Currently, only documents can be tracked in your Analytics reports; views of published spreadsheets and presentations are not tracked. I’d really like Google to add support for tracking published spreadsheets, in particular. Here’s why.

In the day job, I’m advocating making statistics available online in multiple open formats rather than, for example, providing the statistics in a single Excel file hosted on the corporate site for users to download. I’m using Google Spreadsheets as the repository to store the data (here’s an example page linking to data).

I’m trying to follow good practice examples set by The Guardian Data Store and national discussions on Twitter around open data. By posting the data on Google Spreadsheets, users can access the data as an HTML page, download a CSV, TXT or Excel file. Users can view the data with free tools; no proprietary software required. MS Office users can still use Excel files in the usual way. Everyone’s catered for.

Being a content analytics nut, I’m always on the lookout for ways to collect as much evidence as possible on how users interact with content. Having the statistical evidence to back up ideas on where to direct web content efforts is vital for convincing other people that you know what you’re talking about. It also gives you, as a content manager, confidence in your decisions on what’s working and what isn’t.

To web standardistas, developers, open source veterans and knowledge management types, the choice to share data in open formats such as CSV, TXT, XML or HTML is a logical one. The argument doesn’t need to be made to this audience.

However, outside of these circles the argument still needs to be made.

So, Google, please give me some ammunition.

I’d love to use Google Spreadsheets as a more extensive repository for online datasets but will ultimately need to evidence that it actually can work for users. Adding support for tracking published spreadsheets in Analytics will help in making the case.

A published Google Doc is one that you have chosen to openly share with anyone on the web.

To switch on tracking of your published Docs, go into your Google Docs account, choose Settings then the Editing tab.

Select the checkbox next to Use Google Analytics to track the number of visits to your published documents and paste in your Google Analytics tracking code (here’s the tip on how to find your tracking code):

Views of all documents published from this account will now appear in your Analytics reports.

How to publish a document

To publish a Google Doc, go to Share > Publish as a web page:

Next choose Publish document:

Limitations

Note that this feature currently tracks published documents only. At the time of writing, tracking isn’t available for spreadsheets or presentations.

Here’s a video capturing the essence of what the surgery is and how those taking part feel about it (video by John Popham and questions from organiser Nick Booth).

Photo by benjibrum

It’s almost a year now since I first went along to a social media surgery for voluntary and community groups in Birmingham. The surgeries are thriving and it’s great to see new surgeries sprouting in Lozells, Acocks Green and now Solihull.

One of the things I love about going along to these surgeries is that I never know who I’m going to meet or what topics will come up. The randomness is refreshing, it keeps me on my toes while meeting motivated folk who really want to improve their communities is good for the soul.

This social media lark is wide. Those coming along to the surgeries for advice may want to talk about anything from how to start a blog, attracting more readers to their website or making new contacts using the social web – and that’s just the start.

So, what really happens? What do we talk about?

Here’s a summary of a chat from a surgery in Fazeley Studios on 19th August between Esther Boyd, Paul Hadley and I.

Esther writes about environmental and sustainability issues on her Lighter Footprints blogs. Esther came along to the surgery with some specific questions (I hope my notes and memory are up to scratch – I’m writing this some time after the event):

• How could keywords be used to increase ranking of Esther’s blog in search engines?
• How could she get more comments on her posts?
• How could she get more people to visit her blog?

Keywords and search engine rankings

Spending time worrying about the words to use in the keywords meta tag isn’t worth it. (There’s typically a keywords box you can fill out when writing a blog – we looked at this on Esther’s blog, which runs on Movable Type).

Google ignores the keywords meta tag in determining the order of its search results. Don’t just take my word for it though:

While Google ignores the keywords meta tag, this doesn’t mean that all search engines do the same. Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing may do their own thing. However, with Google being so dominant, there’s little point in spending much time on the keywords meta tag.

So that’s something you can forget about.

Is there anything to make sure you do to help your blog perform well in search engine rankings?

Personally speaking, I regard much of SEO as an unwelcome diversion from the real job of writing good web content that other people might be interested in reading.

Whether you’re new to writing a blog or a veteran of the interwebs, the following basics hold true:

1. Write interesting content, regularly
2. Use appropriate, relevant keywords in the title of your post
3. Use sub-headings in the body of your post
4. Be a linker to other people’s sites

(I realise I don’t always practice what I preach; particularly writing regularly!)

Encouraging more comments

Esther was pleased that her posts attracted comments, such as this post on community recycling champions. She wanted to increase the number of comments.

The first thing we mentioned was for Esther to add replies to comments. When someone has taken the time to read the post and add a considered comment, adding a comment thanking that person shows that they are being listened to.

Also, when Esther replies as the author, she has the opportunity to develop the discussion further. As well as reacting to the comments, she can lead the discussion into new areas.

On the technical side, we discussed some possible layout improvements to the blog.

