Edublogs webinar overview – Who’s that on my blog?

Introduction

This session happened at rather short notice. Our guest presenter had to pull out at short notice. So as I recently had a spate of spam comments on my blog and had used my visitor tracking to confirm to myself that it was indeed spam – this led me to think about how much we know about visitors to our blogs. I thought this might be a topic of interest to others.

The Session

We were a very small group this week and as usual we recorded the session (please let me know if you access it) for those who were unable to attend. To start with we took a look at whether we all had blogs – we did, and whether we monitored visitors – I was the only one who did so. We touched a little on monitoring comments and conversations in comparison with the automatic monitoring that was the focus of the session.

We talked about the uses of visitor tracking/monitoring. I myself mainly use three different systems allthough I also access the standard statisitics automaticially available on all Edublogs blogs. My three systems give me different levels of information from the broad totals of visitors to the blog broken down by country, down to much more specific when, where from and which post they arrived on as well as whether they arrived as the result of a search & what that search was. I find the last very useful in helping me to confirm if comments are spam. Anyone who arrives on my blog as a result of a search for “leave a reply” is almost certain to be a spammer!

Feedjit

I used AppShare to illustrate how I use these tracking mechanisms on my own blog and how I use them to inform (to some extent) how and when I post. The last part of the session was, as usual, a look at our best “takeways” from the session

Conclusion

This session went very well even though we were so few and the topic was planned at short notice. I certainly find that using the different visitor tracking systems is very helpful for me in lots of different ways & hope that these thoughts are useful for others

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next session is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday May 12th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday May 13th at 7am West Aus, mid morning Eastern States Aus depending on your timezone (check yours here) – in the usual Elluminate room. This is one of our fortnightly unconference sessions where we invite you to bring along your “hot topics” and “burning issues” for our poll on the topic of the day. If you want to propose a topic in advance then visit the Serendipity Wallwisher and add your topic.

4 thoughts on “Edublogs webinar overview – Who’s that on my blog?

  1. Your post grabbed my attention when I was on Twitter. Being new to blogs I use the same tracking tool and it’s interesting to see where they found my site and what type of software they are using. I haven’t received many spammers but you can definitely tell!

    Thanks for the post!

  2. Wow, Jo! Talk about Serendipitous! I have just listened to the webinar which I missed on Friday while I was attending an IRL Gifted Education seminar in Barwon Heads with Prof. Miraca Gross from GERRIC.
    Your topic this week is exactly what I was wanting to know about for my blog so I will be taking the #SerendipEd challenge!
    I have been keeping statistics on the Gifted Resources website which includes visits to the blog and I have a page views counter on the blog; but I had been admiring the clustr maps and considering installing one on the blog – so this session was very timely!
    Thank you Jo and Phil!
    Here are the smileys I would have given if I were attending at the original time : D 😀 😀 😀 😀

  3. Hi Theresa

    Great that it was interesting for you – have been noticing your blog progress. I was down to be mentor for you in the challenge if needed which you obviously didn’t! You seemed to be “flying” right from the start.

    It is great to see where people come from in terms of how they find us & as you get more visitors you will probably (sadly) get more sp*mmers. Keep up the great blogging progress 🙂 and you are always welcome at our webinars – we love the global input from educators around the world

    Jo

  4. Thank you Jo

    So pleased this was timely for you – we missed you in the session 🙁 but great you had a good PD day. I like my cluster map very much for its broad brush visual appeal (it was the first blog stat I started to collect), although also love the other two stats as well. Would love to hear how it goes for you adding a clustermap to your blog.

    Jo

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