Archive for the ‘web-statistics’ tag
The Stoller Coaster
My last day at Oregon State University is going to be September 30th. I’ve been an academic advisor and web coordinator for the College of Health and Human Sciences (HHS) since 2007. It’s been a transformative experience. The advising team, college and university leadership, peer advisors, and my advisees have taught me so much. It has been a terrific adventure!
Speaking of adventures, you may be wondering what I’m going to be doing or where I am going…
When the “Blogger hits the big time” profile came out, I had already been thinking about my career, my future, and what I wanted to do:
During the day, Eric Stoller is busy advising students in the College of Health and Human Sciences and working on web projects for the college. In the evenings and on weekends, he’s juggling everything from consulting projects to blogging to chatting with his 1,900+ Twitter followers.
“Downtime? What’s that?” he laughs.
And these days, he’s added another job to that list of tasks, as a paid blogger for the highly popular academic website, Inside Higher Ed. As one of 13 regular bloggers for the site, Stoller has begun writing at least two blog posts per week, focused on student affairs and technology.
Working as an academic advisor / web coordinator during the day and engaging in numerous consulting / speaking engagements in the evenings and/or during my vacations has made my life feel like a roller coaster — twists, turns, dips, spins, etc…hence, the “Stoller Coaster.”
I have decided that I am going to focus my energies on my consulting/writing/speaking projects.
- I plan on attending Educause in October to promote my new Inside Higher Ed blog: Student Affairs and Technology.
- I will be participating via Skype in a technology and advising session at the NACADA Annual Conference.
- In November, I will be presenting a social media super session sponsored by Sodexo at the NACAS Annual Conference. In addition to my session, I am also going to be hosting small group consultations.
My consulting efforts are going to be focused on student affairs/higher education and technology:
- Social Media and Marketing
- Web Site Statistics
- Communication Plans
- Branding
- Search Engine Optimization
- Web Site Usability/Accessibility
- Higher Education Association Technology Development and Strategy
I am thrilled to start this new adventure. It’s going to be epic!
Credit for the “Stoller Coaster” – Conzen, 2010.
Student Affairs + Technology: IHE Recap
Career Services and Social Media: Todd really says it best 
@EricStoller If there is a single Student Affairs dept that could *pwn* social media it is career services.
Todd Sanders
tsand
Let’s shift some paradigms: Introducing my new blog at Inside Higher Ed.
Challenge and Tech Support: Student Affairs practitioners and Tech Support departments…please let us be admins.
Do you YouTube? Don’t forget to add captions: Would you build a new building without an elevator? Nope… Then why would you ever create videos without captions?
George Orwell, Web Stats, and Your Site Visitors: Student Affairs + Web Stats….Nerdvana 
Link spammer targets higher education sites
I received the following comment on my blog a couple weeks ago:
“Yeah blogging is really a great way to help people. Great job. I salute you for doing such a great job.
The comment felt like it was spam. The post that was commented on was almost a year old and the comment seemed like it was just a way for the commenter to get their link on a blog post on blogging and academic advising.
As most of you know, I am an avid web statistics aficionado. The same day that the spammy comment was submitted (I moderate all new comments) I noticed two inbound referral links from a couple of Google Docs spreadsheets. My concerns that the comment was from a spammer were confirmed. In fact, I had stumbled upon two link spam documents that had been left open for anyone to see. A SEO company known as “Virtual Assistant” (link is to the Better Business Bureau listing…I love the irony!) was waging a concerted link spam campaign and my site had been “selected” for one of their spam comments.
I quickly saved copies of the link spam documents.
2005 – 2008 Visits + Pageviews
I didn’t monitor my web stats in 2004 (shocker!), but here’s a snapshot of how my little blogging experiment has grown from 2005 to 2008:
Web Stats Addict (WSA)
It is public knowledge that I am a web stats addict. Web stats are a variable reward system that keep me coming back to check on my referrals, keyword searches, and recent visitor activity. I think Wendy is going to host a web stats intervention soon… Is anyone else hooked on their web stats?
More web stats goodness after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »
Technology and Student Affairs
iStudentAffairs.com: A social networking site for Student Affairs administrators. 661 people have already signed up. The site runs off of Ning. I’m not sure if I have the life space for another website, but the discussions on iStudentAffairs.com have been interesting.
Technology panel: I’ll be on a panel for Academic Advising + Web 2.0 at the regional NACADA conference in Vancouver in March. I guess I’ll be chiming in on anything to do with accessibility, blogging, wikis, web statistics, podcasting, rss, etc. I’m walking out if someone calls Facebook an “emerging technology.”
Academic Advising Wiki: I have convinced my colleagues that an internal knowledge base a.k.a. a wiki, would be highly beneficial for our office. I demoed an installation of MediaWiki (similar to the Oregon State University wiki) and hope to get it up and running next month. For more information on higher education and wikis, check out these videos on “21 days of Wiki Adoption“:
Web statistics
My addiction to web site statistics continues unabated…although is has been quite a while since I posted about my site’s web analytics.
Website traffic + Popular posts
The web site statistics for my presence in bloglandia have increased quite a bit since January 2007. Prior to September 2006 I was primarily blogging at my Oregon State University web account. I transitioned the OSU account over to ericstoller.com in September. Web statistics for September 2006 to January 2007 were fairly consistent: 2,000+ Unique Visits and about 4,000 Page Views.
Glacéau + Racist Voicemail Redux
A week ago I blogged about Glacéau’s racist voicemail message. Upon publishing the post, which included an audio recording of the voicemail, I received an interesting comment from Lauren.
Statcounters Anonymous
How many times have I checked today? It’s like a sickness. Statcounter.com is my home page for FireFox! I check my site statistics to see how many visits I’m getting on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. I have obsessive web statistics disorder. My dashboard in WordPress now has a menu item called “Reports.” The plugin, called WordPress Reports, utilizes my Google Analytics account and pulls information into the admin interface.
I love looking at referrals, recent keyword activity, and page views. I love “optimizing” for search engines. I have OWSD!
Go ahead, admit that you love it too.
Update: I forgot that I also have the “Live” plugin installed which lets me view my website activity in REAL TIME!!!
Update 2: Brownfemipower, Radem, Sage and VeganKid are also stats junkies
