Author Archive

Greg Gomer

Inbound Marketing Guide

| June 2nd, 2010

Sounds like a HubSpot blog post, doesn’t it?  Inbound marketing has grown tremendously over the last year thanks to our friends over at HubSpot.  It has changed the way most internet companies behave on social media platforms, and even inspired a few Pinyadda marketing campaigns.  Now, HubSpotters are the best, but in order to stay ahead of the curve there are many other inbound marketing focused blogs and rockstars to stay on top of.

Pinyadda has you covered.  Here is your guide to keeping up with inbound marketing, and without having to conduct a single search on Google:

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Posted in Top Yadda | 671 Comments »

Greg Gomer

How to Follow the NBA Playoffs on Pinyadda

| May 26th, 2010

If you are like me, you can get slightly overwhelmed this time of year trying to keep up with your favorite sports teams.  The NHL playoffs are still going on, Baseball is really picking up, players are reporting for NFL pre-season camps, and the NBA playoffs are as action packed as ever.

And since the Celtics are making a run for the Championship, you had better know where to get your information, so you don’t sound like a clown at the water cooler.  Look no further, here is your complete guide to following the NBA playoffs on Pinyadda.

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Posted in Top Yadda | 912 Comments »

Greg Gomer

Election Results or Media Buzz in Massachusetts? A Scott Brown Story

| January 25th, 2010

After one of the most exciting special elections in Massachusetts history, I couldn’t help but contemplate exactly how much the media had to do with the the results.  Martha Coakley, the favored Democrat, was simply waiting to dot the i’s and cross the t’s in a layup election when a rogue Republican entered the race with a bang.  Who is Scott Brown and when did he enter this race?  When the election results came in they shook Mass. and made a big statement in Washington.  The results were so surprising, in fact, that the company in charge of setting up the exit polls opted not to because this was supposed to be a landslide in Coakley’s favor.  Now this decision was obviously made weeks in advance of the election.  Could these results have been predicted by perhaps studying the amount of content produced about each candidate?

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Posted in Data | 431 Comments »

Greg Gomer

Palin vs. Conan vs. Cowell a media buzz showdown

| January 15th, 2010


As you may know this week was bustling with gossip and headlines surrounding a few big names. NBC pushed Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show back so Leno could have his old spot, which Conan subsequently walked away from. Simon Cowell is leaving American Idol after this season. And the lovely Sarah Palin is joining Fox News as an analyst.

After a week of big headlines filled with even bigger names, our team was curious to see which name stole the spotlight when it came to online buzz. Before I run the numbers I am going to take a guess and rank them.

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Posted in Data | 459 Comments »

Greg Gomer

How much has Yemen blown up in the press? (Hint: A lot!)

| January 12th, 2010

Jog your memory from before Christmas when Yemen landed on the terror radar — was it in there? Geography buffs knew it was a country in Southwest Asia, but the majority of us couldn’t have spit out any other facts about the place. Other than the obscure Friend’s reference when Chandler bought a plane ticket to Yemen to run away from Janice, I certainly couldn’t tell you anything.

So, exactly how much has Yemen blown up in the press? Let’s visit the Pinyadda index and find out.

In the last 6 months ending on Christmas Eve, Yemen was the topic of 1,524 articles. Not bad. In the 19 days following Christmas Eve, Yemen was the topic of over 2,200 articles.

Woah, hold up, let’s do the math: 60 percent of all Yemen focused articles were published in the last 3 weeks.

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Posted in Data | 247 Comments »

Greg Gomer

Avatar vs. Titanic; An Epic World Wide Web Battle

| January 11th, 2010

Webatar (noun, adjective; web-a-tar): The enormous online presence surrounding the buzz of Avatar. Originally derived from Avatar, with roots in the World Wide Web.

There is no question James Cameron’s new movie will eventually outlast Titanic’s reign, and for one simple reason: the Internet. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a sucker for that last scene, “Don’t let go, Jack!” (so emotional). However, a lot has changed since 1997. Google was a year old, Facebook didn’t exist, Twitter – uh, nope. I was using AOL on a dial up connection to talk to my 7th grade girlfriend. But enough about the memories.

After reading Mashable’s latest post on Avatar it amazes me that Titanic made as much money as it did in the first place with minimal use of the Web and social media. I won’t repeat how important social media was for Avatar; instead, I am going to run some hard numbers from Pinyadda’s index to prove my point.

From when the trailer debuted on August 20th until its release on Decemeber 18th, 55 posts and articles were published from the top social media blogs and newspapers. From after it’s release through today, 63 additional posts and articles were published.

There are of course many more publishers out there than the handful above, so we pulled data from every single site we index to emphasize the point more dramatically:


From August 20th through Avatar’s release, 149 articles and blog posts were published. Post launch, a whopping 1,215. That’s over 8 times the amount of content.

While I wish I could run Titanic’s numbers, unfortunately Pinyadda wasn’t around in ’97. Regardless, without the proliferation of the WWW and social media, I am willing to bet we would see the inverse of what we see above, with more posts and articles published leading up to the movie’s release than after it hit theaters.

Please post your comments, hypotheses, and theories below. I love a good debate.

P.S. I can’t even keep up while writing this – Mashable has already published another piece on Avatar, and it complements this post quite nicely.

