Are you a publisher, bookseller, or maybe an author? If so, you may have found it rather troublesome to get some real statistical data when it comes to books and you may want to keep an eye on a new service, TitleZ. TitleZ is a new company by The Planning Shop that provides statistical data about books using by using Amazon’s API (with permission). The service is currently in free beta (won’t be free for long) and lets you monitor book trends, sale rankings, and other insightful data which can be very helpful for authors, publishers, or even editors. TitleZ eliminates the frustration of searching through pages and pages of Amazon rankings just to help find competitive book titles and puts an end to the day to day only rank positions of titles. Back in 2004, TitleZ began recording top selling titles, with Amazon’s permission, and grabs statistics every day using it to build a very powerful tool.

TitleZ main functionality exist in a section dedicated to the research of top selling books on Amazon. Getting stated is as simple as typing in a keyword to return a list of books. In my case, I searched using the term, “Ajax.” I was presented with a list of books, sorted by current sales rank, along with some basic information like the title, author, publisher, price, and more importantly, its current rank. I looked for a book that I owned and found the book, Ajax in Action. I personally found the book to be an excellent read and noticed that I am not alone because it was ranked 181 at the top of the list. Now that I found a book of interest, I clicked on the arrow to the left which will drop down and show me more statistics about the book. This is where things get more interesting and a lot more useful - also information beyond what Amazon provides. You can see the books best or worst sales rank, averages (7 day, 30 day, 90 day, and Lifetime), and also a very nice line graph. The line graph plots rankings for everyday so you can get an easy to see visual on the progress of the book and when hovering over a point, it will show you the date, time, and rank of the book at that point.

Lets say your an author or a publisher. What could you do to make it easier for you to track only books that you want to track? Next to each book that TitleZ tracks, you will see a button that says, “Save.” This will save the book a place it in your own personalized page, “My TitleZ.” This way, you can easily view only the statistics for books that you need to track. I can find this very useful for publishers so they can track all the books under their name and I also find it useful for authors so they can easily see how well their books are selling. I also want to note that you may come across some books that are not showing statistics because TitleZ has not began recording ranks for the book. If this is the case, TitleZ allows you to easily start tracking the information by simply clicking on the “Start Tracking” button.

TitleZ also provides a nice comparison feature that lets you pull up multiple books and compare their statistics side by side. In the results page after making a search, I selected 5 books that I wanted to compare. All books are then placed side by side showing all the information on the main results page along with colors assigned to them. Then below the books will be a bar graph that shows the monthly sales rank averages for each book. Each book has its own bar that is in the color that the book was associated with. The comparison page is great, but the month labels at the bottom of the graph needs some work because they overlap eachother. The comparison page is also great because it gives you a figure on how well your book is doing compared to your competition.

I know that when the time comes that I publish my own book (right!), I know that I will definitely remember to checkout TitleZ because the information provided seems to be very helpful. It is very beneficial and has a ton of uses for publishers, authors, editors, agents, marketers, and so on. As I have said, TitleZ is currently in beta and is free for the beta testing period only and expect to pay for the statistics once it’s released.

If you have written a book before, let me know how useful TitleZ has been for you and how valuable you find the statistics to be. I am interested in hearing from actual authors and/or publishers.

View TitleZ - Book Trends for Publishers (via ComputerZen.com).

FeedButler is a new service that is related to services like Digg and Reddit, except it has an interesting spin to it. The service gets its stories automatically from feeds, not by users. Users can add feeds and upload OPML files to contribute to the news being fed, but they cannot submit stories. Think of it as a public feed reader that allows users to promote stories much like you would in services like Digg. I find this very interesting and wonder how successful a service such as FeedButler could be knowing that the feeds are in control of what the new stories page shows. You promote stories, but do you like not being in control of whats being fed to the service? Personally, I like it and feel that it gives everyone a chance to get some exposure because stories are grabbed automatically. I’m very interested in seeing what others have to think about this as well.

With FeedButler, you get a constant stream of news fed automatically from feeds. You start off by going to the “New Stories” section where you will find the latest news from the feeds FeedButler is aggregating. You can also filter the stories by category by selecting a category from the right menu. When you view a story that you liked, click on the gray bedge on the left of the articles title to mark it. The more marks a story gets, the more likely it is to make it to the main page of FeedButler. Each story also has its own permanent page that shows other users of FeedButler that has marked it but does not allow for comments, which I think would be a great addition. Just a note about marking stories. When marking a badge in Firefox, it marks the story but does not update the badge to the gold color showing you marked it. It does work in other browsers though, but would be great if it worked in Firefox as well.

I also found FeedButler to be a great source of news because of the categories. The categories seem to be automatically created, depending on the stories that have been fed. Because of this, the service has a wide range of categories but provides a strong stream of stories in each. There is a category for Web 2.0 and the stories that appear in it are great and range from all different kinds of websites and blogs that I do not normally read. Even better, you can subscribe to any page on FeedButler, so I have subscribed to the categories I am interested in an now have a steady flow of stories appearing in my feed reader.

