinated by Method and the brand image it has created. I spent about a year helping my friend with his wine company, Oriel, and I realized how much competition a bottle of wine has on the shelf. Name and look and feel of the label and bottle DO matter.  Technology products are more egalitarian – it’s first about how effectively and efficiently it meets your needs. Brand plays a role but in  my opinion it becomes a factor after you decide whether it is a worthwhile product.

So welcome to BlazingStreams (for now)! And as EC and I like to jest when our brains are a little fried or we’re annoyed at each other, “I’m tired of you talking so much BS!”

Cheers!

p.s. feel free to recommend some names once our beta launches – to be announced!

p.p.s companies mentioned: Method: www.methodhome.com | Oriel: www.orielwines.com

If you happen to stumbleupon this blog (before we announce our beta) - go and check out www.blazingstreams.com. I like to describe our current website as ‘an expression of our backend’ – this basically means it’s not very pretty and a little hard to use – but we’re working on that!

Cheers!