There’s a list of recent comments on the home page’s sidebar, which demonstrates an active site and a nice community feel:

However, the list of recent comments isn’t shown on any of the other page templates in Esther’s blog (post, search results or archived by category). Not all visitors will land on the blog via the home page. In fact, if the visitor is arriving via a web search, it’s more likely that person will land on a single post.

Changing the page layout to show recent comments on every page template is more complex as the blog layout is locked down in a pre-defined template. One for whoever runs the Birmingham Mail blogs.

Using Twitter to build a network

The last part of our chat came about through Esther asking how she could get more people to visit her blog.

We talked about social networking, specifically using Twitter and Facebook, to let other people know when Esther had written a new post or to highlight interesting comments.

While at the surgery, Esther:

• Registered on Twitter (she’s @estherboyd)
• Discovered people in her existing network who are already on Twitter
• Updated her profile with a description and a link to her Lighter Footprints blog

Blimey, that feels like quite a lot after writing it down.

So, these are a few examples of the things people talk about at a social media surgery.

It could be something completely different next time.

I was stuck trying to embed this flickr slideshow a few weeks ago so I asked for help on Twitter. Josh R and Warren Pearce pointed me in the right direction, mentioning a workaround using Vodpod to convert the slideshow to video and then posting the video to WordPress.

After some further digging, I found a solution I quite liked within this post by Geeky Coder.

The method

1. Go to flickr and login.
2. View the photostream or set and choose to view as a slideshow.
3. Open the share options and copy the embed HTML.
4. Use the VodPod Firefox Extension for WordPress and paste the embed HTML (you’ll need to have already registered a Vodpod account).
5. Preview the slideshow as a video.
6. Post the newly-created video as a new draft in your WordPress.com blog. (This is my variation to the method described by Geeky Coder. I wanted to add copy text with the slideshow before sending the post live.)

Step-by-step video

Geeky Coder made this useful video with captions to walk you through the process. The embed HTML method starts at 1:00.

Post the Vodpod video to a new draft in WordPress.com

View a flickr set in slideshow mode and click the Post to WordPress extension in your Firefox toolbar. The Post video to your blog options appear in a popup.

Add your WordPress blog details and choose details » in the popup options:

Select the draft checkbox (and any other options you want):

Now choose the Publish button (nothing will go live on your blog at this point despite the confirmation screen in the Post video to your blog popup).

Go to your WordPress.com admin site and look in Posts > Edit. You should now have a new draft post:

Preview the post to see the video display just like an embedded flickr slideshow:

That’s it. You can now edit your post as normal, including the embedded HTML.

This post is a braindump of a workaround. While it’s partly for my own reference, I hope the workaround is useful to others. Please feel free to add any suggestions on making the process easier.

Download the audio (MP3, 9.2mb)

Here are the other talks from the event

Yesterday I went along to the West by West Midlands 2 event at the Spotted Dog pub in Digbeth, Birmingham.

Expertly hosted by Shona McQuillan, there were some planned talks plus, following the unconference format, off-the-cuff talks by attendees. If the number chosen by Shona’s random number generator thingy (there’s probably an app for that) matched the number on your sticky lapel label, you stood up and gave an impromptu talk.

My number 31 popped up and here is my attempt to describe what (I think) I talked about…

What makes you who you are?

I grew up in Stockport, which I left aged 18 to go and study at The University of Hull. I came to live in Birmingham in 2001, the place I now consider home.

Thinking about heritage, where you’re from and being a self-exiled northerner welcomed into a new city, I’ve come to believe that your personality, individuality and heritage is really an aggregation of the experiences through life that have left some kind of permanent effect on you. The postcode of the hospital you were born in doesn’t equate to ‘this is where you’re from’.

The record shop owner, Rob, and his two assistants, Dick and Barry, in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like.

The books you read, people you meet, conversations you take part in, films you watch, records you listen to, the places you visit; these things aggregate into a personal definition.

I’m currently reading Gig: The Life and Times of a Rock-Star Fantasist by Simon Armitage, a poet from West Yorkshire. There’s one particular passage I love in this book where Simon describes standing on West Nab, a high point that’s part of the Pennine watershed:

Standing on top of West Nab, I can look out across a huge circumference of inspiration and influence. Starting westwards it’s Manchester and Lancashire, so it’s Joy Division and The Fall, it’s The Smiths and Elbow, it’s Magazine and The Buzzcocks and the Happy Mondays, it’s the Chameleons, it’s the Stone Roses, it’s Oasis (before they became their own tribute band), and beyond them, out towards the Mersey, it’s the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes. Music, like the weather, always seemed to come from the north-west, and still does, carried on the prevailing breeze, perhaps.

You can listen to Simon reading the full passage starting at 5:08 in this clip:

Simon Armitage reads from Gig on Vimeo.

As well as music, Simon sweeps around the compass referencing poets, artists and landmarks that have made an impact on him.

Something about this geographical representation of cultural influences, and the anchor point of West Nab, really struck a chord with me and got me thinking. (Also, on a superficial level, I feel a certain kinship through liking many of the namechecked bands and I’ve a deep familiarity of the M62 motorway between Liverpool and Hull.)

