A heat map is a graphical representation of data where the values taken by a variable in a two-dimensional map are represented as colors. A very similar presentation form is a tree map. The term is also used to mean its thematic application as a choropleth map.

Heat maps originated in 2D displays of the values in a data matrix. Larger values were represented by small dark gray or black squares (pixels) and smaller values by lighter squares. Sneath (1957) displayed the results of a cluster analysis by permuting the rows and the columns of
a matrix to place similar values near each other according to the clustering. Jacques Bertin used a similar representation to display data that conformed to a Guttman scale. The idea for joining cluster trees to the rows and columns of the data matrix originated with Robert Ling in 1973. Ling used overstruck printer characters to represent different shades of gray, one character-width per pixel. Leland Wilkinson developed the first computer program in 1994 (SYSTAT) to produce cluster heat maps with high-resolution color graphics. The Eisen et al. display shown in the figure is a replication of the earlier SYSTAT design.

There are several different kinds of heat map:

• Web heat maps have been used for displaying areas of a Web page most frequently scanned by visitors.
• Biology heat maps are typically used in molecular biology to represent the level of expression of many genes across a number of comparable samples (e.g. cells in different states, samples from different patients) as they are obtained from DNA microarrays.
• The tree map is a 2D hierarchical partitioning of data that visually resembles a heat map.
  A mosaic plot is a tiled heat map for representing a two-way or higher-way table of data. As with treemaps, the rectangular regions in a mosaic plot are hierarchically organized. The means that the regions are rectangles instead of squares. Friendly (1994) surveys the history and usage of this graph.

Ref.Wiki

So What’s a Heat Map and how it is useful for Web marketing?

Through years of research in web marketing, patterns have been seen in the ways that people not only navigate the web, but web sites and even web pages. All of this data was compiled by marketing firms and used to create a heat map.

Heat maps are charts that show us where most people look when they open a web site or page, by human instinct. The map displays regions colored yellow, orange and red – the darker the color, the more high-profile the spot is.

So if you are a web analyst/developer: simply look at a heat map before you design your next web site, plan to remodel your existing one, or are planning on remodeling your online advertising campaign, and make sure the ads are placed in the right “hot” areas!

Website Heat Maps

A heat map enables the website owner to determine what areas of a website the visitors find most interesting. It is best displayed visually.

Heat map image of Google

As you can see the more red the color, the greater the activity on that area of the website. Thus, for Google rankings the top 5 listings get a majority of the eye balls. You will also notice the red lines on the image, these represent the “fold,” the area above where you would have to scroll down to see more of the page.

Website Heat Maps with eye tracking

An eyetracking “heatmap” shows how much users looked at different parts of a Web page. Areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer fixations, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn’t attract any fixations.

Ever wondered from where on earth the short and smart URLs coming from, specilly while reading tweets on Twitter like social networking websites? And yes, It does makes sence to shorten your URLs when there is a limit set on the total number of characters for a tweet.

Twitter allows you to add a website URL up to 40 characters without any problem. Say I wanted to tweet “Check this! DigitalPercept has shared a new article today http://www.digitalpercept.com/2009/12/avatar-an-audio-visual-treat-with-3d-technology-and-a-story-told-from-the-heart/” this will show an error stating the number of “extra” characters. That means you need to shorten the text. Here you cannot link text in your tweet, thus you just add the URL and Twitter creates the link for you.

There are plenty of websites helping you to shorten the link. What all these websites do for you is, storing the URL provided by you on there server and providing you the short URL pointing to your URL. Quite smart idea.

Few websites providing this service:

http://bit.ly
http://tinyurl.com
http://lizzer.com

Firefox Addon:

TinyUrl Creator 1.0.5

Few desktop applications providing this service:

Twhirl

twhirl is a social software desktop client, based on the Adobe AIR platform.

Seesmic Desktop

TweetDeck alike features include the capability to monitor multiple feeds side-by-side in a similar fashion, create custom user lists, and post from multiple accounts while the application keeps track of which ones are which to keep duplicates at bay.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that is currently in public beta. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.

This will allow you to convert those long URL’s into Short tiny URLs.

Tag Cloud – Defination – What is a tag cloud?

A tag cloud is a stylized way of visually representing occurrences of words used to described tags. The most popular words are normally highlighted in a larger, bolder font. Visitors to a blog or site using a tag cloud, are able to easily see the most popular topics within the website by clicking on the respective tags.

