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What is Woopra (and why it is far better than Google Analytics)

I have already blogged about Woopra. Now, after 2 weeks of intensive use and test, I can give you some insights about this amazing piece of Web Analytics software.

I embed here the presentation for MediaCamp Roma, the social media marketing event held in Rome on Dec 3th 2008. My presentation was about Woopra analytics of course! I made a brief comparison with Google Analytics and the result is... Woopra is better than Google Analitycs!

Thanks to all the guys at MediaCamp Roma, especially to Chris Hambly and Massimo Burgio who made this event possible. It was a great opportunity to share knowledge about Social Media, Social Web and latest Social Trends in the blogosphere. 

I strongly believe that Woopra is a sort of Social Web Analytics. What do you think? Here we go with the presentation "What is Woopra (and why it is far better than Google Analytics)".

What is Woopra (and why it is far better than Google Analytics)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: woopra analytics)

Is Change coming? I start to change (here)

After the election of Barack Obama, is Change coming?

You might be interested, then head to change.gov to know more about the president-elect. You might also be tempted to try change.com but you will be disappointed. Maybe.

Anyway, my point is: I'm going to change the blogging pace of this blog. I thought I could write a slow blog on philosophical considerations about advertising, marketing and web-related technologies. But I'm not that kind of person. I'm quickly changing and I cannot slow down my pace to 1 post per month.

I decided to change.

My paz.typepad.com blog will be update more frequently, so that I can excercise my english and express my opinion on international facts and happenings.

My first opinion is about president-elect Barack Obama.

The weekly address from the President-elect will be published on YouTube. Do you think this is a good idea? What if I tell you that comments are closed, and this is only an old style streaming video (a.k.a. webTV)? Do you still believe Obama is 2.0?

The videos uploaded to YouTube by the user changedotgov are all but social: no comments, no video responses, no ratings. And far less views. Is Obama REALLY changing?

Keep in touch: feel free to add me on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Facebook is not enough! Why you need to be everywhere and how you can make it

You're on Facebook. And maybe you're on LinkedIn too. I tell you something: it's not enough.

Hundreds of people won't find you on their favorite social network. Some other people cannot spell your name correctly and don't know what to search on Google. A few know your name, are connected to you but don't know you're blogging somewhere on the web.

Even your closest friends are missing something about your online persona.  And it's not good for you, because maybe the will find something interesting and can tell you something you don't know about your niche. Don't you believe me?

An old friend connected to me on Facebook, and asked me something about what I've written on a blog. It was an interesting conversation and I had a great time talking again with him. I put all my blogs on my Facebook URLs so everyone can easily check all my online spaces. And I put them on FriendFeed too!

I've been using FriendFeed for a few weeks by now, and I think it's very useful because it can do a very simple thing for me: track all my contents published on the web (serveral blogs, delicious, youtube, twitter). Although it can be a conversational social network I use it in a very basic way: I just put my RSS feeds in it and it does all the rest!

I post on twitter, save bookmarks on delicious, publish video on youtube and write on several blogs. My friends probably visit two or more of my blogs, but still not all of them. My random readers will probably visit just one of my spaces. So, both to the first and to the latter, I can suggest something I've written that might be worth to read.

Here's my advice for you: try to inter-connect all your social spaces between each other (via a simple link) and use some aggregator - like FriendFeed - to give a unique stream of all your social media. You will get more readers, and you could offer a good service to your loyal followers.

Feel free to add me as a friend on Facebook, btw.

Are you competitive enough to make Jessica Alba stare at you for 1 minute?

Dear Jessica,
I can beat you!

On Ibeatyou.com you can "challenge the world". Someone challenged Jessica Alba. And here's the video response (real!).

Not only she's incredibly hot, she's also really funny! She was asked to stare without blinking her eyes for as long as possible, and she managed to do it for over 1 minute. She looks completely natural.

I Beat You (IBY) is a web site where you can start a competition with a video, a picture or a text. You can literally challenge everyone, and the judges are the users who can vote your performance (or your pictures/texts). I think the trick is to get your friends to vote for you: the one who has got the more collaborative friends can win, but I bet that Jessica Alba can win hands-down against every one.

