Lens Harbor

Found something interesting when looking at lens stats for one of my bottom dwellers recently. The lens was created in January, 2009. I had an idea, built the lens and made a couple edits through January. Then did nothing with it. No promotion, no updates, nothing, and it got zero traffic for months.

You can see the effect of all this inactivity on lensrank by looking at the smooth curve between section A (when I updated the lens) and section B in the screen shot below. That’s the lensrank algorithm at work, steadily lowering my lensrank over time. It’s very graceful, actually.

Then in April the lens got its first visitor and lensrank soared about 74,000 spots. It got another hit or two into May which helped it tread water for a while. Then the rank dropped, the effect of all that traffic had expired.

But look at the right hand part of section B on the chart. Instead of going back to the same point it was at before the visits, the lensrank dropped further. It went all the way down to the point on the curve where it would’ve been if no one had visited the lens. Connect the lines under the traffic blips and you’ll still see that same graceful curve in action.

This pattern repeats in section C on the chart when the lens had brief periods of traffic in June and July. There were no clickouts, ratings or interaction with polls or guestbooks for the lens during the chart’s time period so we can eliminate those as variables.

What does this mean?
1. The effect of traffic visits are short lived. Once that effect is over the lensrank returns to where it would’ve been if the traffic never existed.

2. Lens updates matter. No surprise here, but notice in section A that lensrank got a bump from my updates and continued the curve from that new higher point. It didn’t revert back to the previous curve like it did for traffic. Or maybe it does revert back but at a much slower rate.

For the record, I’m not trying to solve the lensrank code. The behavior I’ve casually observed over 3 years is mostly consistent with what I’d expect from a ranking algorithm. Even so, I was intrigued at seeing such a clean curve.

Now it’s time to get that lens out of the cellar…

Woohoo! This week the poll on my lens about the online game Fallen Sword got its one thousandth vote! That’s way more votes than any other lens poll I have.

It didn’t happen overnight, the lens will be 2 years old in a few weeks, but it’s cool to see a poll get that much interest. It’s also good to know people read down the lens at least as far as the poll module. Here’s a screen shot…

One thing that I think helped get this much participation (other than traffic) was offering more than 2 choices. When I see a poll where the only options are “It’s Great” and “It Sucks”, I’ll usually pass if my opinion isn’t at either extreme. But if there are some more moderate options to choose, I’ll probably vote.

Look at the results above…40% of the votes were for the middle three options. That’s 400 votes that might not have been cast if the only options were “Awesome” and “Complete Rubbish”.

Like others, my lenses get a variety of guestbook comments.  Unfortunately some of them aren’t lens worthy…spam, profanity or flaming other commenters mostly…so they don’t get approved.

Years ago, when Squidoo rolled out the Guestbook module, I chose to keep any comments that I didn’t approve in pending status as a record of what had been submitted.  Yeah, I can be a pack rat…hate to throw stuff away in case it has a use someday.   And I like to keep stats on things.

What use could keeping unapproved comments around have? Entertainment value mostly.  It’s funny sometimes to scroll through and see the lame spam attempts.  But the annoyance of having to scroll through them every time I want to approve a comment now outweighs any entertainment value.

I just counted and my dashboard shows a total of 73 unapproved comments dating back to June, 2007.  40 of them are from other lensmasters, the rest from anonymous visitors.  I’m tempted to keep the ones from other lensmasters because I have used those to decide whether to ban someone from commenting if they continually post spam…but that wouldn’t reduce the scrolling issue much.

So I’m clearing out the bilge and getting rid of these worthless relics.

Does anyone else keep unapproved comments around…or do you toss them immediately?

(Rereading this post reminded me of the AT&T wireless commercials about the unused rollover minutes.)

The new eBay royalty stats are awesome! Someone bought a $200 golf club after clicking through to eBay from one of my lenses. The best part? I don’t have any golf clubs listed…it’s not even a golf related lens. The most expensive item in that eBay module is less than $10. You never know what people will buy after clicking through to Amazon and eBay from your lens…but it sure is fun finding out.

I do wish the Amazon and eBay stats would show the commission for each order.

Title credit: The Advertising Slogan Generator