If you are using the Wordpress Tag Cloud widget, you will come to know that you are unable to style it the way you like. If you call it directly from PHP in your template there are a few options you can use to control the look. The widgetized version does not give you access to options to control the style
neither you can style it with CSS. Not a problem! Now, You can fix the Tag Cloud Widget with this php function without touching the Wordpress core code.

HTML code of the default Tag Cloud widget:

< a href="http://www.digitalpercept.com/?tag=wordpress" class='tag-link-1' title='3 topic' style='font-size: 8pt;'>wordpress< /a>

The CLASS attribute is unique per tag and does not include any weighting information. And the STYLE tag hard-codes the font size based on weight but would override any CSS font-sizing we might have been able apply with the CLASS. Lets use the font-size information from the STYLE to determine the weight and
write a small filter function to rewrite the CLASS and STYLE declarations so we can use CSS to style the tag cloud.

Copy this filter function code block to your functions.php file in your active template.


// filter tag clould output so that it can be styled by CSS
function style_my_tag_cloud($tags)
{
$tags = preg_replace_callback("|(class='tag-link-[0-9]+)('.*?)(style='font-size: )([0-9]+)(pt;')|",
create_function(
'$match',
'$low=1; $high=5; $sz=($match[4]-8.0)/(22-8)*($high-$low)+$low; return "{$match[1]} tagsize-{$sz}{$match[2]}";'
),
$tags);
return $tags;
}


Hook the created php function into the rendering of the tag cloud widget

add_action('wp_tag_cloud', 'style_my_tag_cloud');

The function rewrites the tag links to look like this:

< a href="http://www.digitalpercept.com/?tag=wordpress" class='tag-link-1 tagsize-1' title='3 topic'>wordpress< /a>

The default tag cloud uses font-sizes from 8 to 22 points. The filter function uses a regular expression to extract that size and remap the default range (8-16) to the range defined by the $low and $high variables, for this example I used 1 though 5. An additional CLASS is added ‘tagsize-n’ where ‘n’ is 1-5 and then the STYLE attribute is removed. With the additional class you can now add something like this to your style.css and make the Tag Cloud look any way you’d like!


a.tagsize-1 { font-size: 8px; }
a.tagsize-2 { font-size: 10px; }
a.tagsize-3 { font-size: 12px; }
a.tagsize-4 { font-size: 14px; }
a.tagsize-5 { font-size: 16px; }


What is a Blog Network?

A blog network is a group of independent bloggers who have joined together under a particular name/banner for different purposes the most common being to grow a back link. It is also referred to as a blog farm. There are different types of blog networks all designed for a specific purpose. There are blog networks that are commercial in nature and others that are primarily about social networking and promoting blogs. Gawker Media and Weblogs Inc are considered to be two of the most famous and long running blog networks.

1 | My Opera

My Opera is the support community for the Opera web browser. More than 4,500+ new members join per day, and the site has more than 3.5 million members. In addition to being a support site for the Opera browser, My Opera is a social networking site, featured with blogs, photo albums, and more

One can do following things by joining this community:

Blogging

– Easy to use and fully customizable blogs

Photo sharing

– Share your photos online

Friends

– Keep up with friends, Facebook & Twitter integration

Opera

– Access to Opera Link and Opera Unite

It’s free

– Membership is completely free

Link: http://my.opera.com/community

2 | MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog is a social network for the blogger community that is based in part on interactions facilitated by a popular web widget that many members install on their blog. Bloggers sign up for free accounts on MyBlogLog and can initiate a blog community for one or more blogs they author. Other registered members can subscribe to these communities, effectively bookmarking them for future reading and sharing them with their own contacts.

Bloggers can then display widgets on their sites which show MyBlogLog online community members who have recently visited their page. These widgets also contain links to visiting members’ community pages, and are one way in which users connect with one another. All members can see certain basic information about how many people visit their blog, what links they clicked and where they come from. Members may also view more extensive information about traffic on their site for a monthly fee.

Link: http://www.mybloglog.com

Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs. By June 2008, Technorati indexes 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.The name Technorati is a blend of the words technology and literati, which invokes the notion of technological intelligence or intellectualism.

Technorati uses and contributes to open source software. Technorati has an active software developer community, many of them from open-source culture. Sifry is a major open-source advocate, and was a founder of LinuxCare and later of Wi-Fi access point software developer Sputnik. Technorati includes a public
developer’s wiki, where developers and contributors collaborate, also various open APIs.

Link: http://www.technorati.com

4 | Blog Catalog

Blog Catalog is the premiere social blog directory on the internet. Whether you’re looking to promote your own blog, find blogs on various topics, or connect with other bloggers this site is for you.

