Stalk Yourself 101

[hope]

When it comes to feedback in fandom, I tend to agree with the school of thought that suggests 'feedback' comes in a number of forms. Not just comments or emails but recs, bookmarks and hits/visits, to name a few alternatives.

So, being the obsessive type, and already having a compulsion to know as exhaustively as possible what people are saying about me, I've got a few techniques for measuring these kinds of feedback.

• LJSeek - a search engine that sweeps public livejournal entries to locate where your username appears, then lists in chronological order.

Pros: Is a search engine specific for livejournal, so the results are displayed in a relatively handy manner - linking directly to the entry instead of the root directory of the journal. Also, it snapshots/archives pages. So even if the OP deleted the entry/edited it, its original incarnation is recorded by the bot (once it's public on the internet, it's there forever, folks). Searches for links to your journal in hyperlinks as well as just the lj user= form, which is very handy.

Cons: doesn't search livejournal comments, alas. Also, it used to be quite on-the-ball, but over the past handfull of months it's been terrible with keeping up-to-date. As in, displaying recent matches. Supposedly you can put a little box with your "ranking" (how much you're linked to) on your userinfo, but I can never get mine to display any hits on it.

Tips: "angstslashhope" is a pretty unique word, but when it comes to more common word usernames, the search results can be irrelevant, especially when the search doesn't take into account underscores or hyphens. Try searching in "quotation marks" to whittle down the irrelevant results.

• Technorati - a search engine specifically for the blogosphere.

Pros: Technorati is extremely on-the-ball. You can come up with results that were posted less than an hour ago. You can also "claim your blog" on technorati, which gives you easy access to your ranking and search results. The search itself is handy, too - lets your search for the URL of your blog, and comes up with results from matches found in hyperlinks.

Cons: Doesn't link to the entries the link occured in directly - just links to the root directory of the OP's journal, which can be really frustrating if the post was made even a week early! You have to do a lot of digging around in the OP's journal to find the referral. Also, Technorati has a habit of repeating results from posts made a while ago, instead of just posting each result once, and having the fresher ones to the top.

Tips: You can subscribe to your technorati search results with your RSS aggregator: just use the results address (eg. http://technorati.com/search/angstslashhope.livejournal.com)

• Google - search engine

Pros: Google casts a wider net than the blogosphere - with it you can see where you're linked to outside of livejournal; recs websites, wikis, forums, bookmark engines, etc. It also ranks the results - the results that get the most clicks from people who search for that term on google are at the top of the results list. Again, cached pages is also pretty cool.

Cons: Result ranking as well. When you're digging around for recs made in journals that don't get a lot of attention or posts made only a day ago, you'd rather have them at the top rather than the link to your own userinfo!

Tips: Again, can be difficult to keep the results relevant if you don't have a unique username. Try searching for your username in inverted commas (if it's more than one word). Also try searching for the url of the root directory of your lj ("angstslashhope.livejournal.com") - it can come up with a different set of results based on hyperlinks.

• del.icio.us - a bookmarking website that allows uses to create and tag their own set of links.
  
  Pros: Some of the readers tag stories with author usernames, so searching for http://del.icio.us/tag/angstslashhope will come up, with most recent first, people who've bookmarked and tagged things with your username. There are also individual pages for each URL that has been tagged that displays who has bookmarked it, when they've bookmarked it, any comments they've added and the tags they've used. You can also subscribe to new posts made with particular tags (i.e. your username) with your RSS aggregator. Also, below each bookmark it displays "saved by [X number of] other people", which you can click on to see who else has bookmarked it! v. handy.
  
  Cons: Not everyone bookmarks or recs with del.icio.us! I really wish livejournal had a feature that let you see who had memoried your posts. Also, often people's usernames on del.icio.us are different from their LJ names, so you can't always tell *who* is bookmarking/reccing you, like you can with most of the tools listed above.
  
  Tips: In order to get the most out of mining feedback from del.icio.us, you need to kind of manipulate the system a bit. I have a tag called "myfic" that does the trick: I just tag all my own stories/major posts/websites/etc with that tag, then going to that page lists all the bookmarks my pages have got - just click on the "saved by [X] other people] to go to the entry for that URL.

