Author Archive

Kevin McCarthy

Publisher Spotlight: Electric Toolbox LAMP Blog

Speaking from first hand experience, learning programming languages can be difficult, especially when teaching yourself an open-source language like HTML, Javascript or PHP.  With little formalized documentation, you end up relying heavily on forums and blogs for coding tips.  The Electric Toolbox by Chris Hope is one of these blogs and is indispensable if you’re a newbie or an open-source veteran.

Chris graciously took some time to talk about The Electric Toolbox in our latest installment of Pinyadda’s Publisher Spotlight:

Pinyadda (P): What does the Electric Toolbox cover?

Chris Hope (CH): Electric Toolbox LAMP Blog covers a variety of topics with a main focus on LAMP programming (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) , HTML/CSS and Javascript/jQuery.

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Kevin McCarthy

Top 5 Tech Stories You May Have Missed

With the Fourth of July holiday last week and lots of people on vacation, you probably missed a news story here or there.  Here are the top 5 tech-related news stories that may have slipped through the cracks…
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Kevin McCarthy

Miami Dominates LeBron Coverage in Final Days

After yesterday’s movie/company buzz article, Austin had a great idea:  Do the same thing but for LeBron James and the teams vying to sign him.  Without further ado, below are the results.

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Comparing the amount of articles that mention “LeBron” and the city name, you can see that Miami came on way strong in the final two days.  It seems that the rumor mill was abuzz with LeBron staying in Cleveland or going to Chicago consistently up until recently.  According to the data, it looks like the Knicks or the Nets never stood a chance.

Here is the data of articles that mention “LeBron” and “Ego”.  No doubt this graph will be exponential.

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It’s interesting to see that the media coverage mentioning the other cities dropped so sharply even before the announcement . Is this a sign that the Heat are better at generating buzz, or simply that an early leak led to a fast-moving rumor mill. Either way, LeBron’s ability to generate coverage is impressive. Since the end of the NBA Finals, we picked up over 4,700 articles that mentioned LeBron somewhere in the title. To put that into perspective, we picked up just over 5,000 articles mentioning ‘oil spill’ in the title.  The numbers aren’t a definitive record of all coverage, but they certainly paint an interesting picture.

Kevin McCarthy

Measuring Media Buzz Over Time: Movies & Companies

Last week, I did some research on the amount of times a movie was mentioned in the press compared to the movie’s box office take.   It figured it’d be cool to measure the amount of daily movie mentions in the days leading up to opening night.

Movie Mentions

Here is some interesting notes about the high peaks:

  • Peak A: Iron Man 2 release date
  • Peak B: Shrek 4 release date
  • Peak C: McDonald’s recalls Shrek 4 glasses because of cadmium used in the paint.
  • Peak D: Toy Story 3 release
  • Peak E: Twilight 3 release

I thought that checking major tech company mentions over Q2 would be interesting as well

Company Mentions

Here are some of the major stories related to these peaks:

  • Peak A:  Google buys Pink, Google rewrites Docs, Italian judge says profit behind Google verdict
  • Peak B: iPhone 4 leaked, Apple 2Q earnings revealed
  • Peak C: German prosecutors investigating Google, Google App Engine
  • Peak D: iPhone 4 release

I think this method is a great way to determine highs and lows in buzz over long periods of time.

Kevin McCarthy

VentureBeat Authors and VentureBeat Articles: The Statistics

Yesterday, I read an informative VentureBeat article by Kim-Mai Cutler via the Yadda.  When I finished laughing-out-loud at the title, I thought a cool exercise would be to dive in and examine VentureBeat’s publication by their authors and their source code.  So without further ado….

Venture Beat Authors

Over the week between Tuesday, June 22nd to Tuesday, June 29th, VentureBeat (VB) published a total of 161 articles.  These articles were written by 25 authors and 12 of those authors contributed more than 1 piece.  The graph below shows the breakdown of author contributions.

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Dean Takahashi was the most prolific writer with 43 articles while Camille Ricketts and Kim-Mai Culter each had 22.  Anthony Ha rounded out the top four with 19 submissions.

Venture Beat Articles’ source code

148 of the 161 articles were marked with at least one tag.  Since VB uses a tagging system built on top of WordPress, no VB article has a meta-keyword field in their source code.

The meta-description field appears to be the first sentence of so of the article.  Since the first sentence of any article generally includes pronouns revolving around the article’s topic,  the meta-description field appears to be optimized for SEO.  The article’s title appears in two key places: in the <title> tag and the <h1>.  The <h1> tag is used to ensure that the article at least has chance to have a high page rank.

There you have it.  Is there another publication anyone would like seen broken down in this way?  Let me know in the comments section.

Kevin McCarthy

The Implications of News as a Commodity

Austin’s latest piece described news as a commodity.  Does it matter that you got breaking news from a Snooki tweet instead of from the New York Times?  The answer is no. (A better question: are you seriously following Snooki?)

Let’s assume that the news is a commodity and the atomic unit of the news is an article.  An article therefore has the following two characteristics:

  1. Each article has the same value.
  2. Their values are additive.

So, if there are 15 articles about the new Karate Kid movie and each has a value of X, the value of the Karate Kid story is 15X.

But what is the value of X?

Comparing opening weekend box office gross to the number of article mentions leading up to the film, you could ostensibly calculate the value 1 article mention has on box office reveneue.

For fun, I thought I’d put some of this data together to see the correlation between article mentions and box office numbers (see the following chart here).  Although this test is riddled with inaccuracies* and thus the data holds no weight, I hope you can see the value of this methodology if done correctly (which I plan on doing for a particular industry when the time is right).