And the West by West Midlands bit?

So, I’ve been wondering—and these are questions I opened up to others at WxWM—what would life experiences look like when visualised geographically, say using social tools?

How can we geographically tag life experiences yet also give each small record of experience some kind of emotional measure?

A band you saw live for the first time; a blossomed friendship; meeting someone that you’ll spend the rest of your life with; the first time you walk on to the terrace at a football stadium and see the pitch; a holiday; a book you read that helped you see the world differently; any goal by Eric Cantona (might just be me, that one).

Could an amassed archive of your life’s experiences, both the transformative events and the trivial, tagged with location and some indicator of emotional attachment actually become an autobiography?

More on pyschogeography

Jon Bounds took the discussion further after the talk. Check out his post on conversational pyschogeography — mapping real life with the social web.

There’s some interesting work at Mapping the Lakes, a collaborative and explorative research project testing whether Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology can be used to further the understanding of the literature of place and space.

Other presenters at West by West Midlands 2

• Dave Harte on a Birmingham un-marathon
• Jon Hickman on reactions to the MA in Social Media
• Dynamic Arts on the future of Rhubarb Radio (Rhubarb covered the event live)
• Nicky Getgood on new website Digpuss
• Jon Bounds on how he started Birmingham It’s Not Shit
• Neil Houston
• Ben Whitehouse neatly wrapped up the night
• Alex Hughes drew caricatures of the presenters throughout the event
• Shona McQuillan made it all happen

There aren’t many surprises in the words that pop out. In a way, I’m quite pleased that my followers’ interests or specialisms match closely to my own.

It’s still interesting though to see what topics your followers use to describe their own interests and how these topics correspond to what you ‘think’ your tweets are about. It’s the content of your tweets that retains followers after all.

What’s noteworthy to me is the significant number of words that look like they’re part of job titles, which leads me to think of Twitter bios as professional statements rather than personal descriptions or hobby lists.

While I’m looking at this word cloud from a curiousity angle, Twittersheep looks like a useful tool for marketers. Daniel Davies notes how businesses targeting a certain demographic or pushing their brand using Twitter could use Twittersheep to learn more about their followers.

Yesterday I spent a wonderful hour meeting Attiye Faraji at the sixth social media surgery in Birmingham.

Attiye is a health and wellbeing lead for young people at Health Exchange, which aims to “make health services available and accessible to all members of our community”. It’s a partnership development between the Heart of Birmingham Teaching Primary Care Trust and Birmingham City Libraries.

What’s a social media surgery?

The social media surgeries are informal meetups where voluntary and community groups can get free advice on how to make use of things like blogs, Twitter and YouTube. Chris Ivens summarises it far better than I can:

Q: What is a Social Media Surgery?  A: With an abundance of buzz-words at every tick and turn and an almost daily mention of twitter in the news we try to look at what technologies could really help your organisation and we’re here to explain in plain English what they are. It’s not a sales pitch nor are you obliged to do anything after the meet, I guess it’s the old cliché; ‘Giving Something Back’. If you come and find the session useful, please pass on the word so more people can benefit.

What we did

Attiye had already set up her experimental blog at a previous surgery. This time, she wanted to learn more about writing on her blog.

We covered a lot:

• How to write a page
• Attiye published her first post
• How to review, approve or delete comments
• How to change the look of her WordPress blog

We also played with a Flip video camcorder but got a bit baffled.

It’s wonderful to see Attiye get started at blogging and I hope she grows more confident with each new post. Hopefully, we’ve demystified the technology so she can concentrate on getting her message out and getting some discussion going through the blog.

How do these surgeries happen?

Nick Booth brings it all together. The surgeons are all volunteers and change from month to month. This time it was the super Jon Bounds, Nicky Getgood, Chris Ivens, Pete Ashton, Neil Houston, Kasper Sorenson and Andy Mabbett (I’m sorry if I’ve missed anyone off). Diane from Fazeley Studios also volunteers her time to keep the meeting place open.

Keep an eye on the Paradise Circus site for future surgery dates.

Hat tip to Nick for the photo.

Linking between posts is also essential if you’re writing a series of related posts.

But one result of linking between posts has always bothered me. Trackbacks or pingbacks displayed in the comments on your own post don’t make sense in the context of your own site; trackbacks and pingbacks only make sense where other people link to your post.

So how do trackbacks and pingbacks appear in the first place?

In WordPress, if you’ve enabled trackbacks and pingbacks for the post you are writing:

…and you add an absolute link to a second post within your site:

…a trackback will appear in the comments list of the second post.

How to prevent trackbacks for posts within your own site

You can prevent trackbacks appearing when linking between posts on your own site by using a relative link, rather than the absolute link.

For example, use the relative link:

/link-to-another-post

…instead of the absolute link:

http://www.yoursite.com/link-to-another-post

Hat tip to Tim J for the answer to my request on how to solve this issue.