Cogblog

Besides amazing APIs and private maps, what did we do?

In case you were wondering:

• A new homepage
• Country, State, NAICS code and Alphabetical listings of all of the maps
• Double-clicking a person zooms in on that person and exposes editing tools
• Coglinks! (An example is here)
• Dozens of bugs fixed
• Comments! Here is a little about how comments work:
  • Simple, unthreaded comments associated with each chart
  • Comments show up right away but are queued for moderation
  • Upon moderation, accepted comments are sent to map subscribers
• How do Private Charts work?
  • When you create a private chart, you are added to the access control list. You cannot be removed from accessing this chart.
  • You add email addresses to your access control list. When you add someone, they are sent an email. The chart shows up in their “My Cogmap”. If they sign up using another email address, they cannot access the chart.
  • Anyone who has access to a chart can add or delete people’s access to a chart.
  • If someone goes to a chart that they don’t have access to, they can have an automated email sent to the chart owner requesting to be added to the Access Control List.
• Related charts was built using Vogoo’s Slope One open source implementation
• Improved login code pretty substantially.
• Sped up adding people to maps significantly (so cool and fast, we are actually highlighting it, which is weird)
• Livesearch works
• RSS feed more explicitly exposed to audience (via icon on chart page)
• Dozens of minor bug fixes and usability improvements

OK, that was an intentionally provocative title and overstates the case, but still, I haven’t had a lot of fun with this!

If I was Uncov, I would have to figure out a way to say, “FAIL”.

Google has gotten a ton of coverage for rolling out their Social Graph API. (No link to the original Google post because blogger trackbacks are incomprehensible and I protest them.)

Theoretically, the Social Graph API is a slam dunk for Cogmap.  For each person in charts, I can show their Social Graph, allowing you to explore how you may know people at a company, how they know each other, etc..

Anyway, here are my issues:

1. It appears inserting URLs with query strings doesn’t work right in the API?  I tried escaping special characters and it continued to puke.  For example, I wanted to set the query string to a Cogmap profile, of the format: http://www.cogmap.com/profile.php?id=3.  Unfortunately, the Google documentation doesn’t explain what you should do in such a situation.
2. I know URIs are convenient because they are keys, but I want to be able to query the Social Graph with whatever information I have (in this case, ideally, name, company, title, maybe email) and get results, but Social Graph only accepts URIs and emails.

The result is that Social Graph is kind of weak!  It neither accepts my URIs nor takes other information I have that could be used to generate a Social Graph.

Awkward.

Anyway, I am at FOWA today, maybe I will look for Kevin Marks.

– brent

We here at Cogmap have been hard at work on the next generation of Cog-ness.  It will be a fearsome release with a wave of features guaranteed to rock the org charting universe.

With this in mind, we have been wanting to figure out how to make a little PR splash.

I went on the Internet to hear some good council on how to get awesome PR without spending any money.  There were many, many articles about how to not upset bloggers.  Let’s assume that you are like me: Familiar with bloggers that cover my industry, know how to send emails, etc.  The real question is what is the best thing to do with this little knowledge.

I found two articles that I felt like were very illuminating and I wanted to give them a little link juice love:

• Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Thoughts on Product Launch Promotion
• Alex Iskold’s PR Tips for Startups

Alex is very focused on “hire a PR firm” and “launch at an event”, which I won’t do for these reasons:

• We do not give away equity in the mighty Cogmap nor do we have any money, which limits our scope of innovation.  More importantly, the reasons that we have these policies limit the interest a PR firm would have in partnering.
• Launching at an event is the kind of thing that may compromise other things I do.  While I might like to demo the new, pimped out Cogmap, I am not sure it is appropriate.

Regardless, great tips and interesting reading if you are trying to figure out how to get the word out for your Web 2.0 site.

http://www.i-marco.nl/weblog/archive/2006/06/20/prototypejs_oncomplete_and_ano

That saved me about a jillion years, in case anyone cares.

The next release of Cogmap is a big one and could use some interested testers.  Leave a comment with your Cogmap user name if you are interested in messing with our next big release a little bit.

