August 24, 2012
August 21, 2012
Facebook Users Watch 500 years of YouTube Video Every Day!
Sent to you by rak77 via Google Reader:
via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog by Amit on 3/1/12
Every person on Earth spends an average of 26 minutes on YouTube per month.
Do you know that "500 years of YouTube video" are watched on Facebook every single day?
Google has released new statistics around YouTube usage across the world and the world's favorite video website continues to set new records. Here are some highlights:
- In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views* (video playbacks).
- 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. This number was only "48 hours" a couple of months ago.
- Over 4 billion YouTube videos are viewed a day up from 3 billion so the new channel based layout seem to be doing well for YouTube.
- Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube.
The one figure that has however stayed constant for YouTube in the past few months is the number of unique visitors. YouTube, according to the press page, gets around 800 million uniques every month so they still another 50 million to beat Facebook.
[*] Facebook gets around a trillion pageviews every month according to Google's own data.The YouTube statistics page also says that 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute. Surprisingly, there's still no mention of Google Plus on that page.
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How to Turn Twitter into a Gmail Notifier
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via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog by Amit on 3/12/12
I am ready to share a little project around Gmail that I have been working on this weekend. The idea is that you can turn your Twitter Timeline into a Gmail Notifier and get notified (via tweets) as soon as new email messages arrive in your mailbox.
And since you can link Twitter to your phone number, you can even get SMS text alerts for new Gmail messages on your mobile phone with the help of Twitter. There's no programming required and you can be up and running in 5 minutes.
Tutorial: Get Gmail notifications as Tweets or SMS Alerts
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Use Google Analytics to Track When People Print your Web Pages
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via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog by Amit on 3/26/12
Say you have a website that is printer-friendly but you are not too sure if people are actually printing your web pages. And if they are, you are interested to know how often they print pages and what is the kind of content that users are most likely to print on your site.
There are basically three ways to print any standard web page (see above screenshot):
- Experienced users may press the Ctrl + P keyboard shortcut (or Command-P on a Mac) to send the current web page to the printer.
- Some web pages have a dedicated PRINT button on the page itself.
- Other users may prefer to print web pages from the File Menu that is standard across all browsers.
Because there are multiple ways to print the same web page, it is difficult to use JavaScript based event tracking in Google Analytics to track print usage.
A simple workaround is that you add an invisible tracking image (like the ones used for read receipts in email) only in the printed version of a web page. Thus when a user prints a web page, through any route, that tracking image will download on his / her computer and you can easily track the print (and print preview) action.
Track Print Usage with Google Analytics
That was the boring theory but you can safely skip the technical details and get right into implementing the actual tracking code.
All you have to do is copy-paste the following code above the closing </body> tag in your website template. If you are on WordPress, you can simple paste it in your footer.php file.
Please remember to replace REPLACE_ME in the code with your actual Google Analytics Profile ID which looks something like this – UA-12345-89.
<script type="text/javascript"> var ga = "REPLACE_ME"; var css = document.createElement('style'); if (css && ga != "REPLACE_ME") { var gimg = "http://ctrlq.org/urchin/?"; gimg += "id=" + ga; gimg += "&d=" + document.location.hostname; gimg += "&i=" + document.location.pathname; var cstr = "@media print {body:after"; cstr += "{content:url(" + gimg + ")}}"; var node = document.createTextNode(cstr); if (css.styleSheet) { css.styleSheet.cssText = node.nodeValue; } else { css.appendChild(node); } var head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0]; if (head) { head.appendChild(css); } } </script> Once the tracking code is live, wait for a day or two as as Google Analytics may take time to process usage data. Then log in to your Google Analytics dashboard, go to Content –> Site Content –> Pages and set /print/ as the search filter.
You'll get a complete list of web pages that have been printed in this duration while the Pageview column will reflect the the number of times a particular page has been printed . Set the Secondary Dimension in the report as Browser or Operating System or Country and you'll get additional details about the users who are using the Print function on your web site.
Here's a sample print usage report generated with Google Analytics.
How Print Tracking Works?
Should you be interested in the technical details, here they are. The JavaScript code adds the following CSS rule to your HTML webpage while it is rendering in the browser.
