Blog Archives
My Three WordPress.com Wishes: Second Wish
More Stats!
Dear @wordpressdotcom More comprehensive statistics #2ndof3wishes #11millionusers Blogger Live Stats Vs WP Stats http://bit.ly/9NJxKq—
JenniferT (@wysiwygjt) July 07, 2010
So the WordPress.com Dashboard Stats page got “sexified”, but still lacks comprehensive statistics like visitor country, time of visit, length of visit, page entry/exit, etc., etc., etc. As far as I know, this information is already being collected on your blog via both Google Analytics and Quantcast. Other 3rd party stats apps such as “whos.amung.us“, “Clicky“, “SiteMeter” and Google Webmaster Tools can fill in some of these blanks, but these utilities can’t do the entire job because of the javascript limitation in place here. Timethief has some excellent information about visitor tracking, and why external stats programs are never quite as accurate as inhouse tracking, on her blog, onecoolsitebloggingtips.com
If not as a part of the basic package, can we say “Paid Upgrade”? There certainly would be a market for it. Check out these forum discussions on Google Analytics and Woopra.
(Should anyone reading this be using the WordPress Stats plugin on their external, self-hosted WordPress install, if you see other kinds of information that we here on WordPress.com don’t, please leave a comment and let the rest of us know.)
One other stat I’d be interested in seeing in all our Dashboards are full subscriber statistics. As it stands now, subscriber stats only reflect the people who signed up to receive your posts by email. If someone subscribed in the WordPress.com Admin Bar and set their Subscription Reader preference to “never”, i.e. read their subscriptions only in the Reader on WordPress.com, they aren’t counted in your subscriber stats.
As an aside, for the truly stats obsessed who use the Chrome web browser, there’s the WordPress Stats extension which will allow you to check your WordPress blog’s stats without having to log in to your site. For users of Firefox, there’s MMD WordPress.com extension. (NAYY) Of course, if you’re checking your blog’s stats continuously, you also may want to seek help for your condition. Just saying… 
So that’s my second wish. What about you? Do you have a wish to make your WordPress.com experience rock? Put it in the comments or post your own “My 3 WordPress.com Wishes” and send a backtrack to any of my posts.
Third wish coming soon; stay tuned! Better yet, sign up for my blog’s RSS feed or read by email. You can grab both in my sidebar.
Better shared!
My Three WordPress.com Wishes: First Wish
Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis knows that I 
WordPress.com. The wranglers, gardeners, engineers and poets do an amazing job of keeping our little home on the web the envy of the blogging neighborhood.
While surfing around the web a few months ago, I kept bumping into articles about apps or utilities that made me think how great it would be if WordPress.com supported them. So, here is the first of my three wishes for making my WordPress.com world rock a little harder.
More Mobile!
Dear @wordpressdotcom a mobile app for the rest of us who don't/won't have a smartphone. #1stof3wishes #11millionusers cc @snaptu @fring—
JenniferT (@wysiwygjt) July 02, 2010
Being resigned to the ranks of the un-cool using WordPress.com’s mobile site (m.wordpress.com), I found its bare bones functionality lacking a little something. Actually, lacking closer to everything.
With the estimated number of WordPress.com bloggers having reached 13 million+ (also according to one well-placed source) and WordPress.com celebrating the one millionth mobile user mark, one would hope there’d be some incentive to add an app to the growing arsenal of existing WordPress.com mobile apps for the rest of us without smartphones. Regular mobile phones still outnumber smartphones, especially outside the US. Sadly, however, nothing expected in the foreseeable future. (I know that it’s possible to post by email, but that’s just not the same thing.)
If there’s no incentive for WordPress.com to directly develop an app, then maybe Snaptu or Fring could pick up the challenge. With thirteen million blogs on WordPress.com alone, minus the combined WordPress.com and WordPress.org’s one million users using WordPress’ mobile apps, that’s a lot of potential users.
(The above tweet was brought to you by serendipity, as WordPress.com has just recently started using Twitter’s Blackberry Pie tweet embed. Thank you WordPress.com! #awesome #FTW)
There are, of course, two more posts coming with my additional wishes. Meantime, if you have your own wish that would make using WordPress.com more awesome for you, feel free to leave it in the comments. Better yet, why not start your own “Three Wishes” for WordPress.com. Who knows? Maybe between us, we’ll find that genie in a bottle.
Better shared!
When Good Social Networks Go Bad
“When we use a social network religiously, we feel a sense of ownership. Which is what the social network’s parent company wants us to feel: a sense of loyalty. But with
that sense of ownership, we feel entitlement as well. Entitled to being part of the process of change, to be able to give our input before change happens, to be able in some
way to control the change.
While some smaller companies do gather input from their users to determine modifications of their services, most larger ones, like Facebook, will make changes often, and seemingly at random. We’re left scratching our heads or
panicking because of the potential negative impacts of the new changes on our social media presences.”
via Surviving Sudden Social Network Changes: Business Collaboration News «.
Posted, ironically, using WordPress.com’s “Press This” utility.
WordPress.com is not the only social network where I’ve experienced this kind of change. All the icons above represent services that I started using way back when they still felt like close-knit communities, flickr and last.fm being the most painful transitions thus far.
The kind of heated discussions that we’ve seen in the WordPress.com Support forums and elsewhere during the last few months over implementation of reblogging, the 30-minute “Under Review by Staff” delay and such like are all symptoms of the collision between a rapidly growing service and those of us not directly associated with it who may feel, correctly or not, a certain amount of “entitlement”. As a for-profit business, I have no doubt that WordPress.com will continue to go through major changes and have made a conscious decision to “keep calm and carry on“.
But it won’t keep me from thinking that it’s a failure for everyone concerned when a service no longer listens to its most devoted users.
The 10 Tweetmandments | Historical Tweets
via The 10 Tweetmandments | Historical Tweets.
Wishing everyone who celebrates a peaceful and happy Passover.
