Reid Dossinger

I took a little time to browse through the AddThis documentation to see if there was any feature I was missing, and it turns out there was something that I had just been wondering about: adding in Google Analytics code to the end of the URL when someone uses AddThis to share a page on your site.

There’s documentation on the AddThis site for adding URL parameters, but here’s how I modified it to incorporate the Analytics code. In the AddThis code where you call javascript that powers the widget (s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js), add this in:

<script type="text/javascript">
var addthis_share = 
{ url_transforms : 
{ add: { 
     utm_campaign: 'AddThis', 
     utm_source: '{{code}}', 
     utm_medium: 'share' } } }
<script>

The {{code}} will add in the service that was used to share (ie “delicious”, “googlereader”, etc) in a single word and in all lowercase letters.You’re just adding in the standard Google Analytics variables in place of the “name” and “favorite number” in the example. Of course, you could add in whatever parameters and values you want, but this works really well for GA, meaning you can now track traffic that comes from links shared through AddThis and create a custom segment for that campaign, meaning you can track just how far those AddThis links are reaching.It should also be noted that you can put all AddThis javascript in the head so that it doesn’t have to load more than once. See the “Optimize AddThis Script” secition at the bottom of this page.

I was thrilled today to see this article today calling for what I think it crucially necessary for Google Circles: a way for people to choose what content of different users that they see. The “follow” Circle is really useless without it, unless you’re following a person who ONLY talks about one subject publicly.

The way I think it should work is much like the way I have my different Twitter accounts set up: I have a personal account, which is just kind of a dumping ground for my random thoughts, including sports and politics; I have my professional account, where I talk mostly about tech, web services and business and is set up to be completely open, public and findable; and my music account. I mix up the content every now and then, getting personal on my professional and talking about music on my personal account, but I’ve found that the division works pretty well.

But it’s still three separate accounts, and while Tweetdeck makes it pretty easy to manage them all in one place, it’s still far from ideal. To let other people know that I even have the other accounts, I have to retweet something every now and then or send out a promo tweet on one or the other. What would be great (and this is what the author of that article proposes for Plus) is to be able to have a single account, but to specify which subject it goes in, and when people follow me, they select which content areas of mine that they want to see. They’re deciding for themselves, not me for them, which is guessing and exclusionary.

There’s two things that the article misses that I think are crucial to making this work. 

1. You’d have to be able to make certain content groups private (user has to get permission before seeing the content) and have the option to block people from seeing certain content groups.
2. You should be encouraged (by the process) to have a low number of content groups. I think that you should be able to create content groups and call them whatever you want, but if someone hauls off and makes 20-30 content groups, it could be confusing for the people choosing to follow you. I would have no more than 4-5 groups. 

When you get down to it, it’s making the basis of Google+ more like blogs than like Facebook. You’re creating content and defining it and then people can see the parts of it that they want to, opting into and out of the types of things you write rather than into you as a whole. And that makes a hell of a lot more sense than the ridiculous “real life social networks” theory that Circles is based on. 

I saw an interesting line chart recently that showed the number of telecommuters declining. The first thought is that this seems surprising. Technology is getting better and we can do more and more all the time on our mobile phones. Why would people be doing less telecommuting?

I’m lucky enough that I can work from home occasionally, and usually try to do so once a week. The conveniences are largely to my personal life: it instantly saves me at least an hour and a half of the day by cutting out my commute, I can start my work day earlier, my home computer is faster than the one I have at home, and I can get small household chores done. It’s really nice, a definite advantage, and I don’t feel that there’s any productivity loss.

But I can also say that there are definitely ways that telecommuting still doesn’t match the office experience. Here’s three ways:

Conference calls are still lacking and are no substitute for a conversation. I’ve said before that conference calls are a joke, but where even person-to-person video calls don’t match up is that there’s still no culture of casual conversations in the digital world; no equivalent of running into someone in the hall or stopping by their desk. Instant message has long been a pop-in kind of medium, but that hasn’t extended to video calls, and even IM can’t match the number of times the important conversations that start casually in the hallways.

Lack of adoption of centralized management and communication tools. There are tons of project management (ie Basecamp, etc) and communications (ie Yammer) tools around, but the workplace still operates around email, which is a highly exclusive (as opposed to inclusive) medium. Working from home often separates you from those projects that you aren’t directly involved with that you only hear because the people around you are involved. There are plenty of tools that could broadcast what’s going on in the company so that everyone would be informed not matter where they are, but in my experience, it’s extremely hard to get most people to adopt such tools.

You learn more by being around people. If you ask someone a question over email, you get the answer to that question. If you ask them when in person, you see the entire process as they walk you through it. We underestimate how much we learn, even on computers, by actually seeing it done, and no amount of screen sharing or video conferences can replace the amount you can learn by working through a problem with someone in person.

I know that some of the few readers of these posts work from home: what do you think? As nice and easy as working from home is, where do you think its weaknesses are? Or strengths?