So, I completely abandoned Pyxlin recently… I abandoned it because I was pointed towards LDSJournal.com, which I consider a better solution to my needs. Not only is it free, but I like how easy it is to use, without the obnoxious wait times and such that I experienced with Pyxlin’s site. Pyxlin was great, and I don’t regret the money I spent to get a year subscription (it was cheap, and I wrote daily), but that’s all a sunk cost now that I see something that meets my needs in a better way.

Few examples:

LDSJournal.com runs much faster because it doesn’t run on the silly platform that Pyxlin uses!

Pyxlin:

LDSJournal:

As you can see, posting on LDSJournal is very similar to posting on your blog. I don’t have to worry about the silly typesetting thing that gets really annoying.

You can also use Firefox spell checking (see above picture for red squigglies), which you could not do in Pyxlin… You were instead forced to use their retarded spell checker.

LDSJournal also allows for footnotes (images and such) as well as journal addendums that can be time stamped differently to show that you went back to old journal entries and had thoughts that you wanted to share. This could be really neat for reviewing your journal at the end of the month or end of the year. You could go in and explain how certain thoughts became really important to you as the month went on and how different experiences may have shaped what you decided your next steps in life to be.

I also don’t have to have silly chapters and things in my LDSJournal. Everything is associated with a date (see the calendar on both the image above and the one below that lets you know when you’ve made an entry), and when I decide to print something (the functionality for that is forthcoming, but I’m faithful since I’ve already seen development since I moved to their service) it will be set chronologically without hassle. Apparently they are also working on the “tag” feature I would really like, which would allow me to print a different journal just based on entries with spiritual experiences or confessions of love (cheesy!).

I also like that it tells me right at the bottom what my most recent journal entries are and the dates associated with them. This just makes it a little easier for me to keep track of my progress with an actual idea of what I wrote about based on the entry title.

Anyway, this is my new recommendation! Certainly check it out (it’s FREE). I encourage everyone to keep a journal for a bunch of reasons:

1. It helps you process what you did during the day
2. It is great for thinking through whatever you are experiencing in life
3. I often have my “A HA!” moments as I’m writing in my journal, and those really help shape my life
4. It’s sort of recommended by the Prophets and Apostles…

I may have a new favorite online service: Pyxlin… I saw this in the Daily Universe (BYU’s Student newspaper) yesterday, and since I have been an avid Journaler over the last 8 months (though I’ve been pretty bad at it recently) I thought I would check it out. Seriously, I’m pretty highly impressed!!! Pyxlin isn’t a terribly new idea in it’s basic form - it’s an online Journal tool - but it’s a service that finally does things right.

The biggest downfalls I’ve seen to previous services like this have been that they don’t provide all the functionality I want in their web service (a full text editor and the ability to upload my photos however I want) nor do they provide much of a way for you to get a hardbound copy of what you have worked so diligently to keep… Well, those are two things that Pyxlin definitely gets right! Keeping an online journal sure is convenient since you can access it from anywhere and flake out during class if you’d like, but finally I can get my journal in a book at the end of the year to keep on my book shelf.

I like to see when people do technology the right way… Too often people try and digitize your whole life, but for the majority of us there is a strong feeling of nostalgia for the things of the past… I LOVE having hard copies of my journals. Can I tell you how much I love that? I LOOOOVE having hard copies of my journals. It’s nice to pull it out once in a while to see what I was feeling and thinking about a while back… It’s really great if you want to share some personal thoughts that you wrote about your girlfriend when you first started dating… Seriously, it’s a big deal to me, and to see someone respond to that type of user requirement (I know I’m not the only one who feels this way) is really impressive.

I recommend you check it out and take a look at a pretty neat product. I don’t know anything about the guys who developed it, other than that they were/are apparently BYU students - thus why the Daily Universe covered it, so I don’t want anyone to think I’m recommending you check out something a friend built (though you should definitely check out RateMyApartments.com).

There is a site charge (something like $20 a year if you pay annually), but you can do a 7-day trial for free. Let me know what you think! I get excited about people using technology intelligently like this - it’s a big step up from the non-innovative ideas I often see.

It’s been a while since I’ve had some time to get a post up, and one of the reasons why is because I have been spending a lot of time preparing for the Omniture Web Analytics Competition at BYU. For those who don’t know, I’m taking a Web Analytics class this semester and we’re encouraged (maybe required?) to participate in the competition. This was my second semester participating in the competition, but unfortunately we worked with the same website’s data. Though you’d think I had an advantage, being familiar with http://www.costumecraze.com/, the Omniture people made it clear at the opening meeting that we needed to come in with new information this time around.