I spent a little time on SEO on the site recently and saw a definite lift in traffic. Now, I am no SEO expert and at some level I would say that the site is more or less what it is. There are not a ton of things I can/should/want to do regarding changing H1’s, adding anchor text, blah blah blah. Cogmap is an application. It does what it does. I don’t want to add a bunch of unnecessary verbiage to improve search results, etc.

But, what I did has resulted in better traffic! 30%+ better with just a few changes. I was talking with a friend about some of the things we did and some of the things I learned as we went through the process and he was interested and surprised, so I said, “Man I should blog that!”

Here it is!

First, PageRank is huge, but checking PageRank is kind of bogus. See Matt Cutt’s commentary.

PageRank from the Google toolbar is some static number that gets dumped out quarterly, while your actual pagerank is constantly being computed. So all it provides is some raw quarterly directional indicator. That is kinda weak!

Second, I used SEOmoz’s Search Engine Ranking Guide, which seemed like a relatively complete and reliable resource, to rapidly generate the small list of high impact things I could do to rock my pagerank.

Frankly, the thing that caused me the most agitation is that I would love for the URLs to all be Wikipedia-esquely the company name of the org chart. Unfortunately, we continue to refuse to code all of the pain in the ass code to make it happen and make sure that we don’t get 404’s if someone links to a chart and then someone changes the name. There are a host of version control issues there that are Pandora’s box that we have shied away from. We have API’s that let people access pages that way, but we use UIDs to identify each chart in our internal linking scheme. That makes us kind of weak! I would pick up so much pagerank steam if I overcame this.

Moral of the story: SEOing applications is hard because you do not want to make significant functionality changes that hurt the user experience simply to improve rank. Most SEOing articles are assuming that you are simply improving content on the page for machine consumption.

I recently received an email question that I offered to post to the blog:

Currently I use Cogmap as a reference for a company’s general reporting structure.  Is there a way to get in touch with other Cogmap users to pick their brains about what programs they use for their finished product org charts?

Speak up, although my response was that everyone uses Cogmap for the finished product!

A wave of new code has been unleashed, incrementing the version number to 11! No question, these are some of the biggest new features since our launch last year.

New features include:

• Subscribe to changes in maps (You are automatically subscribed to maps you edit) via email
• Send charts to friends without being logged in
• Metadata about maps - City, State, Country & SIC Code are now captured. I will do some super fun stuff with that very soon
• Search has been tweaked a bit

When you add this to the sweet new scoring system, we are creating a simple but broader data framework to let us offer a sweet new wave of functionality.

Update: We have abandoned SIC codes for the 2007 NAICS list (using only 2 and 3 digit codes to keep the file size down).  Is there a better list of industry types that is still standards-based-ish?

Just rolled out a new feature: cogscores!  Check out an example by looking at anyone’s cogprofile - for example, you could look at rpeters59’s cogprofile, you can see that he has made a number of maps, some of which are a pretty good size, and his cogscore reflects his contributions to the cogmunity!  (My, we are feeling coggy today!)

So here we are implementing a bunch of the things that people say make sites more social-ish.  First profiles, now scoring.  LSVP, my site of choice for linking love, has a slew of good posts pointing to other posts on this.

Obviously, there is the potential to game the system to get points.  The initial implementation of this is super simplistic, but we will ramp up the complexity over time to factor quality, popularity of maps, and some other interesting metrics into the mix.  For now, build lots of big maps and you will be a winner.

Our help page explains the awesome benefits of point accumulation: not too much.

Many new features on the way.

The first alpha of our drop-dead easy “Cogmap for Salesforce” application is complete.  How basic is it?  It adds a button to all of your account pages that opens that accounts organization chart in Cogmap.

We desperately need alpha testers to give it a whirl and tell us what you think.  What are the next exciting features that we should add?  Let us know so we can get crackin’!

Send email to brent at cogmap dot com with your feedback.  If all goes well, we will transition this to a publicly-available managed package and add capability like adding your Salesforce.com contacts into maps systematically.

Pretty cool!