Friends is another great feature that FeedButler has. When you view your profile, you will see a section titled, Friends. You go into the add friends section, search for a friend, and click add. Next time you view the Friends section in your profile, you will see stories that all of your friends have marked with stars on them. This way you have a page that are only of stories that your friends liked. Also as you view the main page and new stories of FeedButler, the badges will show stars on them if any of your friends have marked them to make them easier to spot. I really like the Friends feature because it lets your narrow down on the stories that only your friends approve of making it a much more trusting source of news.

Overall, I think FeedButler is great. The news isn’t user-submitted but rather grabbed from feeds automatically giving you a wide range of stories to read. I also find it very interesting because any feed can be submitted. Meaning, you can submit your del.icio.us feed, Flickr feed, or whatever feed you can think of. There were a few things that I think it could improve on, but for the most part, I really liked it. I would like to see a button or link in user profiles that will let us easily add any member to our friends list. I also think that pages should display more stories then it does now. Currently, it shows 6 stories, but I think maybe 10 or so would be better. Lastly, I think it would be great to include user comments to the stories making it a more social service. Other then that, the service works great (besides the marking of badges in Firefox) and I have found it very enjoyable so far. I’d like to know what you think about FeedButler, being how stories are fed automatically and not by the users.

View FeedButler - Serving the News (via Library Clips).

Update (1/29): First, sorry for the mixup with the address to this post as some feed readers had picked up the wrong address pointing to an invalid page. Secondly, the creator of FeedButler has gotten back to me and has fixed the mark error in Firefox and has also increased the number of articles displayed on a page. Love it. Great work!

Blogbeat is a new blog statistic tracking service that has just recently opened its doors to the public and seems quiet promising. I have been beta testing Blogbeat for a few weeks now and have been monitoring the many revisions the developers have been making to the service and everytime it gets better and better. Blogbeat is not your normal statistic tracking service, such as Google Analytics, but leans more toward blog statistics with simplistic monitoring, as does MeasureMap (Review), which is still in private beta. Blogbeat provides all of the basic statistics including visitors, referrers, search engines, browsers, etc.., but also has great post detail stats, RSS statistics (for Feedburner), comment tracking, outgoing links, and more. It is not usual that I write about commercial services, here at Solution Watch, but I feel Blogbeat is well worth the money and is also worth a look by anyone interested because of its painless 30 day free trial.

Throughout my beta testing of Blogbeat, I have seen three different interfaces, all great. But the final interface for their release is the best yet and makes viewing statistics very simple for the user. Lets take a few steps back and start fresh with setting up Blogbeat. Blogbeat is remotely hosted, meaning that you do not need to install anything on your server to get it running. All you need to do is place a small snippet of Javascript in the footer of your blog and start to watch the data flow in. I setup Blogbeat on Solution Watch and it really only took a matter of seconds to get data coming in. In my account settings, I selected WordPress as my blogging platform and filled in my RSS feed, which also ties into your statistics. Blogbeat then automatically determines how to parse your blog correctly depending on the blogging platform you selected. Very simple and that is really all there is to it.

Once you get Blogbeat’s snippet inserted into your blog, log into Blogbeat and lets take a look at your interface. The first page you will see is the Blog Summary page that gives a basic overview of your statistics for the day. As you can see, everything is very nicely layed out, easy going colors, big typeface for easy reading, graphs, and percentages. First thing to take note of is the top bar. You will see your website name and description (taken from the RSS feed you provided, I am assuming) along with some overall totals. The overall totals provided includes monthly visitors, monthly pageviews, feed subscribers (via Feedburner - More on this later.), and average views per visitor. This bar is global throughout every page of Blogbeat making it easy for you to get an idea of totals from any page. The next feature I want to mention is the date selection. The date selection allows you to set a date range for the statistics shown throughout Blogbeat. If you are interested in today, yesterday, or maybe last months statistics, you can still narrow down on that data. It is not as indepth as MeasureMap when it comes to date selection, but definitely gets the job done. The main page of Blogbeat will also include a list of recent visitors and a graph on the right for a visual of your blogs traffic.

