It has been a slow blogging week — sorry I have not written anything here for the paste week. Regular readers should know where all the new bargains are posted anyway. Personally I have also been spending more time running the OzBargain site than actual blogging here. I am a software developer after all and I actually enjoy coding and running a website more than bargain hunting (horror! horror!) So let me use this opportunity to update what has been happening there which I launched almost 11 months ago.

Traffic has been growing

IMG >> WORD * 1000 (A picture is worth a thousand words)

Looks like the traffic has been moving up each month since the start of the year. As of August, there were 58,000 visits and 180,000 page views. Not too bad for a website that is only 35MB on disk and used only 6GB traffic last month. Here are more interesting statistics:

• 91% of visitors are from Australia, which is obvious.
• 47.11% of visitors use Internet Explorer, and 46.32% use Firefox. It has been a close match, although there have been more Firefox users than IE users in all previous months.
• Firefox users spend on average 30 seconds more on OzBargain than Internet Explorer users.
• There have been 66 visits using Playstation 3, 4 visits using Nintendo Wii and 1 visits using Playstation Portable. Haven’t recorded anything against Xbox 360 yet. Oh, 1 visit using IRIX as well. Any Silicon Graphics deal out there? :)
• Most popular keyword people used on search engines to find OzBargain is… ozbargain! Looks like people are too lazy to type in the full URL or even bookmark the site, and prefer to just search for “ozbargain” on Google.
• Biggest referrer sites have been Whirlpool forums and OCAU forums, but I don’t even post there! Hey guys! Don’t spam those forums too hard :)

Thank you guys for supporting the growth of OzBargain!

We are still in BETA

Almost 11 months later and we are still in beta, as I am still constantly adding more features to OzBargain.com.au. The site might be a bit flaky every now and then so please excuse me and help me ironing out the bugs (while I am introducing more along the way :)

A few new features have been added over the past few weeks.

OzBargain Live was implemented for those who do not want to miss out any action happening at OzBargain. It is inspired by (read: idea stolen from) Digg Spy and Pligg Live but at a much slower pace. Basically it polls the server every minute looking for new deals and comments posted, and what have been voted, and by whom. It listed down all the “actions” in reverse chronological order.

If you are a developer, you can also grab the list of last 30 “actions” in JSON format here. You can use it to build more interesting tools for your own website or a desktop app. A super-mega bargain website mash up, or a OzBargain live action widget?

Top 150 OzBargain Tags is a tag cloud showing the weight of the tags proportional to their font size. What is a “tag”? It is a text string you can associate with a deal/coupon using a categorisation method called folksonomy. What is “Folksonomy”? According to Wikipedia:

Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging , social classification, social indexing, social tagging, and other names) is the practise and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize Content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing metadata is not only generated by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.

Make sense? No? Actually in the context of social classification, it only really works if there is a large number of participants tagging the same resource, which is not what OzBargain does (only the content creator, i.e. the one who posted the deal, can tag). However I think tagging is just something that you ought to have in the Web 2.0 era (see this Dilbert cartoon), provided that you can define what “Web 2.0” is :)

Deals/coupons by merchant’s URL domain is also a new feature that has been added over the last couple of weeks. It is actually an easier way to see all the offers from a particular merchant, assumes that they all have the same domain in URL (that’s why I am quite particular about putting in the right URL when you submit a deal).

Formation of URL is simple:

http://www.ozbargain.com.au/deals/<domain>

For example, if you want to check all the deals submitted to OzBargain that are related to Deals Direct, you use the following URL:

http://www.ozbargain.com.au/deals/dealsdirect.com.au

Simple, huh?! Now it is easy to find out deals offered by OO.com.au, Dell, dStore and ShoppingSquare. Go ahead and try the rest.

You can also append /feed at the end of merchant domain URL and it instantly becomes an RSS feed. Tracking Dell deals with FeedDaemon? No problem!

There are other tweaks here and there which I can’t remember, but the fact is, OzBargain is probably going to stay in Beta for a while. I have also been experimenting an alternate method to access the deals posted at OzBargain — and hopefully I’ll reveal it next week. Stay tuned!

Bad thing about having a contact form

The easiest way to contact me is use the Contact Form here (or at OzBargain). What those forms do is simply sending an email to me. Now I have all kinds of people contacting me this way. Some are very helpful — thank you to everyone who notified me about bugs. Some are spammy, which I won’t disclose the content here. Some are just plain silly.

Every week someone will use the contact form to ask me about the “products” that I am offering. Oh wait, I am not running a merchant website here — I am running a social bargain website and I do not physically sell anything! However it seems that people don’t really get the idea. They put in the product name into Google. Somehow they found OzBargain or this blog. Then they will use the contact form to ask:

• “Can you tell me how much does it cost to connect to your VoIP service?”
• “My camera broke and can you tell me how much does it cost to repair it, and where I can send it to?”
• “I am interested in your product. Please call me on this number <an Australian mobile number<“
• “…”

I was trying to explain the situation for the first few enquiries, but after a while I just can’t be bothered. Any suggestion on stopping people making silly enquiries?