As many of you know, Firefox 4 was recently released, and as these things do, included many changes and upgrades. Typically we try to keep up with browser updates, but in this case there’s a bigger picture we’re looking at.

The Firefox team has a project in their labs, called Jetpack, which will enable us to provide the same extension for Firefox as we do for Chrome and Safari. The extension API still needs updating, though, and at this point we’re not aware of any timelines for when Jetpack will officially become part of Firefox.

So until then, the PostRank Google Reader extension for Firefox has been shelved, since minor updates to it in the mean time would mostly just be re-arranging deck chairs. Stay tuned, however! When the Firefox extension comes back, it’ll be pretty awesome stuff.

PostRank Data Services provide online content performance and engagement data for a host of applications:

• PR firms
• Communications agencies
• Corporate brands
• Competitive intelligence analysts
• Ad networks
• Content aggregators
• Media monitoring firms
• Developers

We capture over 20 million individual engagement activities with content on the social web every day, and have archived over 9 billion activities in the largest database of its kind. Imagine what you can do with that! Whether you’re looking for quality content filtered by engagement, or metrics associated with specific URLs, or social engagement data associated with an industry, we have everything you’re looking for.

To help us expose all the gold nuggets buried in this mountain of data, we’ve got a new addition to the PostRank Team. Andrey Aredakov brings more than an decade of experience in media analysis to his role as our first on-staff Data Analyst. Having worked in research and analysis with the likes of Cision and Medialogia, Andrey has been offering up fascinating industry and brand snapshots on our new blog: PostRank Insights. He has been expanding the archive of meaningful, in-depth, turnkey industry reports for organizations ranging from banks to breweries and everything in between on a daily basis.

So if you haven’t visited us lately, or would like to learn more about Data Services, there’s no better time to check us out!

What you need to know:

• The change will take place Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011 and affects access to all PostRank APIs described at http://apidocs.postrank.com.
• Existing customers and trial users should not be affected. PostRank will contact you to confirm that you have a valid API key. Please ensure that you are using the correct API key. No other changes will need to be made on your end.
• PostRank will make an effort to contact all users with old API keys before the change. If you are a current API user and have not received an updated key, or would like to confirm your key, please contact peter@postrank.com for assistance.

The full PostRank archive contains over 5 billion individual engagement events with all kinds of online content. When you query the Metrics API, you are actually accessing this entire archive in real-time and retrieving the latest set of aggregated metrics. There is no caching, there are no delays; all of the ranking data is served in real-time for each request. Needless to say, it takes more than just a single database or an API server to power such a service.

Metrics API Update: Query by URL

If you have used our Metrics API before, then you will know that we required that your query should specify the MD5 hashes (a 32 character string) for each URL — that is how the data is stored internally at PostRank, so it was a simple direct mapping. However, as many of our partners know, hashing URLs is tricky business: a single character change will result in a different key. So, if you didn’t remove a tracking parameter from your URL, or omitted that extra slash, then you might get a completely different set of results.

To simplify this case for everyone, we just pushed out an update to the Metrics API, which allows you to query by URL directly, without having to specify your own MD5 keys. A simple change to the API and a big win for every user. PostRank will do all of the URL normalization, handle all the edge cases, and return to you all the metrics associated with the URL you have submitted. Let’s take a look at a simple example:

Both of the queries are for the same URL; the second one just happens to have some extra Google Analytics tracking parameters — should you remove those when you query the API? Don’t worry about it, just pass in the URL as you have it, and let PostRank do the rest. Both requests now return the same results.

Earlier today, Alex Kosorukoff (Chief Scientist at StumbleUpon) posted some really interesting data analysis he performed over the weekend using PostRank’s Metrics API:

“I took a sample of 2169 urls pulled from about 200 feeds in my google reader. Those feeds cover a pretty diverse set of topics, including science, engineering, entrepreneurship, business, management, psychology, legal, photography, music, humor, lifestyle, etc. I pulled the Postrank metrics for each of those urls into a user engagement matrix. Each row of the matrix represents a url information, and each column has values of a single engagement metric (e.g. number of posts on twitter) across all the 2169 urls. I computed the Pearson correlation between every pair of columns. This resulted in a matrix visualized below.”