I mentioned that Blogbeat is not your average statistics tracking service. One feature that differentiates Blogbeat from the crowd is how it can drill down into every last drop of information, starting from the beginning. For example, on the main page you will see the list of recent visitors. Each recent visitor block includes a link to the post they viewed from your blog, where they came from, and even a permanent link to the visitor themselves (more on this later). Here is where the drilling down comes in. When you click on the blog post they viewed, it wont direct you to the actual post but rather details for that individual post (which you can see in the above screenshot). Each post has its own individual statistics page including a graph, overview of totals, recent activity (visits), top referrers, and top search terms. Not only that but it also tracks how many comments have been made to that post, which I am told is possible because of “magic,” according to the creator (haha). This is very neat and very helpful because I love being able to track activity on individual posts from my site. Helps me see what my visitors have interest in so I can hopefully write about services more in favor of my visitors. One last feature that I want to mention that you may find useful is the way that referrers are presented. Not only is the address presented, but also the paragraph that your link was in from the referring site. This is great because if I get a referrer, I can see what the site was talking about and why it linked to me without even having to view it. Small features such as that make big differences. Now looking at a bigger scope, you can also drill down into statistics for visitors, outgoing links, referrers, search engines, and even individual keywords themselves!

Blogbeat also has separate overview pages for your visitors themselves. Not just an overview of the visitors combined, but every individual user. This is something that I find very interesting and useful. I wonder why other services haven’t done this yet. When you go to the visitors section of Blogbeat, you will see a list of your recent visitors by IP Address. Click on the IP Address and you will be directed to that individuals overview page. You get some basic information, such as browser type, resolution, etc., but what more interests me was that it also grabs geographical information via the IP address of the visitor that can give you a basic idea of where the visitor is from. Even more, you can also see how many visits the viewer has come to your site. For example, I can see a visitor came to my site once yesterday and two times today. This is all great that I can view this information, but how can I keep track of this visitor? Well, tag the visitor. This is something I have yet to see in any statistical service and found it an excellent idea. You can actually tag any visitor that comes to your site so when viewing the overall visitors page, you can see users titled by there tag rather then IP address, making it easier for you to keep track of them. To test this out, I visited my site and tagged my visit as “self.” Now, every time I visit my site, Blogbeat will show me in the visitor log as “self.” I now can easily find myself and view my stats of my activity to get an idea of how often I actually visit my own site! Of course, ideally you would use it to track your visitors, not yourself… but just for testing reason, I tested it on me. I do love the tagging functionality and it makes it very easy for you to track a visitors activity, but one thing comes to mind that I don’t see. A tag cloud or a list of tags used. You can tag a visitor, but once you tag them, you can only pick them out of the visitor overview page when they visit your site again. If there was a tag cloud, it would act as a filter of the visitor overview page allowing you to see only recent activity from visitors associated with the tag they are tagged with. I’ve been tagging some of my known frequent visitors as “frequent” and it would be really cool if I can click on a tag to view statistics for that tag only. But other then that, I absolutely love the idea and find it very useful.

I have spoken to the developer of Blogbeat and have been told that there are more features on its way. Specifically, he had mentioned more Feedburner integration and a Blogbeat API that is in the works. Let me talk about the Feedburner integration for a minute. This is also a unique feature that I have not seen utilized in other statistic tracking services. In the settings of your Blogbeat account, you can optionally fill in your Feedburner username. When you do fill in the username, it can provide you with your subscribed circulation on the top bar, as you see in the screenshots and as of right now that is all. But from previous versions during my testing of Blogbeat, there were 7 and 30 day RSS traffic vs blog traffic graphs as well that you can view. From the sounds of it, this will be included again into the service soon, I hope. As for the API, it appears that the API will allow you to include lists of most popular posts and popular referrers in your blog itself for your visitors to see. Very cool.

There are a few minor adjustments that I would make, and I have been helping the developer out with my ideas and opinions as I’ve been testing. As I have said, above, I would love to select tags on the visitor overview page to filter the visitors displayed. I also personally think that the logged in session is too short. It seems like every time I leave, I have to log back in again. I would like the session to last maybe at a days time if at all possible so I don’t need to login all the time. Lastly, I like the referrals page, but the links to the referrer goes to the detailed stats page for that individual link. I would love to have an icon on the side of this link that would allow me to open the referrer up in a new window. Other than that, everything is great. The basic features of Blogbeat has been covered and I really do love the service. Will I pay for it? Yes. The prices are cheap and I really do value the statistics that it provides. Even if you don’t want to pay for the service, give it a try with its 30 day free trial just to get a feel for it. Great work, Jeff! I love it.

View Blogbeat - Real Time Blog Analytics.

JellyBarn is a new service that aims to help strengthen your online presence by creating free and private photo sharing communities for friends and family. The service is currently in an invite only beta, but I have luckily been given the opportunity to test it. JellyBarn is a very feature-rich photo sharing service that lets you create communities through the JellyBarn website or through your own site with the use of their commercial API. I was also surprised to see an extensive use of Flash rather then a technology like Ajax. But after seeing the features that JellyBarn offers, which I was very impressed by, it is clear why Flash was the best platform for their service. Lets take a look.