I can’t share any specific information due to my signing a non-disclosure agreement, but I can talk a bit about the SiteCatalyst product! To be completely honest, SiteCatalyst is an absolutely fabulous tool that still needs a little work. Currently, you have great flexibility and customization available to you (though sometimes you end up paying quite a bit more for some of those options) as an Omniture customer. The task of keeping up with all of your key performance indicators is pretty simple with the advanced dashboards you can create. From my experience, which is admittedly little, SiteCatalyst blows the competition away in sophistication and the level of customization available. Granted, those who use Omniture’s tools are paying out the nose, so SiteCatalyst better be good.

I do, however, have a few complaints. Omniture has broken up their reports into three main sections: Commerce, Traffic, and Paths. This is really helpful in some regards because it breaks up the many reports available into three different categories, yet I found myself extremely frustrated on several occasions. Because these three categories are very rigidly constructed, getting reports on data from both traffic and commerce is impossible (or at least hard enough to seem so). For example, should I want to find a report that gave me the percentage of site traffic that came from a specific domain and the revenue from that domain I would be out of luck. For some questions you can look up two different reports within their respective categories, but this is not always the case.

Without giving out specific information, I was trying to do research on CostumeCraze’s global presence (where commerce and traffic were coming from geographically) and I could not find reports that really helped me drill down on the issue. SiteCatalyst provides traffic maps, showing which countries around the world are providing site traffic, but I could not find anything that would help me see the revenue that matched up with that traffic. The data already being tracked, so why can’t I get to the information I need? There were ways to work around the problem, sort of, but I’d rather just have interoperability between the three categories.

Omniture does offer other services, and it’s entirely possible that Discover (a new app they use) or another piece of software solves some of the problems I see in SiteCatalyst. Unfortunately, I haven’t had access to any of the more advanced tools, but I can probably research it a little bit. Either way, web analytics is a pretty interesting and I encourage those who are web developers to look into Google’s free analytics tools (http://www.google.com/analytics).

I’ve been reading about the phenomenon of Internet video the last few days and I suppose I should comment on the issue (links to the articles can be found below). There are a couple different topics I’d like to touch on in this post…The real secret ingredient to successful online video advertising is similar to Metcalf’s Law in that as you increase the amount of locations that host your content you are thus increasing the power of your message. Think about it, if you have a really clever advertisement that is playing on half a dozen different websites that all receive a decent amount of daily traffic, you have a pretty strong network working for you. Users begin to take ownership of some of these great videos that are available because they found them on their favorite site, or because they can download the content to their local machine for later playback.

Sharing on-demand content with your friends is much easier than trying to find when it will be replayed on television; by creating quality, on-demand media that can spread throughout the internet you are increasing the total number of “views” you get for little to no marginal cost.One of the keys, in my opinion, to a successful marketing campaign is being able to select a target market (or two) and successfully drive your advertising and other marketing efforts towards those people. By creating video content (or any content, really) that is posted online, you can more easily advertise to those who you are looking to target. MySpace and YouTube have become extremely large online communities where mass amounts of younger generation users spend a lot of their time. By creating quality content with the target audience in mind, you can now specifically place your ads on YouTube, MySpace, or on another online community that specifically caters to your desired market and thus increase the effectiveness of reaching your target audience.

The creation of online content is also fairly cheap. By comparison to a television or print media ad, your costs to post some of these videos around the internet are extremely cheap or, in a lot of cases, free! It is no longer true that you need to spend millions of dollars on an ad campaign because television advertising means high costs if you want a quality time slot; in the current market you can develop an ad spot or short film for as little as a couple thousand dollars, and then have the ability to post it online for free at several video hosting sites. Even to post videos on a corporate or personal website if fairly cheap considering the plummeting costs of bandwidth. Though television and print media ads have their place, anyone can diversify their marketing efforts to the web and thus save money while increasing brand awareness and attitude.

The most curious thing, which wasn’t directly talked about in the articles I read, but was implied. If an organization wants to create a great following and truly have successful marketing on the web, they need to create a community that users will want to be a member of. This goes back to the whole Web 2.0concept that has been all the buzz over the last year or so, and the validity behind all of it is becoming more and more obvious. Think of some of the more successful web organizations out there and you’ll quickly come up with a list that includes MySpace, YouTube, and Amazon. One of the things that each of these sites have in common is their feeling of community and the fact that any registered user can create and contribute content to the site. MySpace gives you a page online where you can communicate with friends and create a customized page for yourself. YouTube gives each user the ability to upload and rate content. Amazon creates a community by allowing everyone to review products and make recommendations to others who may have similar tastes and preferences. As people become more attached to their online community, they spend more time on the site and become viral marketers to the world about the things they love online. I don’t necessarily endorse any of these services , but you have to concede that these companies have done something right that the rest of the world is trying to emulate or take advantage of (evidenced by the insane amount of money YouTube and MySpace sold for over the last year).

BTW, the sources I read can be found at the following locations:

• Blending Video and E-Commerce
• Business Goes Straight to Video