The Pearson correlation matrix above highlights that certain sites tend to exhibit similar behaviours, which is arguably not surprising. Some of this, as Alex points out, can be attributed to data exchange between the different sites, but just as likely, it simply shows that no matter what tool we prefer (e.g. Delicious or Diigo for bookmarking), not surprisingly, we tend to engage with similar content. So, no matter if you are a publisher or a consumer, you could either discover more like-minded people, or a wider audience for your content, if you continue to explore different networks — a win-win.

The topic of Human Based Computation (HBS) is an incredibly interesting one to explore and it is always exciting to see intriguing studies and results in the space. Check out Alex’s post (“Mapping the social web with PostRank“), and let us know if you have other interesting results or applications of this data! Social search, discovery, collaboration, gaming, and the list goes on — the Social Web is a deep well of ideas to explore and improve on.

When we began tracking social interactions with content in early 2007, the terms “social media” and “social engagement” were barely in the lexicon, let alone understood in the marketing world. Today, I think all of us can point to a handful of big brands that effectively leverage social networks to grow loyalty with customers.

But our intuition told us that most still aren’t taking advantage of this powerful way to capture the minds and hearts of potential customers. The case studies always seem to reference the same names. And so with the recent release of our Domain Activity API, we decided to run a little experiment and grade the performance of some household names in major consumer categories familiar to all of us.

First, a brief explanation of the Domain Activity API: it rolls up all of the engagement events that occur for an entire domain and its sub-domains. So if the URL of a domain is tweeted, bookmarked, shared, dugg, etc. on any of the 25 social hubs we track, we collect that data in real-time as a measure of how engaged the social sphere is with the brand website(s) overall.

To be clear, we’re not measuring brand mentions; we’re measuring the performance of the brand’s online properties overall. More information on how we define engagement can be found here. You can also see the Domain Activity API in action.

We decided to compare data from well known players in the following categories to measure who was taking advantage in the social world:

• airlines
• consumer electronics
• coffee
• newspapers
• sporting goods.

The data we compared for each domain included: PostRank social engagement, unique visitors, overall visits to the site. Here’s what we found…

Airlines – Virgin, American Airlines, British Airways, Lufthansa



Who gets an A+ for their social media efforts? Virgin is running away with a disproportionate share of online engagement compared to the others, while having the lowest number of unique visitors and visits to the site. British Airways isn’t doing too bad either, considering it only grabbed 6% of the uniques and visits, but 23% of the engagement. By contrast, American Airlines dominates on-site uniques and overall visits, but only gets 25% of the attention on social networks. Lufthansa isn’t making a mark on either front. My bet is that if we ran our sentiment analysis on the content associated with each of these brands, we’d also find some large disparities. Can anyone guess who would win that contest?

Consumer Electronics – Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, LG

While engagement with the selected consumer electronics websites isn’t super high relative to other product categories, among them Samsung leads the pack. Sony has half the engagement of Samsung, but more unique visitors and visits. Samsung also got picked up on fifteen social networks, while Sony only got notice on eight. Panasonic and LG lag far behind, with LG’s entire social engagement in March and April consisting of four tweets.

Coffee – Starbucks, Peet’s, Seattle’s Best, Tim Hortons

The story in coffee isn’t entirely surprising; who doesn’t know that Starbucks is all over social media? Well, it’s working. They dominate online engagement, uniques and visits compared to the others by a country mile. What is surprising, at least to us, is that Seattle’s Best, a brand common across the US, has zero engagement in the social world. Zero. A quick look at their site reveals no social media presence at all, no blog and no RSS feed. While Peet’s and Tim’s have stuck their toes in the water, they’ve got a long way to go to get anywhere near the Starbucks stratosphere.

Newspapers – New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today

It’s no secret that traditional print news media has struggled to find its footing in the online world. However, the New York Times appears to be doing a very good job of that compared to the WSJ and USA Today. While unique visitors and overall visits among the three sites aren’t significantly different, the New York Times is blowing away the competition in terms of social engagement. They’ve done a stellar job of creating custom feeds oriented to topics of interest, and actively promoting blog content and interactive participation on their site. One form of engagement, Reader Comments, is particularly telling. In March and April the New York Times got 1.15 million comments on their content; the Wall Street Journal and USA Today got less than one-fifth of that.

