So, I’ve been giving things a bit of trim.  I started by restoring the blog.predictabuy.com URL for this blog.  I know blogs seem downright old school now and there are cooler blogging platforms on the block but I still think there’s a lot of meaningful stuff on this blog.  And I’ve got a few new things I want to ramble about.  And I still like the ‘long form’ blog better than the quick hits of things like twitter.

I also restored my photography site: http://www.ericfredine.com/.  It’s long overdue for a renovation but I still enjoy looking at the photographs on it.  You might too.

I’ve been tweeting a bit too: predictabuy.  I have a Facebook presence as well – but I mostly view that as family and friends – with the exception that quite a few photographers are friends on Facebook – but a fair number of them are friends in the true sense as well.

Lately, I’ve also opened up an account on Google+: https://profiles.google.com/eric.fredine.   I am a gray haired geek after all – and that does seem to be the dominant demographic at the moment.  I think it will likely have some legs.  The http://www.linkedin.com/in/efredine presence is pretty low key and easy to maintain.

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That’s enough for me.  More than enough actually.  One thing that is both interesting and scary is that these identities are certainly becoming very personally identifiable.  That’s quite an explicit goal of all these social services – and understandably so from the point of view of the ‘utility’ of the service I suppose.

But it does feel like the virtual world keeps shrinking and become denser.  I hope it doesn’t all disappear in to a black hole!

I’d link to the post – but I can’t remember where I put it.  Which is why we’re having this blog post: I want to be able to ‘search’ my web history rather than having to ‘sort’ it with bookmarks or some other technique.

So, I did a little research and found three candidates: Infoaxe, Egoarchive and Google web history (with the help of the Google toolbar).  Here’s a brief run down of each of them.

Web History in the Cloud – Very Scary

So, the idea of all these tools is that you store your browsing history in the cloud.  They all use a browser plug-in that reports every link you visit to a cloud based service.  Then they provide you with some tools to search this history.

This is scary: you’re voluntarily providing your entire click-stream to a third party.  It’s imperative for them to demonstrate that they will take good care of it and they need to provide a lot of value – to me – the user – in return.

Searching Your History

All three work as advertised.  They store your history and provide various ways to search it.  EgoArchive and InfoAxe provide tools for bookmarking stuff in your archive.  EgoArchive also provides sharing tools from within the archive.  EgoArchive actually stores an image of your page – which is what get’s shared.  While I thought this was kind of cool I didn’t find it very useful – it just seems to take up a lot of screen real-estate that I think would be better utilized with a denser presentation of the results.

In the end, none of them were what I was really looking for.  They made me realize I am looking for more than ‘just’ search.  I want a tool that is able to help with organizing the information as well – something more along the line of threading conversations in the email world.  In this sense, Google’s web history did the best job of providing a bit of structure to the data.  Not surprisingly their organization views ‘the search’ as the fundamental organizational construct.  I’m not convinced that’s really the way to think of a click-stream.

Asserting Their Presence

I found that InfoAxe took a number of liberties with my browser settings!  It took over my home page, without asking me.  The nerve!  I was very annoyed.  I removed it almost immediately. Given how much trust I gave them in the first place – here have my click history – I really needed them to be much more respectful about what they were doing to my browser.  I was left thinking: wow, if they’ll do that to my browser right in front of me what might they do with my data behind my back!

EgoArchive was more refined in this respect.  I’m not sure I really enjoyed the way it stuck itself in to the top of my Google search results.  That could use a little refinement.  I don’t like things ‘messing’ with my browser too much.

Google on the other hand almost disappears.  You have to go seek out your web history.  This doesn’t surprise me, since they are probably more interested in how my data helps them organized the world’s information than in how they can help me organize MY information.

Organizing My Information

I think the focus of existing web history tools is on ‘re-finding’.  This is a worthy objective, but seems to fall far short of the potential here.  What I’m ultimately looking for is a tool to help me organize all MY information (at least as it pertains to my wanderings around the web) – without requiring me to become a pedantic filer.  Because that’s just never going to happen!

Suggestions?

Also, re-booting eric.fredine.com.

Cheers,
Eric

Off for a 2 week family vacation in Nova Scotia — posting will resume after the break.

Cheers,
Eric

1. Users respond to them; and
2. You also get to track redemption.

You get to track a coupon twice: once when they click on it and once when they redeem it!

Over at Local Mobile Search, Greg Sterling talks about some of their recent survey results:

In our most recent survey (3/09, not yet published) we found that 57% of respondents agreed “strongly” or “somewhat” with the statement: “I’m interested in any ad that offers me a discount or way to save money.” Here’s a related question and answer from and online survey we conducted in August, 2008 (n=789):

He then goes on to discuss some recent experience from ValPack:

What ValPak told me in a follow up conversation on the phone is that they quietly optimized ValPak.com for mobile in March. Leiser said they were happily surprised by the adoption and response with no promotion or formal announcement.

Now for the significant information: I was told that for every four site visitors to ValPak.com on the PC the company sees one coupon print (25% response/conversion) on average. But in April, with a smaller base, the company saw four coupons selected/downloaded for every mobile site visitor (400% response/conversion). This grew from 200% in March.