July 2007 – Page 4 – Andy writes!

Last week, Nielsen declared the page view meaningless as a yardstick for measuring visitor activity on a website. It’s apparently all — or partially — YouTube’s fault, because people watching videos online don’t clicky clicky to other pages as often.

Although Nielsen already measures average time spent and average number of sessions per visitor for each site, it will start reporting total time spent and sessions for all visitors to give advertisers, investors and analysts a broader picture of what sites are most popular.

Currently, sites and advertisers often use page views, a figure that reflects the number of Web pages a visitor pulls from a site.

Via the almost always prescient Micro Persuasion (link), who predicted the page view’s demise last December.

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal noted that blogging will celebrate its 10th birthday later this year. (I found this out via GigaOM, which points out that it took a mainstream media source to inform us all of this milestone.) According to the WSJ:

We are approaching a decade since the first blogger — regarded by many to be Jorn Barger — began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary. On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote: “I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis,” and the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as the primordial root of the word “weblog.”

To which blogger Jason D. O’Grady replies, “Not so fast.”

“I take issue with both of their reports,” O’Grady writes, referring to another blogger’s post that traces blogging’s origins to 1996, “because there were a number of people blogging before this and Iâ€™m one of them.”

This blog is comparatively young. Next December, around the same time Barger will celebrate 10 years of the craft, higher ed marketing will enter the terrible twos.

Month: July 2007

Blogging turns 10. Or 12.