Sporting Goods – Nike, Adidas, Reebok

Nike is the gorilla in terms of online engagement compared to Adidas and Reebok. Their site makes it easier to engage in the social world, while the other two sites are less obviously social. Nike also picks up engagement across 12 of 25 social networks we track, while Adidas and Reebok get activity in eight and five respectively. While Twitter was the largest source of engagement for Nike and Adidas, Reebok didn’t get a single tweet in either March or April. Nike has also done some innovative things like bridging online and offline activity with runners and building a highly engaged online community through it. The other two might watch and learn.

Update: Fast Company has posted a piece on Adidas and Nike re. the World Cup that totally confirms our findings re. Nike and social media.

Conclusion

Some brands, like Virgin, Starbucks and Nike, are well ahead of the competition in their product categories in leveraging social media to gain brand awareness. But why is measuring audience interaction with a brand in the social sphere so important?

Because at PostRank we know that social networks are where people increasingly spend their time, and links to content that are shared, voted for, and otherwise interacted with can drive a massive amount of traffic back to the originating website, not to mention to stores. Not only do social networks drive traffic back, that traffic tends to be more targeted and loyal, something all brands aim for. Some of them understand that, but others have a long way to go.

So it comes as no surprise that upon launching the Domain Activity API, our thoughts turned to this marvelous haven of deplorable grammar and social foible exploitation. We had to know: Just how are the internets wasting their time? We’re all about the hard science here at the PostRanch, people.

First off, let’s see what we’re analyzing. There are 50 sites in total, divided into five categories: LOL, FAIL, POP CULTURE, WTF?, and WIN. The most populous category is WTF? with 13 sites; the least populous category is WIN, with three.

I Can Has Cheezburger is the longest running site, started in January 2007. Overkill 9000 appears to be the newest, launched at the end of April, but they do add new sites all the time. (Note: We were unable to include Overkill 9000 in the analysis as our API didn’t return engagement metrics, presumably due to the newness of the site.)

I would have bet that the venerable ICHC site would top the charts in engagement, but fortunately I didn’t put any money on that. As it turns out, FAIL Blog has by far the most engagement, with a total of 1077685 points. I Can Has Cheezburger came in second, but, at 416941 points, with a mere 39% of FAIL Blog’s engagement.

In fact, the FAIL category receives 46% of the total engagement of the entire 50-site Network! Never underestimate the entertainment value of Schadenfreude… (I will note that the guys weren’t surprised at all that FAIL Blog and the FAIL category in general took top honours.) At 404 points, Historic LOLs had the lowest engagement of all the sites with a mere .01%.

The LOL category came in second in total engagement, with 21%, and WTF came in third, with 14%. (I think this is the internets version of the “Who’s on first?” skit.)

It was certainly apparent that people love to share the content from these sites, with tweets, Delicious, Google Reader Shares and Buzz being the among the most consistently high sources of engagement across the categories. (Google Buzz may be a robot party, but at least the robots have a good sense of humour.)

The LOL and WTF categories seemed to be the most popular with Reddit voters, while WIN was the most popular on Digg, with FAIL and WTF running neck and neck for second-place Digg popularity. The CUTE category had relatively low overall engagement, but it’s a hit on Twitter, with tweets accounting for three-quarters of that category’s engagement. WIN was the only other category with a similarly skewed breakdown, with the aforementioned Digg voting popularity accounting for the lion’s share of its engagement. (The WIN category also had the least of its engagement coming from Twitter.)

If you’d like to play around with the data, help yourself to the Google spreadsheet, or download it.

Update: The New York Times has published an interesting piece on the development and nuts and bolts of the Cheezburger Network: Once Just a Site With Funny Cat Pictures, and Now a Web Empire

Each of those events is associated with a URL, which means that we have, in effect, a panel of tens of millions of users who give us the pulse on every story being shared and discussed across all the major social media platforms. A heaven for data geeks of all professions.

To that end, PostRank is always researching, developing, and tweaking access to data, how we can analyze and present it, and, most importantly, how we can help customers use the data. Today we’re launching another powerful tool in our Data Services toolkit: the Domain Activity API.

