A nice service for my locals

Puerto Rico Daily News & Image Searches. Driving traffic to Puerto Rico’s best media sites. The fastest way to find news and images relevant to Puerto Rico. Coming soon to http://www.miislita.com

I think this can be applied to many knowledge domains without making the same mistakes from similar services across the Web.  For now, baby steps.

An update to the Web Crawler

A nice update, indeed:
http://www.miislita.com/web-crawler/web-crawler.php

The Web Crawler is Back!

Our popular tool, The Web Crawler, is back! This new iteration of the tool is a lot more faster because is based on a different strategy: extractions of HREF sets and then refinement of these to get URLs that are qualified for status checks. So the tool also works as a link checker.

Another advantage of the above strategy is this:

A set of HREFs may contain information about absolute and relative URLs, visible and hidden links, internal and external file paths, email addresses, css files, local javascript calls, and anchors (#). A subset of HREFs can also be used as pointers to anchor text information. So, a set of HREFs can be more informative than a mere set of links or URLs as it subsumes both.

Tracking Users: An Email Crawler on Steroids

We have added to our email crawler

(http://www.miislita.com/email-crawler/email-crawler.php)

the following features:

1. A User Tracking Session (just find the link and click on it) to view current user data.

2. Search for user email addresses in the top search engines and social networks

Give it a try.

We plan to add the tracking session feature to all our pages. This feature is now visible to gives you an idea of how it works, but can be invisible to users. Geo and search data can be added in a snap.

Why pay monthly fees when you can have your own tracking service, customized to your needs?

Fractalettes: A Fractal Design Strategy to Color Mining and Learning through Discovery

We have just published this short article, based on The Color Miner tool:

Fractalettes: A Fractal Design Strategy to Color Mining and Learning through Discovery - Based on Fractal Geometry, fractalettes are color palettes within color palettes, where each cell contains color space information and relationships. These types of architectures engage end-users in data mining, critical thinking, and learning through discovery.

The Binary Similarity Calculator

We have just launched The Binary Similarity Calculator. This is a new tool for computing binary-based similarity measures that is available now.

What it is

The Binary Similarity Calculator (BSC) can be used to compare binary sets, groups consisting of only two types of items or states. These are item sets that can be represented as sequences of 1′s and 0′s.

Who can benefit from it

• Marketing analysts that need to examine Yes/No-type questionnaires about products and services.

• Teachers and examiners that must score Yes/No-type exams or assess plagiarism cases.

• Engineers, mathematicians, and physicists that must evaluate On/Off-type records.

• Statisticians, bioanalysts, and others involved with sequencing analysis.

• To sum up, anyone that uses binary sets.

The Unicode Miner

The Unicode Miner, a tool for data mining characters and symbols from the Unicode System is now available.

The Color Miner – A Tool for Mining Colors

The Color Miner, is a tool for mining colors from Web documents.

The traditional way of presenting color palettes to users is by rendering these as static arrays of colors. This limits users to staring at color squares to make color-color comparisons instead of engaging them in data mining and critical thinking, activities that promotes discovery and learning—in a research or school setting.

When we developed The Color Miner, we did so with a fractal design strategy in mind. As a result, we developed a tool capable of generating what we call fractalettes or palettes within palettes. That is, each cell of a generated palette behaves as a smaller palette, containing color space information and relationships for the current color.

We could iterate the individual cells for ever, but in practice we found that a one-level iteration was a good start to encourage users to investigate color-color, space-space, and color-space relationships, to find basic trends and information patterns. In general, this architecture can be iterated to organize additional attributes and relational data.

Using hosts file to protect your computer

A handy resource:

1. If you are using Spybot Search & Destroy on Windows32 systems, enter

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

2. Spybot Search & Destroy will list all blocked connections; i.e. those that are redirected to the localhost.

3. You can manually add/delete entries.

4. It is a another layer of security!!

For details, check:

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spybot_%E2%80%93_Search_%26_Destroy

 

Why time spent on a site is so important?

That is a recurrent question being asked by some of my readers. Here is my answer.

Back in 1995, I wrote in the Dedication section of my doctoral thesis:

“If I have a theory, but no experimental results, I may have nothing. And if I have a theory without practical applications, I may have an artifact.”

So, don’t give your visitors hearsays, half-lies, or misrepresentation of facts found across the Web, but things that they can really test, use, and that solve a real or urgent problem for them. Don’t waste your time repeating interesting -perhaps catchy concepts-, but that at the end of the day are just useless.

In addition to textual and audiovisual content of good quality, give them TOOLS. However, provide tools that make them interact more time with your site and that authoritative pages will recommend or link to.

This is important because the amount of time spent by users in a site is directly correlated to several web metrics/analytics like:

• frequency cap – restriction on the amount of time a specific visitor is shown a particular advertisement.
• stickiness – the amount of time spent at a site over a given time period.
• underdelivery – delivery of less impressions, visitors, or conversions than contracted for a specified period of time.
• unique visitors – individuals who have visited a site (or network) at least once during a fixed time frame.
• bandwidth – how much data (e.g., content, ads, creatives) can be transmitted in a time period over a communication channel, often expressed in kilobits per second (kbps). Data is any alphanumeric content. This includes parameters, variables or any text/pixel-based creative.

Other time-based metrics inherited from traditional media (TV, radio) and that are based on the time spent by users viewing a communication channel can be applied to web channels and sites; among others:

• average audience – the average number of people who tuned into the given time selected and expressed in thousands or as a percentage (also known as a Rating) of thetotal potential audience of the demographic selected. It is also known as a T.A.R.P -Targeted Audience Rating Point.
• channel share – the share one channel has of all viewing for a particular time period. The share, expressed as a percentage, is calculated by dividing the channel’s average audience by the average audience of all channels (PUTs) (It is held in higher esteem by networks than media buyers on a day to day basis and is only referred to by the latter group when apportioning budgets and evaluating a programme for sponsorship).
• cummulative audience or reach – the total number of different people within the selected demographic who tuned into the selected time period for 8 minutes or more (i.e., reached at least once by a specific schedule or advertisement).
• frequency – the average number of times that a person within the target audience has had the opportunity to see an advertisement over the campaign period.
• time spent viewing or TVS – how many minutes/hours an audience has viewed a particular channel.

[Sources: WebSiteMagazine, WebMediaSolutions, NielsenMedia].

So, any tool that helps your visitors to wisely improve their time spent on your site -in an effective manner, of course- cannot hurt you. For this to be true, however, the tool provided must be engaging, useful, effortless, and with a minimum learning curve; otherwise the user experience of your visitors can be frustrating and a waste of time.