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Posted in Data | 1,011 Comments »

Greg Gomer

Indexing All for you

| November 6th, 2009

Well this week’s post will be short and to the point. We have recently finished a major milestone in general content indexing across the United States top news sites by circulation. The current growth focus is targeted at diving deep into specific industry verticals (ie. venture captial, advertising, healthcare…) and guess who gets to do most of the work…YOU. Well not really, but we definitely need the voice of our users telling us what they read everyday. I will rely heavily on our elite beta users and even the new guys to drive what content Pinyadda will index. This is your chance to personally receive exactly what you are looking for on the internet. Perhaps you just have a suggestion for a new tag or even a genre of content, we’ll make it happen. Please post a comment or send me an email (greg at pinyadda dot com) and I will respond and get what you want indexed live right away.

New sites this week (all from users):
zerohedge.com, chrisdixon.org, paidcontent.org, moconews.org, contentsutra.org, paidcontent:uk.org, npr.org, designsponge.com, smittenkitchen.com, csmonitor.com, weekly standard.com, and commentarymagazine.com

Until next week,

sligs

ps. pinyadda is currently averaging 30,000 trusted content items a day

Posted in Product | 433 Comments »

Greg Gomer

Indexing Speed & Real Time Content

| November 2nd, 2009

First of all, I should mention that I’m a few days late in my post. Halloween is our favorite holiday here at Pinyadda, and I was entirely too busy playing tricks rather than treating you to Friday morning with Sliggity. So here’s my blog post for Oct 30.

As you know, the hype about the interweb nowadays is this thing dubbed “real time.” In context, I guess it makes sense – real time, meaning right now or when something really happened. But what if that thing never really happened and someone simply made up a rumor or published bogus content. My biggest qualm with this term is services like Twitter and oneriot utilizing it so heavily. Yes, when someone tweets about something it shows up right away on Twitter and with a slight delay on oneriot. However, I am more concerned with actual ‘real’ time ‘content’, meaning that it has value and can be verified. We’ll come back to this topic shortly.

Next item; indexing speed. I am running a test (as we speak) in order to measure Google’s content indexing speed and the time lapse until I receive a Google Alert. I will clock the time from the moment a content item is posted from this blog until it appears in Google search results and I receive my ‘Pinyadda” Google Alert. While I am doing this, you can entertain yourself with some side reading. Here is a post by Charles Heflin back in 2008 about clocking the speed of content indexing (I like how he touches upon page rank influence). To touch upon Alltop, an RSS-powered aggregator that (in their words) allows you to answer the question “what’s happening?” Well what’s happening when? Yesterday? 5 minutes ago? Right now? Well their answer is once every hour…boring.

Now take Pinyadda’s backend, which I like to call a ‘real’ time ‘content’ indexing service. I like it because you have to focus on real time, we are indexing new content within minutes of when the item is published, and then focus on real content, which is trusted and valuable to you.

Long enough here are the answers you have been waiting for:

2 minutes for search*
still waiting on google alert. UPDATE 2:52pm, what is the reason for the delay here?
not a controlled test b/c google owns blogger, will try again next week.

New sites this week:
The Blade, Tulsa World, Dayton Daily News, Press-Register, Akron Beacon Journal, Syracuse.com, Kentucky.com, Delaware.com, The News Tribune, Arizona Daily Star, Oakland Tribune, The Morning Call, Philly.com, The Advocate, Sarasota Herald Tribune, Wisconsin State Journal, The State, The Post & Courier, The Journal News. Phew that wraps up the top 100 News Publications by circulation.

What’s next? Tune in on Friday morning, Pinheads.

Cheers,
Sligs

Posted in Product, Social | 1,095 Comments »

Greg Gomer

Welcome to IA

| October 23rd, 2009

Hello World. I’d like to introduce myself before getting into the inaugural Information Architecture blog post. My name is Greg and I am in charge of Ops and IA here at Pinyadda. I will be writing a weekly post (Friday mornings with Sliggity) with the goal of keeping you up to date on all things content. Phew, let’s get into it.

We hit a big milestone this week by crossing the one million mark in items indexed. First million is always the hardest, right? We have been increasing our content at an alarming rate and adding many new sites a day. During these weekly posts I will be summarizing a few of the big sites in hopes that you will add them to your Pin and explore a new realm of content. I will also touch upon some of our challenges and highlight our indexing numbers as well as those of our competitors (big numbers guy, I hate text).

As we expand rapidly one of the major challenges we embark on is the organization of our content. We do not want to simply index like Google and throw a firehose of information at you. Every item that comes in is carefully classified in real time by our taxonomy, which is constantly evolving as trending topics are surfaced throughout the web (and no, we don’t use Twitter). This will ensure that you will find exactly what you are looking for in exactly the place you thought it would be. We’re constantly adding more content based on our extremely complex standards, also known as a set of algorithms I came up with while studying at Babson, locked in the Cutler Center for days with only a keyboard and the classifieds section of a newspaper. Just kidding. We rely on a few simple metrics, our brains and your suggestions to discover and deliver the most valuable and trusted sites on the web to you.

New Sites, Week of 10/19/09 – 10/22/09:

Richmond Times-Dispatch, Raleigh News & Observer, Hartford Courant, Austin-American Statesman, Investor’s Business Daily, Tennessean, Fresno Bee, The Palm Beach Post, The Press-Enterprise, Democrat & Chronicle, Birmingham News, Illinois Daily Herald, Des Moines Register, The Honolulu Advertiser, Los Angeles Daily News, Asbury Park Press, Florida Times-Union, Providence Journal, The Salt-Lake Tribune

(Free Pinata to anyone who can spot the trend in this week’s new sites)

As I’m sure you have many other interesting pieces of content to get into this morning, I am going to wrap this up. Please post comments or send me an email greg at pinyadda dot com, I’d love to hear new site suggestions and your views on IA.

Cheers,

Sligs

Posted in Product | 1,095 Comments »