Take a 47 second ride around the world via Google Earth and LinkedIn. If you ever doubted the increasing power of professional social media, watch this short video recorded at 3:47 pm Central Standard Time in the USA on Wednesday, November 10th. You may be amazed to see all the people who were joining LinkedIn listed by name, job title and location. Given the time of day, it was quite late in Europe, and Asia was asleep. You'll see that there were quite a few night owls awake on the other side of the the Pacific and Atlantic from North America! My recording was created using NewIn from LinkedIn Labs.

The short video should also help you understand why I am so high on LinkedIn. The demographics contained in their database is amazing. See my post about Signals which explains with annotated screenshots how you can use this power to listen to the conversation …

I've included both a screenshot, and my 47 second video tour! Clicking upon this link will take you to Vimeo where it is easier to read each new LinkedIn member's name and details than in the embedded video given below

47 Seconds of LinkedIn via GoogleEarth from Rich Hoeg on Vimeo.

Last weekend I blogged about mouse movement analytics. As opposed to traditional web analytics which just measure your web traffic, Clicktale actually records the movement of your visitor's mouse as it interacts with your web site content (Clicktale is available without charge for smaller web sites like my own).

For instance, where do people on your site …

• move their mouse (even if they don't click)
• hover with their mouse (i.e. pause and reflect)
• actually click with their mouse

In my earlier post I promised some results, and shown below is an initial heat map for one page on my site, Engineering Learning. 

Although the numbers of visits reflected in the heat map is not yet statistically significant, the data is already making me wonder if I need to take a different approach to my right hand column content. Other than my RSS feed, there is almost no mouse movement in the right column. Darker "fire colors" in the red spectrum indicate strong movement; colder "blue colors" indicate lesser movement density.

Click for an expanded view.

I'm nerding out on a Saturday morning before the sun comes up. The Deeps waterfall is roaring from all the rain and snow this week. In an hour or so, I'll go trail running, but in the meantime I just installed ClickTale on NorthstarNerd.Org. I'll post my initial results later next week. This service appears to be real cool, not just measuring web analytics, but recording how visitors interact with my web site. In other words, I'll get mouse movement heat maps (where people physically move, hover, and click with their mouse on my web site) and other reports that show how folks interact with my content. Stay tuned.