We hope that some of our visitors noticed fancy rectangles at the left sidebar of our radars:

Google Conversation Element at AC Milan Radar

Those rectangles are Google Conversation Element. This element, powered by Google Friend Connect, lets our visitors post comments restricted to just our site or participate in a global conversation based on a topic of interest.

Wikipedia provides us with some insights on this innovative social product by Google:

Google Friend Connect is an online service by Google that allows users on the internet to connect with their friends on different websites.

Google Friend Connect is an Open Social application offered by Google that started in May 2008. Google Friend Connect main focus is to simplify the connection between social and non-social websites and standardize the handling and presentation of social applications and content..

..In May 2009, Google introduced a new feature called “Comment Translation” in Friend Connect. With this feature, comments left in any native language except English can be easily translated to English.

We created the Google Friend Connect/Conversation Element radar, which covers different aspects of using the product.

There is also an excellent Video Guide by Google walking you through the social service.

For now, we piloted Conversation Element for the Around World,  Sports and Members radars only, however, eventually we will roll out them across the whole site.

Many happy conversations to you!

Our regulars have probably noticed that, starting on the 7^th of this September, our site drastically changed its look and feel.

However, we didn’t rush with announcing these changes, as we were in an unofficial “beta” mode. We knew from our own, and from other experiences, that the site redesign could impact the site traffic, big time. And right we were! However, the whole story deserves another post and today we finally decided that there is no way of turning back to our old design.

There are a lot of new and exciting features for the site, such as:

• Web 2.0 look and feel for the site
• Two-column News Digest-style layout
• Top News, Articles, Videos and Blogs blocks
• Advanced filtering by source
• Enhanced navigation, registration and sponsorship workflows
• Easy-to-generate portable content (RSS feeds and Web widgets)
• “You may also check..” suggestions
• New user interface for our sponsors

and much, much more..

We are also working on new features for the site, and we will be delivering them quite often.

Stay tuned and enjoy our site!

Another update by mighty Google-nicknamed “Vince” swept through the Webosphere like a hurricane, despite all assurances by Google that Vince has been just a minor tweak. According to some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) pundits, the whole purpose of Vince was to bump up “big brands” in Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPs).

According to Google guru, Matt Cutts, that there had been a change, but that he wouldn’t nessecarily consider it an “update” but more of a “simple change”. Matt mentioned that it only affected a small number of queries, and that Google doesn’t really think of websites in terms of “brands”.  Instead, they were looking at factors such as:

- Trust
- Authority
- Reputation
- Pagerank

Matt also gave some advice- that webmasters should basically “do nothing”. We followed his advice and have not done anything other than create a radar dedicated to Vince.

However, since March 2009, we’ve noticed that when the Vince update has been implemented in North America that our Search Engine Rankings (SERs) bumped up for quite a few generic “head” keywords (as opposed to more specific and odd “long tail” keywords).

To illustrate it, we’ve attached keyword searches on Google that led to the site being listed in the SERPs, and the click through rates of such listings for August, 2009 collected through Google Webmaster Tools.

See for instance the sample of generic “head” keywords (1- and 2-word keyphrases), for which we have the top 20 Google Web Search rankings worldwide (in brackets, the total number of results returned by Google for the specific keyword):