Above is a screenshot of the JellyBarn interface in which you will be using for your photo communities (note: the screenshot was compressed in filesize resulting in worse quality, but the main format is there). The first page you are directed to when logging in is your profile page that you will find your photos, albums, your profile, and of course, tagging for the photos. One thing that you will notice is that the interface isn’t only Flash, but also HTML, which allows for a more flexible environment. Even though a technology like Ajax isn’t used, the functionality is very much similar when combining Flash with a little Javascript resulting in the same, real-time, type of feeling. To interact with your photo community, you can upload photos, save contacts and create groups, email photos, create projects, manage events, and even maintain an online journal.

The first thing that I wanted to do was to upload some of my photos that I have taken. I went into the photos section and went to upload. I was expecting a basic form that you can upload multiple photos with, but I was definitely wrong, in a good way. I was very impressed with all of the uploading options that you are given. You can upload using a basic form, Java Applet (above screenshot), JellyBarn Uploader application (Windows/Mac), and according to the profile page, you can send photos via email and even through your cell phone if you enter your phone number. As you can tell, there are plenty of options are available. I used the basic upload form first which went through nicely and allowed me to tag and add descriptions to all the photos I uploaded. I also tested the Java uploader which actually makes an open dialog, much like how your computer works, that also has a drag and drop upload functionality.

Now that I have some photos uploaded, it is time to have some fun with some of JellyBarn’s features. My favorite section of JellyBarn is the projects section. The projects section lets you actually create small projects with your photos, such as DVD Movies (actually slideshows), Fun Cards (postcards), and photo books. This is where the Flash approach to the service really comes in handy. In the above screenshot, you will see a Photo Book Project. You can create a cover page, add as many pages as you want, add photos using drag and drop, resize photos, add text, and change colors. It also uses a nice page turning transition when going through the pages. Another project that I liked was the DVD project, which is really a more advanced slideshow. Much like Microsoft PowerPoint, you create slides and organize them. You can create slides with titles, smooth zoom in/out motions, durations (time on an individual slide), and even background music from their music collection (including rock, classical, r&b, jazz, etc.). Once you are done creating your projects, you can then share them with your community and send them via email.

JellyBarn is an excellent service to create a private photo sharing community. To get a community started, you need to go to the people section, add some contacts. You will then be able to see the profiles of your contacts as well as recent photos from each contact. You will also now see recent photos from your community along with community tags in the photos section of JellyBarn, much like other photo sharing services. But my favorite feature is sharing with contacts. When you choose to share with a contact, you will get directed to a page with your library and your contacts library. You can then drag and drop your contacts photos into your library and your photos into your contacts library. So, for example, if your friend had a party and knows you have some photos from it, you can then add your photos of the party into your friends party album in a matter of seconds. Love the sharing feature.

Overall, JellyBarn works excellent for creating your own photo sharing communities for friends and family. You can manage photos, contacts, projects, events, and even journals. JellyBarn still has some ways to go and is currently in invite only beta, but from what I can see, it is a great addition to the growing list of photo sharing services.

View JellyBarn - Building Photo Sharing Communities.

Google has just released the new Google Video Store tonight, what the Google Video Blog calls, “the first open video marketplace.” Along with the addition of paid content, Google has also added more formats for downloading of videos. As usual, Google makes everything extremely simple for the user. You can easily find and purchase video for sale and find popular videos. I was also impressed to see Google providing download formats for Apple’s iPod Video and Sony’s PSP, along with regular downloading for Windows and Macintosh with the use of the Google Video Player.

Google now displays videos from the Video Store on the top of Google Video followed by popular and random videos. You can find videos from many sources, such as CBS shows, NBA, and Sony BMG including videos for popular shows: CSI, Survivor, NCIS, Amazing Race and Classics Including I Love Lucy, The Brady Bunch, and Twilight Zone. Google has also managed to get NBA to put their current season games on the web for the first time. There are also many more providers and source of paid content that Google will be using which are stated in Google’s press release, “Google to Launch Video Marketplace.” So lets get down to business. How much are you going to be paying for these videos? The CBS Shows seem to be selling at $1.99 per video, which really is quite small of a price. I have seen prices ranging anywhere from $0.99 cents to $10.00 dollars. You will also see that some videos don’t have a buy button, but rather a Day Pass button. Purchasing a video under Day Pass will allow you to download the video and have access to it for only 24 hours and can only be viewed while being online, which is reasonable.

Searching for videos is simple and there are some advanced methods you can use. The most basic one is limiting your search to titles. Simple put, “Title: ” in front of any title of any video and search. Google also provides some filtering options (above screenshot) for filtering videos for sale, for free, or by the length of the video.

And what about purchasing the videos? Purchasing is done directly through Google Video Store and you are not directed to any external sites. You do need a Google Account to purchase videos and if you do, you will just need to enter your payment information for the first time of making a purchase. Google even has a new Purchased Videos page so you can track the videos you have purchased.

Update: You can view some more Video Providers from the Official Google Blog.