 

• LJ Toys - a visitor analytics package made specifically for livejournal. You place a 1x1 transparent pixel image on each entry (and your userinfo) that is housed on the LJ Toys server. LJ Toys tracks the hits on this image, providing you with results of whose livejournal is hitting which entries of yours. Usually the image is integrated into your mood theme, to make it easier for you to automatically post with it.
  
  Pros: You can see who on livejournal is hitting what posts of yours - who is clicking on what cut tag, and how many times they visit it!
  
  Cons: Unless you're willing to fork out the fee for a paid LJ Toys account, you have to wade through results and be pretty familiar with your /numbernumbernumber.html URLs of particular stories, etc. Free accounts only list hits in chronological order, you can't actually get a result of how many times a particular URL has been hit in a summary or anything. I've actually given up on bothering with LJ Toys altogether, I can't be bothered sifting through all the data!
  
  Tips/warnings: LJ Toys can come across as a somewhat invasive form of measuring hits - as if you're spying on your readers. They might actually be LESS likely to click on your cut tags or read your comments if they know you're going to be watching them do it. If you know what to look for, it's reasonably easy to pick out an LJ Toys user - if the blank/image-less-yet-gappy moodtheme doesn't give you away, the "loading file from angstslashhope.ljtoys.co.uk" on the reader's task bar as their flist loads will.
  

• Sitemeter - web visitor counter
  
  Pros: Can keep track of hits on a particular entry (or page, if you roll that way). If you have it on your webpage, you can usually check out your referrals and find out who's linking to you.
  
  Cons: Alas, livejournal is not entirely conducive to sitemeter, as it doesn't seem to be able to track referrals (where people have clicked from), and thus only serves as a basic measure of how many times people are visiting the page. It's been interesting for my recs post, but isn't really practical for things like fic - too much work to create a new sitemeter account for each story!
  
  Tips: If you don't want people to know you've got a sitemeter up there, try making it the same colour as your background (however, remember that "loading images from sitemeter.com" thing in the reader's taskbar). If you're putting one on your website, don't forget to put one on each page.
  

 

• Google Analytics - web visitor counter, statistics and analysis
  
  Pros: If you're wanting to keep track of website visitors and don't want to pay for the privilege, definitely go for Google Analytics over Sitemeter! It has awesome analysis of your hits, including maps displaying where in the world you're getting hits from, pie graphs of referrers, line graphs of hits and unique visitors over hours or days or weeks... it's fab. It's also invisible on your site, and results accessible only by you.
  
  Cons: I haven't experimented a good deal with it on livejournal, but it generally seems not to work at all, alas. As with sitemeter, it works most effectively when you put the code for it on *every* page. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to pick up pings from code on my userinfo page at all, so I'm not sure what the dealio is. Might experiment more with it later.
  
  Tips: Don't really have any, as all the features are quite awesome enough that you don't really need to tweak or manipulate it all that much.

 

• YouTube - embedded video publishing/hosting website
  
  Pros: YouTube not only allows comments directly on your video, but documents how many views it has had, how many people have favourited it (through YouTube), and links you to where it's been embedded off-site. It also tells you how many 'subscribers' there are to your videos, and who they are. This has been a blessing for me, as a vidder, when it comes to measuring feedback, as vids tend to get so little direct feedback (eg. comments). Also, you can embed YouTube videos on your livejournal - it doesn't entirely have to be removed from this forum!
  
  Cons: Stepping outside of the realm of LJ into a realm where authorship seems to be a more diffuse beast that functions different can be a bit off-putting if you prefer to retain complete identification with and control over your vid.
  
  Tips: When you post a vid to YouTube, comment on your own vid with a link back to your LJ post about the vid - it may help direct the feedback back to that location. Also, embed the vid itself in that livejournal post (behind a cut-tag though, please!!). If people are watching it right THERE (instead of downloading to watch later - even if it's just a once-it's-downloaded later - and being removed from the author), they're more likely to comment right there, as they've just watched it and are still RIGHT THERE.

Right. I can't think of any more off the top of my head that I really use all that frequently. If you're interested, I'm also obsessed with recording and organising all this data, so as well as that tag of mine on del.icio.us, I also memory all the livejournal entries I'm recced in. I like it :)

I got on a bit of a tangent away from LJ at the end there, and could have included things like Feedburner for people who have websites/blogs that are more typically subscribed to, but I'm not sure how relevant it would be.

Please comment if you have other tips or tools or strategies! I am infinitely interested.