<style type="text/css"> @media print { body:after { content:url("GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_TRACKING_IMAGE") } } </style>This is simple print only rule that will add an invisible tracking image to the printer-friendly version of your page (body:after). When a user prints the page, the tracking image downloads on the user's computer and this is registered as a page view in Google Analytics as shown in the above report.
The above CSS rule is only activated when the users invokes the print or print preview command. Some PDF writing programs also use the Print stylesheet when saving web pages to PDFs and thus, the same tracking code will work in those cases as well.
PS: If you have a PHP enabled web server, you can simple copy this PHP file on to your own server as index.php and replace ctrlq.org/urchin in the above JavaScript code with your own web server's address.
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Prevent your Blogger Blog from Redirecting to Country-Specific URLs
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via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog by Amit on 3/22/12
Google, as most would know, redirects Blogger blogs to country-specific domains. For instance, if you open example.blogspot.com in your browser, you might be redirected to example.blogspot.in if you are located in India or to example.blogspot.com.au if you access the same blog from Australia.
The main reason why Google implemented country-specific redirection is selective censorship – they can now easily block a blog, or a particular page on a blog, in one country but still serve it in other regions.
Blogger and Country-Specific Domains
My traffic logs suggest that country-specific redirection in Blogger is now live in at least 15 countries. Here's a complete list:
India [blogspot.in], Australia [blogspot.com.au], UK [blogspot.co.uk], Japan [blogspot.jp], New Zealand [blogspot.co.nz], Canada [blogspot.ca], Germany [blogspot.de], Italy [blogspot.it], France [blogspot.fr], Sweden [blogspot.se], Spain [blogspot.com.es], Portugal [blogspot.pt], Brazil [blogspot.com.br], Argentina [blogspot.com.ar], Mexico [blogspot.mx]
Prevent Blogger from Redirecting to Country-Specific Domains
This country based URL redirection does mean some negative consequences to your Blogger blog. For example:
- The social stats – like Facebook Likes, Google +1s and Tweet counts – for your blog stories may be diluted as the URLs for the same story become different from different visitors.
- You will have a similar problem if you are using an external commenting platform like Disqus or Facebook Comments.
- Also, if canonicalization isn't implemented properly, it may cost you some Google juice as external websites may link to your country-specific pages.
If you are not happy with the idea of Blogger redirecting your blog to a different URL, you can add the following piece of code to your Blogger template and it will always serve the .com address to your visitors irrespective of their geographic location.
Go to your blog inside the Blogger Dashboard and choose Template. Then click the "Edit HTML" button followed by "Proceed." Next, copy-paste the following code into the template after the <head> tag.
<script type="text/javascript"> var blog = document.location.hostname; var slug = document.location.pathname; var ctld = blog.substr(blog.lastIndexOf(".")); if (ctld != ".com") { var ncr = "http://" + blog.substr(0, blog.indexOf(".")); ncr += ".blogspot.com/ncr" + slug; window.location.replace(ncr); } </script>Click the Save Template button and now your Blogger Blog will always serve with the blogspot.com URL.
This simple script parses the domain name (document.location.hostname) of your blog page and if it includes a country-specific URL (like blogspot.in), it will force-redirect the visitor to the blogspot.com address using the /ncr switch.
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Save your Gmail Messages in Google Docs
Sent to you by rak77 via Google Reader:
via Digital Inspiration Technology Blog by Amit on 3/30/12
You can save your Gmail messages in Google Docs and then edit them like any other document. The other use case is that once a Gmail message is available inside Google Docs, you can easily export that email as a PDF file or as a Word document while retaining the original formatting and without requiring an external PDF writer.
To integrated Google Docs with Gmail, go to the Labs page and enable the "Create a Document" gadget. Save the changes and return to your Gmail Inbox.
Next, open any of your existing email messages and you should see a "Create a Document" link under the More box as shown in the screenshot above. This will export the current message as a new document in Google Docs – the rich text formatting is preserved but if the message includes any file attachments, Google Docs will ignore them.
One more thing. The Google Docs app for Android allows offline access to your documents so once you have saved your most important Gmail messages in Google Docs, they can be accessed on your phone without a data connection as well.
Thank you J.D. Biersdorfer for the tip.
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