You can submit your Blog by going to the Submit A Blog page. Once your blog has been submitted, it will be reviewed by a member of the BlogCatalog Team. Generally the process takes no longer than 24 hours. However, depending upon the circumstances it can take up to 48 hours.

Link: http://www.blogcatalog.com

5 | LiveJournal

LiveJournal (often abbreviated LJ) is a virtual community where Internet users can keep a blog, journal or diary. LiveJournal is also the name of the free and open source server software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community. LiveJournal’s differences from other blogging sites include its WELL-like features of a self-contained community and some social networking features similar to other social networking sites.

Link: http://www.livejournal.com

Social networking and business networking websites are springing up on a daily basis at the moment, here at DigitalPercept we are compiling a list of the best social networking websites and the best business networking websites we have found. We are also offering the webmasters of networking sites to add their
information to DigitalPercept. If you would like to add your networking site please Contact us ensuring you mention DigitalPercept Social Networking in the subject line.

These are the DigitalPercept’s choice of Top 10 Social Networking websites of year 2010.

1 | twitter

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict
delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service itself costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Link: http://www.twitter.com

MySpace is a social networking website. Its headquarters are in Beverly Hills, California, US, where it shares an office building with its immediate owner, Fox Interactive Media, owned by News Corporation. MySpace became the most popular social networking site in the United States in June 2006. According to comScore, MySpace was overtaken internationally by its main competitor, Facebook, in April 2008, based on monthly unique visitors. MySpace employs 1,000 employees, after laying off 30% of its workforce in June 2009; the company does not disclose revenues or profits separately from News Corporation. The 100 millionth account was created on August 9, 2006, in the Netherlands.

Link: http://www.myspace.com

Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. The website’s name stems from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better.

Link: http://www.facebook.com

Bebo is a popular social networking site which connects you to everyone and everything you care about.It is your life online — a social experience that helps you discover what’s going on with your world and helps the world discover what’s going on with you. Bebo combines community, self-expression and entertainment, enabling you to consume, create, discover, curate and share digital content in entirely new ways. Bebo has sites all across the globe — US, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Poland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, India and the Netherlands.

Link: http://www.bebo.com/

5 | friendster

Friendster is a privately owned social networking website.Its headquarters are in Sydney, Australia. The service allows users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts. The website is also used for dating and discovering new events, bands, and hobbies. Users may share videos, photos, messages and comments with other members via their profile and their network.

Link: http://www.friendster.com/

6 | Hi5

Hi5 is a social networking website. As of January 2009, Hi5 claims to have over 60 million active members.In Hi5, users create an online profile in order to show information such as interests, age and hometown and upload user pictures where users can post comments. Hi5 also allows the user to create personal photo albums and set up a music player in the profile. Users can also send friend requests via e-mail to other users. When a person receives a friend request, he may accept or decline it, or block the user altogether. If the user accepts another user as a friend, the two will be connected directly or in the 1st degree. The user will then appear on the person’s friend list and vice-versa.

Link: http://www.Hi5.com/

Orkut is a free-access social networking service owned and operated by Google. The service is designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. The website is named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten.

Although Orkut is less popular in the United States than competitors Facebook and MySpace, it is one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil.In fact, as of May 2009, 49.83% of Orkut’s users are from Brazil, followed by India with 17.51%.

Link: http://www.orkut.com

Zorpia was founded in 2003 with a goal of bringing people together from all over the world and allowing them to share their ideas and interests. Since then the Zorpia Team has worked ceaselessly to reach people’s heart and provide the best features in order to maximize our users’ satisfaction. Our primary features are photo album, online journal, social networking, customized homepage, comment system and discussion forum.

Link: http://www.Zorpia.com

Netlog (formerly known as Facebox and Bingbox) is a Belgian social networking website specifically targeted at the European youth demographic.The site was founded in July 2003 in Ghent, Belgium, by Lorenz Bogaert and Toon Coppens, and as of December 2009 has 59 million registered users across 25 languages.On Netlog, members can create their own web page, extend their social network, publish their music playlists, share videos, post blogs and join groups.

Link: http://www.Netlog.com

Propeller is a social news portal, meaning that it is programmed by you – the audience. Our members post links to stories from all over the Web. Many of these stories originate from the websites of traditional media, including newspapers and magazines. But you will also find many stories that seldom pop up in the mainstream. Perhaps it does take a village – or at least a large community of news-hungry citizens – to nudge certain stories into the limelight.

Link: http://www.propeller.com