Check out the PostRank Labs demo for a quick preview of the data. Type in any 3 top level domains, and we’ll show you their overall performance, as well as the top sub-domain performers for each one. Keep in mind, however, that the Labs demo only shows the tip of the data iceberg available to our Data Services customers!

Prior to now, you’ve been able to access all of the metrics data via our Metrics API (to find all activity with a specific URL), or the Feed Engagement API (to find all activity for an entire RSS feed, for some period of time). However, what if you’re also interested in bigger, macro-oriented trends? Curious if people are talking about content on your domain, or, perhaps, how your competitors’ audiences are engaging? Now you can satisfy that curiosity via our Domain Activity API.

Let’s have a look at an example. Ever wondered how WordPress, TypePad, Tumblr, and Posterous stack up against each other? (For Blogger stats, check the spreadsheet.)

First off, Posterous still has ways to go to catch up to the rest of the pack when it comes to user engagement. (And to be fair, the other sites have between 2 and 6 years’ head start.)

Both WordPress and TypePad attract a significant portion of on-site comments as part of their engagement, indicating that the “micro-blogging” phenomenon has far from taken over the overall media landscape, and on-site engagement isn’t entirely dead. On the other hand, Tumblr attracts a significant proportion of its traffic from sites such as Reddit and Digg.

Curious about these trends? Feel free to dig a little deeper into the live data, or download the spreadsheet.

We’ve had to retire the Topic API, which means that folks with PostRank.com accounts can no longer export a single, aggregated topic feed from either a topic they’ve created of feeds they’ve imported into their account, or from one of the global topics.

Those who have topic feeds in their RSS readers, etc. will find they no longer work and throw an error. Those feeds can be deleted, as the removal of the Topic API is not temporary (as I initially thought — sorry ’bout that).

Mashup apps also using the API will have stopped working correctly as well.

So what can you still do? All these things!

• Import RSS feeds into your PostRank account.
• Tag feeds in your subscriptions with keywords to create topics.
• Filter feeds based on keywords and/or your desired PostRank filtering level.
• Export the filtered version of individual RSS feeds.
• Export OPML files of user topic or global topic feeds.

Re. that last point, the only difference from before is that you’re exporting all the individual filtered feeds (and would have to separate them with a Google Reader folder or something like that), rather than a single, aggregated feed of all the original feeds in the topic.

This change does not affect PostRank Analytics accounts.

Any questions or whatnot, give me a shout.

And did we mention that what you glean from and do with that data needs to be differentiated from your competitors?

Fortunately, here at PostRank we have superpowers that can tame these challenges:

• a vast archive of constantly updated data
• sophisticated systems to analyze and augment that data with relevant metadata, and
• plenty of ideas about how to work with, customize, and deliver that data.

To that end, we’ve just launched a feature we call Entity Extraction. It’s a feature bundled with our Real-time Content API stream, and is a new way to filter and visualize targeted real-time content information. Check out the one-page Entity Extraction feature summary.

Entity Extraction takes two forms: the Tree Map and the Geo Map.

Tree Map

The Tree Map’s unique algorithm searches every English language story or article coming through our Real-time Content pipe. We extract names of people, places, and things (like company names), then aggregate those entity mentions and display them visually in a tree map.

Each entity is displayed as a dynamically updating square, which shows the relative “share of voice” globally in the last hour. (Each square’s changing size represents frequency of mentions.)

We’ve also layered on our sentiment analysis algorithm to show average sentiment of the current stories relating to an entity. Green is positive, red is negative, and more neutral shading displays in between sentiment.

The Tree Map is also accompanied by a scrolling list of current stories with which people are engaging, providing deeper insights into what topics are trending.

You can check out a demo of a sample of the data we’re currently processing here: Real-time Trends Tree Map.

Geo Map

The Geo Map dynamically visualizes real-time mention of places around the world. The Entity Extraction algorithm analyzes the Real-time Content stream to detect mentions of geographic locations and visually represents them on a map with virtual push pins. With every new mention more pins are added.

The Geo Map is a great way to show geo-specific event trending (what’s drawing attention or soon will be) for everything from cultural phenomena to natural disasters.

You can check out a demo of a sample of the data we’re currently processing here: Real-time Trends Geo Map.

Head on over to PostRank Labs to check out the Entity Extraction demos, or read more about our APIs on the PostRank Data Services site.