March 7-11, 2008
SXSW Interactive
Austin, Texas

The SXSW Interactive Festival features five days of exciting panel content and amazing parties. Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology. Whether you are a hard-core geek, a dedicated content creator, a new media entrepreneur, or just someone who likes being around an extremely creative community, SXSW Interactive is for you!

it’s going to be my first time attending. it sounds like A LOT of fun, can’t wait!

please ping/tweet/email/message/im me if you’re going, would love to connect and catch up

A number of Compete.com updates were released today!

1. Cleaner Results with Report Overviews

Now when you run a Search Analytics report, you will see a new “Report Overview” table above each report. Big plans for this section. Look out for more here in the near future.

2. More Search Analytics data on Site Analytics

The layout of the new Search Analytics module on Site Analytics is much cleaner, and also includes a new metric — the total number of keywords that are driving traffic to the domain.

In the screenshot below, you see immediately that the gurus at Amazon are doing a much better job of milking the long tail than Walmart. Over a 10x difference - 286,306 keywords drive traffic to Amazon.com vs. just 27,206 keywords to Walmart.com!

How are you doing vs. your competitors?

click here for a more complete list of updates

Facebook’s about-face on privacy a bit late
By Therese Poletti, MarketWatch

“Facebook should have said something earlier, that’s a mistake that they made,” said Jay Meattle, a product marketing manager at Compete.com in Boston, which tracks Web site traffic.

The whole Beacon fiasco does not seem to have had any impact on membership, and it is not clear that it will. Even though some members threatened in their posts on the MoveOn.org group that they would quit Facebook, visits to the site are still surging. According to Compete.com, the number of unique visitors to Facebook in November jumped 20.1%, outpacing growth at the larger MySpace, owned by News Corp, which is buying Dow Jones, the parent of MarketWatch.

“Even with the privacy hoopla and the PR fiasco, Facebook is still growing and it’s growing quickly,” said Meattle of Compete.com.

Could be a Technorati bug, but I’ll take it!

Technorati Link
My blog posts on Compete.com

All 3 (very aggressive) personal year goals I set back in January for compete.com met, with time to spare

* Get the blog to a rank better than Hitwise (smoked Hitwise)
* Cross 500,000 monthly uniques (should do 700,000+ in december)
* 50,000 registered users (crossed 60,000)

Compete.com has been around for just 13 months. Anything is possible

In the space of a month, Facebook has gone from media darling to devil. However, all the bad PR didn’t hold back Facebook.com traffic in November. Unique visitors jumped 20%:

The big question — Are Facebook users even aware of their worsening privacy situation? Take a look at the chart below. Looks like regular Facebook users are mostly unaware of their worsening situation, or more likely don’t know what to do about it - not good.

According to one Facebook poll, 67% of all respondents had not even heard of the Facebook Beacon.

It’s generally a good idea to put users first, then investors. I hope the good people at Facebook HQ wake up quickly.

(Published on the Compete Blog on 5-Dec-2007)