juust ~ php oddities

Should I write a post about Mayday ? It half reminds me of the fairytale of the princess on the pea. Mayday is when Matt moved the pea slightly to the conservative right and all white hooded princesses made their bid for Drama Queen.

Personally I hope one day Google split social and business search, deprecate the entire web2.0 social linking and switch to real time traffic data as ranking algorithm for social search, and restore the peer reviewed web for business search with a stronger focus on local and regional delivery and consumer reviews as an alternative ranking mechanism.

Current rankings are most decided on the seo-sem effort of companies and don’t offer end user review on an efficient product list or regional index (aren’t we lucky we have Google Adwords to help our customers find our offers !). Sites like 4Square are closing in on delivering search results on local area venues
using the mobile web, which is an interesting development.

[added 3-6-10] is that just me or did I suddenly notice Google doing a Beta for Social Search yesterday ? basically based on its own profile data, and sites and linkdata from my webmaster tools account (I am not unconditionally happy about that).

The article about using Yahoo Pipes for Twitter ammo deserves an update. When I wrote it (june 2009), Google had not announced they would be listing Tweets on their frontpage.

I was curious if Google list tweets from an pipes account. The specific pipe does use Google News and other trusted news sources for it’s feed, so Tweets should rank high in relevance to the keyword, but I wasn’t sure Google allow automated accounts to hit the frontpage in Search.

I typed in “microfinance twitter” at Google Search and got this as result :

There she is : @NeoFinance, one of my accounts that runs on a Yahoo Pipe.

The account itself is small, 750 tweets, it follows 60 accounts, and has 125 followers, mostly microfinance related. No automated following scripts, just the pipe. I had it offline for a few weeks but restarted it last week.

Google do seem to consider Pipes-accounts acceptable.

I was going to put that online : how to get the pageviews out of the google analytics api, using simplexml and php. Google use three namespaces in the output file which make it less easy accessible, so here’s a quick sample of how to get your sites pageviews out of it :

the feed has three namespaces (atom, opensearch and dxp/analytics), a simple way is accessing the ENTRY tags (from the Atom namespace), in that tag is one DXP: line and that has the answer to the question.

<dxp:metric confidenceInterval=’0.0′ name=’ga:pageviews’ type=’integer’ value=’755′/>

Important is using the (string) typecast, normally simplexml returns a simplexml object, when you force a string type, it gives the actual metric ga:pageview value attribute as number.