Imagine you are an exec at Hewlett Packard in charge of marketing the Tablet and you know the Tablet’s value of X.  To meet your bottom line, you can assume that you’ll need 500 article write-ups in the next 3 weeks to meet your bottom line.  With this knowledge, you could allocate resources for marketing more intelligently (and, more likely, start getting on the horn with every Joe Blogger out there).

There has got to be some industries where something like this would be useful.  Any ideas out there?

* Inaccuracies include but are not limited to:
1) assumption that a high-powered critic’s opinion is the same as a no-namer
2) lack of consideration how long the movie has been in theaters

Kevin McCarthy

Which Pubs are the Biggest Apple Fanboys?

I just heard that there is a new iPhone  hitting stores today.  Apparently, there is some sort of craze behind it as well, because the Boylston Apple store has fan boys and girls up queued up through Fairfield Street.    As such, I figured it was a perfect time to head into Pinyadda’s index and check out some iPhone data.

The below graph shows the relative number iPhone items over each day in June.

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The most iPhone items on a single day occured on June 7th, the day the iPhone 4 was announced.  Interestingly, the 5th and the 6th of June showed the lowest number of iPhone items, respectively.  I guess it really is darkest before dawn.

So which publications had the most iPhone items over June?  See the below graph

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Scanning the publications on this list, only a handful are strictly tech-related.  Many of the publications are larger media outlets (like Yahoo or the New York Times), indicating the strength of the iPhone’s reach to all demographics.

Some other notes of interest:

  • 8.2% of TechCrunch’s articles this June have been about the iPhone, compared to 7.3% for VentureBeat and 9.6% for CNET.com
  • Over 400 sites have had an iPhone item this June

Now are these publications fanboys or is Apple such a cash cow that even mentioning the iPhone on your publication does wonders for your traffic?  Perhaps Apple is too important financially to these publications that not mentioning the iPhone is just bad business.  Thoughts?

Kevin McCarthy

Where Should You Get Your SEO Info?

Earlier this month, I explored the Inbound Marketing feed on Pinyadda.  In testament to my loyalty (albeit blind) to social media, I was surprised to find out that SEO was still a major discussion point for new marketers.  As such, I figured I’d resolve my SEO ignorance and take to the SEO topic on Pinyadda.

From May 21st to June 21st, 15% of Pinyadda’s SEO feed revolved around Google, 1.2 % around  Twitter and 1.6% around Facebook.  Could the relatively low percentages of the two social giants have something to do with the fact that social media links are not highly touted by SEO professionals?  What value (if any) does a social media link have in the eyes of search engines like Google and Bing with regards to page placement?

In efforts to learn more about SEO, I next found out which sites were publishing the most SEO content.  With this in mind, the graph below was created.

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These ten sites shown (Media Post Publications, Marketing Vox, Hubspot Blog, Search Engine Land, Brafton Custom News, Online Marketing Blog, Econsultancy, Clickz, SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog and Search Engine Journal) all had more than 3 SEO items published over the last month.  These ten sites also account for about 76% of SEO content on Pinyadda, so might as well follow all of them.

Kevin McCarthy

Data Post: Which Site Publishes the Most?

On Tuesday, we were lucky enough to speak with the Downtown Boston Rotary club at 225 Franklin Street.  During Chase’s speech, he referenced the amount of articles published each day by the New York Times, which got me thinking:  How many items do these massive sites publish in a day?

Going through Tuesday, June 16th’s data, I was able to construct the following graph comparing the highest volume publications on Pinyadda.

(click here for the graph in a new window)

As suspected, Yahoo, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are all in the top 5.  I was surprised to see some sites (like Contra Costa Times or the Sacramento Bee) publish as much content as they do.  I mean, with the news industry in a downward spiral and Miami’s unemployment rate hovering around 11%, you’d assume that the Miami Herald would be lacking for content.  After closer inspection, however, these sites are not creating their own content at high volume but publishing many items from news syndication sources like the Associated Press or Reuters.

Does anyone else notice any trends or anything interesting from this data?  Recall that all of this data is from a Tuesday- it might be interesting to re-calculate the top 25 sites on Pinyadda by volume on a Friday or Saturday.

Kevin McCarthy

Data Post: John Travolta and the Annoying World Cup Horns

Only five days into the 2010 World Cup and there has been plenty to talk about.  I decided to take a stroll through the World Cup feed to see what people are talking about.

Ignoring country names, I created the following graph based on popular strings in article titles.



If you don’t know what a ‘vuvuzela‘ is just yet, you haven’t watched any World Cup games.  Coverage of these annoying horns  accounts for  8.7% of all of the World Cup items since June 11th.  58% of the sites to have at least one World Cup article have mentioned vuvuzela in the title as well.  Hopefully, the vuvuzela will be banned from the stadiums before the World Cup is finished.

I was surprised to see ‘Travolta’ as a World Cup topic, but apparently he is affiliated with the Australian team’s sponsor, so he and wife Kelly Preston flew to South Africa to speak with the team as well as make a donation to a charity of Nelson Mandela’s.

Robert Green, the English goal-keeper who botched a gimme-save in Saturday’s game with the US, accounted for 2.2% of the World Cup items while the American goal-scorer on that play (Clint Dempsey) accounted for 1.6% of World Cup items.  Lionel Messi, the Argentinian who is arguably the world’s best player, was only mentioned in 0.5% of articles (enjoy the Messi highlight reel below).

On a somber note, Nelson Mandela’s 13 year old daughter was killed in an car collision the day before the World Cup began, which accounted for roughly 2% of the World Cup coverage.  Zenani Mendela was in her school’s choir, played both the saxophone and piano, and was described as a loving child.