Here's the story of I beat you as it is written in Ibeatyouvids YouTube channel (which I subscribed, by the way):

ibeatyou (IBY) was started by a group of very competitive friends. Whether it was determining who had the funniest celebrity impressions, or remembering how many times someone beat somebody else in Nerf Basketball Contests, we realized there was no real outlet to easily showcase our "skills" with other people, or ways to easily let others decide on the true winner. ibeatyou was created for this sole reason alone.

I've just registered on I beat you, and I've discovered that every user can earn points to rank the ladder. I will probably begin with the Stare Competition because it's quite easy to do with a PC and a webcam.

Here's the Ibeatyou page for the Stare Competition and, 'til now, Jessica Alba is the winner (I gave her a 5 out of 5). Having a Jessica Alba's video performance - now that she's pregnant and she cannot act in movies - for promoting a website is a real buzz booster. Well done IBY guys!

Why I've joined the Facebook translation team

Facebook is becoming an important tool for web marketers, social media specialist and online media planners. It delivers targeted-contextual display and text ads, profiled leads and contacts, demographic stats on pageviews and much more.

What's wrong with that? Read on to know what's wrong.

The content is multilingual because the users are in fact multilingual. But what about the interface and the profiles? They're limited to 4 languages and targeted ads and social media campaigns simply don't work well in other languages. Facebook is currently available in 4 languages: English, Spanish, French and German. What about Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and all the other languages?

The bad news is that there's nothing a normal user can do about it. Well, almost.

Because there's a good news: Facebook is being localized in "minor" languages by indipendent translators.

There's a community of volunteers for those who want to join the Facebook translation team. Can you figure out where this community is? Yes! On Facebook of course.

To join the Facebook translation community all you have to do is add the "Translations" Facebook Application (just type Translations inside your Applications search box).

This application is really easy to use and lets you translate "inline" every piece of Facebook still unavailable in your own language.

I've joined that community to translate Facebook from English to Italian because I believe that Facebook is an important marketing tool, and it can become even better if it is localized in my native language.

There are 4000+ phrases left to complete the italian translation: feel free to help us!

FlickrBits: precious resources for Flickr Mash-ups

I've just found a great link list of Flickr Tools.

picture from Flickr

On the website FlickrBits.com you'll find Desktop Applications, PHP Scripts, Plug-ins, Embedding Codes and lots of stuff for your Flickr Mash-ups. Every piece of software uses Flickr APIs to connect with the advanced functionalities of Flickr.com.

Flickr fans heaven right after the jump »

BTW: I wish you a happy Easter-Weekend!

So Flickr goes video...

It's official: a beta video sharing system will be integrated into Flickr by April.
What's the sense of that decisions?

What should we expect?

It has been confirmed that Yahoo! Video and Flickr won't be merged and that Flickr Video won't be a Youtube-like social web site. So what will it be?

The unique feature of Flickr is not the photo sharing itself, but the high-quality of the images. Will it be the same for Flickr Video? Are they preparing a Flickr Video Pro account with high definition support? Will we be able to add notes to video?

I'm quite curious about that but I think that adding a video functionality to Flickr could completely change the sense of Flickr high-profile and high-quality photographers' community.

(photo from a Flickr user)

New User Generated Content and Social Voting web site: Cose di Parte

We've launched last friday Cosediparte.it, a social voting & bookmarking website made by Art Attack Advertising for the political campaign of the italian left parties coalition named la Sinistra l'Arcobaleno.

Here's a screenshot of the main part of the tool.

Cosediparte.it integrates a really new voting system based on drag&drop: you can decide to vote up/down content by simply dragging icons on the left or the right side of the screen. I bet you can guess which part of the screen is the positive one :-D

Of course, the voting system strongly connects with the traditional media campaign which is based on the concept of "choose your part", intended as a political leftwinged choice (red, opposed to black).

A special thanks to the guys @ATAXO for the development: the tool is made in AJAX and runs on a Ruby on Rails server. Note that the tool is completely localized in Italian, but I believe that english speaking visitors can understand how it works as well.

What do you think?