kindle deals – 2 (12,000,000)
weels – 2 (286,000)
elken malaysia – 3 (94,600)
megapatch.info – 4 (1,030,000)
hotweels – 5 (1,810,000)
badmintonfreak.com – 5 (16,500)
megapatch – 5 (124,000)
elken – 6 (345,000)
musica de reggaton – 7 (3,620,000)
ginecomastia masculina – 7 (84,200)
mathletics games – 7 (22,600)
mathletics australia – 7 (775,000)
liga pilipinas – 7 (223,000)
livia andrade – 7 (228,000)
jogos ao vivo – 8 (6,100,000)
ricky pointing – 8 (1,990,000)
jogo ao vivo – 8 (6,950,000)
akinator.fr – 9 (112,000)
lojas americans – 9 (1,220,000)
tvfilia – 9 (15,200)
dorismar xxx – 9 (1,580,000)
testes de qi – 9 (2,880,000)
descagar msn – 9 (9,940,000)
wild apricot – 9 (627,000)
lojas americanas – 9 (2,170,000)
bros 2009 – 10 (37,000,000)
danier leather – 10 (68,500)
virtual rugby – 10 (793,000)
hot weels – 10 (29,200,000)
voleibol no brasil – 10 (1,190,000)
yingo 2009 – 10 (874,000)
jogo di futebol – 10 (1,510,000)
diablo 2 latino – 10 (625,000)
danier – 10 (149,000)
www.komplett.no – 10 (19,700,000)
www.youtub.com – 10 (467,000,000)
affordable vegas – 11 (5,280,000)
nova bros – 11 (2,610,000)
dot baires – 11 (4,370,000)
pamela alfaro – 12 (1,350,000)
www.youtobe.com – 12 (2,240,000,000)
dewi persik – 13 (863,000)
kiki fatmala – 13 (3,730,000)
manohara pinot – 13 (743,000)
aura kasih – 14 (6,600,000)
tapetes de barbante – 14 (107,000)
www.yutube.com – 14 (462,000,000)
aurakasih – 15 (1,200,000)
tapete em barbante – 15 (93,700)
ungu – 17 (4,900,000) 

A majority of the above one and two-word keyphrases represent names of Radars posted on our site.

Does it make us a “Big Brand”? Hardly so. We just aggregate the best Web sources on any specific subject. Therefore, Google ranks our Radar Pages so high. We’ve never spent a penny for SEO, per se. We are still naive to think that SERPs by Google should reflect relevance of Web pages. It is working for us, for now, and Vince has just reinforced our naïveté.

As we’ve mentioned in our previous post; our site, RadarFarms, has been launched in June, 2006 and it is a whole eternity for the Internet age. Since then we went from zero traffic to over one million visits a year.

RadarFarms Yearly Visitors Overview by Google Analytics

While one could argue that it is not a big deal to cite the phenomenal success the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Kosmix and YouTube, we are still proud of our milestone because we know how it has been achieved.

We’ve never had any funding from VCs or angel investors alike and the whole venture is, really, a moonlighting project by a core group of people who are looking for better ways to explore the Internet and how to unleash its unlimited powers.

OK – enough of the self-praising! Let’s get down to, relatively objective, evaluations by Website ranking services.

One of them, Quantcast, just rated our site as 99, 913 and, thus, we’ve made it to the top 100,000 sites rated by the web rating agency.

RadarFarms Dashboard by Quantcast

The ranking is particularly important to us since Quantcast directly measures our traffic in the USA and globally unlike its major competitor, Alexa, which ranks the sites by traffic passing through its proprietary toolbar and using some Internet visitor panels.

Some industry pundits consider Quantcast superior to other “for-fee” and free web ranking services. Anyhow, it is not up to us to judge who is better. We just figure that if the total number of Internet sites exceeds 182 millions and we are in the top 0.1% sites by all the three major ranking services (Alexa and Compete rank our site, at the moment of writing this post; as 125,493 and 123,303, respectively), we must be doing something right!

Our site has been launched on June 1, 2006 and, thus, we are already 2.5 years old. For the World Wide Web, it is quite a while. We started slowly but gained some traction lately.

As a result, we made to the top 200,000 sites by Alexa:

Some people may say that it is not the big deal and they may have a point. However, we are still proud because, according to the study by Netcraft, there were over 182 mln web sites and blogs on the Web in October, 2008. Assuming that the Alexa rankings are more or less correct (there is a lot of controversy the way Alexa is ranking the sites), we are close to the top 1% of the web sites.

Actually as of January 16, 2008, we are officially ranked by Alexa as 188, 147. However, Alexa is usually late with updating its own ranks and some sites using Alexa API are more up-to-date with the Alex ranks. Our site profile by Quarkbase indicates that our rank is 177,001. Therefore, we are actually in the top 1% of the Web.

Alexa also provides ranks by countries and we are in the top 25,000 sites for South Africa, in the top 30,000 sites for Canada, in the top 35,000 sites for Argentina and Brazil and in the top 40,000 sites for Indonesia. We are also very close to making the top 100,000 for the United States (we are ranked as 113,421):

Quantcast, another free Web rating agency and major Alexa competitor, ranked us in December, 2008 as 59,920 in terms of the US traffic:

So, we are doing quite well stateside too. If you would like to learn more about the different free Web rating agencies, you could visit our radar covering the subject.

