A couple I’ve made

Website traffic plummets when 301 redirects are turned off

This is from one of my clients Google Analytics stats. 301 redirects can take a reader from a friendly short url such as www.website.com/word – that they might type into their browser after seeing an advert in a newspaper – to something far more complex like www.website.com/english/html/subject/page.asp?123.

The public search for disease common names

Google Trends is one of my favourite visualisation tools. This shows how many more people search on Google for swine flu (the blue line) rather than the scientific H1N1 (red line). See Google Trends and try it out for yourself.

From the web

Newsmap: Google News stories

I like the macro and micro view of news stories and the way you can customise it by changing the url. This is business, national and technology news for the uk: http://newsmap.jp/#/b,n,t/uk/view/

Healthmap: collating disease outbreaks

RSS feeds from trusted health news sites combined with a Google map to show current disease outbreaks.

Smartmoney Market Map: the US markets

Quickly see which company stock prices are rising and falling in the US markets by sector: both at the macro and micro-level.

Visual Thesaurus: swim through synonyms

So much easier to use than the printed version. I have the CD, but I use the web version.

But recently the tool looks like becoming useful for web writers. Until early May the only way to find out what people were ‘tweeting’ about was to go to Monitter or Twitter search. Now you can see instantly what the most frequently used words are right now, just by going to your own Twitter home page.

During the swine flu panic of late April 2009, the most popular topic (known as ‘trending’) was ‘swine flu’. A few weeks later I saw the addition of ‘H1N1′ as a trending topic. So anyone writing articles about swine flu would have been wise to include these two phrases, rather than the European Union’s favourite ‘novel flu’. Hardly anyone used the term ‘novel flu’ in their ‘tweets’, so you can bet that people weren’t typing that phrase into Google.

The main tools we use to find out what terms are ‘hot’, like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, have a time-lag of over a week. But with Twitter you can see the topical words that people prefer to use straight away – in real time.

Real-time Web

Some have hinted that Twitter may evolve into a search of the ‘now’ – what’s going on right now and what has been published now – about any subject people are interested in. They are currently looking into ways of factoring reputation into Twitter search.

Of course Google looks to fight back. Take a look at the link ‘options’ next time you do a Google search. You can now order by date so the most recently changed pages come up first. Google is apparently set to make lots of other changes so that their results show timely rather than just trusted pages. I’ll kep you posted…

Make sure you write it down so people know whether it has dots, hyphens or underscores. For example, here is a Technorati search for ted2009 (over 200 results). And here is one for ted09 (just 3 results).

Here’s how the New England Chapter of ASIST asks attendees to do it. And here’s the principle in action at Flickr for Bath Spa’s Institutional Web Management event.

Enforcement is another matter, but at least if you let people know what the right format is, they are more likely to use it in their writing and when tagging blog posts, slides, photos etc.

UKOLN have a great briefing paper Use Of Social Tagging Services At Events.