Coolmediaplacement.com – Internet Advertising Guide, providing information and resources for Internet advertising and web traffic, with the Alexa traffic rank of 40,916 (and in top 5,000 sites in Canada and Australia), placed our Tag Cloud widget accross its site.

The widget is created for the Online Advertising News, Blogs and Research radar and includes Tag Cloud:

We are certainly flatterred that the well-respected North Bay, Ontario-based new media outpost utilized our widget. Hopefully, the latest Online Advertising news, blog and research articles, refreshed three times a day, will enrich the site user experience and will bring the site owners some extra advertsing $$.

We noticed that Infolinks in-text ads show up in our content. That’s the way to monetize the Web widgets, in addition, to other known methods.

Our Web Widgets are for free for now, while website owners and bloggers. who will embed them into their own content, could make some money the same way as Coolmediaplacement.com did!

We are at RadarFarms.com feel very strongly about our flagship tool – RadarWizard. Using the tool, you can build News Radars (or RSS Mashups) – subject specific RSS-based information channels. They allow aggregating the Web articles, news, blog and message board’s posts, press releases, bids, newsgroup’s threads, images, audio and video.

We would like you – our members – to use the tool for all your information needs. However, we also realized that our News Radars could be used for your advertising needs.

Therefore, we launched a new promotional campaign – Create Radar, Place Free Ad Link!. Just use our registration form to provide us with your ad link URL and description and go ahead – create up to five (5) radars and we place your ad link on the radars you created.

The recently created Radar Wizard tutorial will assist you with creating the radars.

We would also like to remind that you we are still running another campaign – Register with Us and We Will Create a Radar for You!

We reduced our Advertising Rates making them extremely competitive!

See our new rates at Advertise at Radarfarms and Sponsor Registration at RadarFarms pages.

There are several samples we could bring up to prove our competiveness:

1. If you were to place your text link at our site (including all pages), your Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM) would be just no more than $0.43US

2. If you are an angel or venture capitalist and looking to attract Web 2.0 companies, you could sponsor our Web 2.0 Radars group (which currently includes twenty five radars). It will cost you just up to $1.17CPM for your text link

3. If you are interested in advertising your services to investors into emerging Real Estate markets (Central America and Eastern Europe), advertise our Real Estate group of radars at cost of $0.78 per thousand impressions

4. You could sponsor any of individual radars at cost as little as $0.07 CPM (for a text link) or create new radars reflecting your market niche and attracting your target audience and place your banner or text link in there.

Our existing sponsors (see their links at 77Radars page) enjoy Click Through Rate (CTR) up to 4.7%, which is much higher than the industry average CTR of 0.5%. We explain the pattern by the power of Long Tail Aggregation Advertising.

If you are US-based advertiser, you could see our Advertising Profile estimated by Quantcast.

If you have any questions, please contact us at solutions@radarfarms.com and we will give you the best service we can!

Being dedicated to improving our member’s experience and quality of News Radars, we upgraded our Radar Wizard and added the following sources:

• MSN News
• Squidoo
• Stumbleupon
• Wikipedia

We also created a video tutorial for the tool placed just below the Radar Wizard icon:

The tutorial is also accessible from our Radar Wizard page and from YouTube.

To see high resolution version of the Radar Wizard tutorial, click here.

We are always trying our best to enrich your user experience at RadarFarms. Therefore, we would like to introduce several new features we just implemented at our site.

From now on, the site visitors will be able to filter the Radar items by type:

The visitors could filter the Radar items by the following filters:

• Web – Web site content
• News
• Blogs
• Video
• Forums – user generated content platforms, such as, forums, Discussion groups, answer boards and others
• Bids from eBay
• Articles from leading academic, industry and general interest publications

See, for instance, what Blogs and Video filters bring for Nica Real Estate – our most popular Real Estate radar:

We also introduced a new version of Radar Wizard – our toll, which allows creating Radars for virtually any imaganable subject in thirty seconds for any visitor regadless of her/his technical skills.

We added three new sources:

• MySpace
• RSSMicro – best RSS Feed search engine
• Torrents – from one of the best Torrent Search Engine – Torrentz

In addition, if you would like to make your Radar to non-viewable for others, just check Non-Viewable Radar checkbox:

If you still find Radar Wizard a bit initimidating , just register and we will create a Radar for you!