Cantoni.org

My Cantoni.mobi mobile website resource site has been cruising along with a growing user base and a steady stream of suggested new sites. I wanted to stick with the original one-page design as long as possible, but finally I realized the page size was just too large. With over 300 links, the page weighed in at almost 22KB. Worse, I found it increasingly difficult to navigate within the page because the links list was just too long.

Tonight I’m releasing a big update to the site: we now have a “home” or index page at Cantoni.mobi. The home page has a list of categories, each of which are now on their own page. The structure is to simply add the category name in the URL, so News junkies for example could bookmark: http://cantoni.mobi/news/.

With the split, the home page is once again really lightweight (under 3KB) while the category pages are all under 8KB each.

Watching the Great American Race yesterday, I couldn’t help but notice that Ask.com has tuned into NASCAR in a big way. Sure enough, it turns out that Ask.com has signed a big deal with NASCAR:

Ask.com, a leading search engine and an operating business of IAC, announced Wednesday it has entered into partnerships with NASCAR, NASCAR.COM and Hall of Fame Racing. Under the terms of the partnership with NASCAR, Ask becomes the Official Search Engine of NASCAR, with category exclusivity and a broad set of promotional rights in order to reach the sport’s estimated 75 million loyal fans.

In addition to the on-screen advertising, Ask.com is sponsoring Bobby Labonte in the 96 car (for 18 of the first 21 races), has created a NASCAR toolbar, and has created a new NASCAR homepage. I think the idea of an “official search engine” is pretty solid, even if it sounds a bit hokey. This move won’t put Google out of business, but Ask should pick up some incremental search traffic from NASCAR fans during the year.

For an idea of how valuable this kind of exposure can be, see my previous article on NASCAR sponsorship exposure value.

I wish Yahoo! had taken this opportunity a couple years ago when we were involved in NASCAR (Yahoo! sponsored Tina Gordon in her Busch series car). Unfortunately, I don’t think the value was there for Yahoo!, especially considering that Gordon didn’t qualify for many races and didn’t spend much time running up front.

Here’s a screenshot of Ask.com taken in the middle of the Daytona 500 yesterday:

Getting geared up for the Super Bowl this weekend, which also means the usual anticipation, discussion, and review of all the TV advertising contained within. (About 33 minutes’ worth according to the NY Times.)

On the NY Times site today I discovered this cool multi-media exploration: The Super Ad Bowl:Two Decades of Players. They have a breakdown of all ads that ran during the big game each year, including a video player so you can relive your favorites.

The Times credits Adland as one of the sources for the data. Looks like a great site to follow if you’re at all into TV advertising.

With President Obama’s inauguration came a new website for the White House, generating lots of buzz around the internet. Obama supporters have high hopes for his leadership, and for web geeks in particular, high hopes for his web site.

For myself, I found the executive orders section interesting and something worth keeping an eye on over time. Unfortunately, that portion of the site doesn’t have its own RSS feed. With a quick site scraper assembled with Yahoo! PIpes, I created a feed that pulls in the full content of each executive order and presidential memo:

Subscribe to feed for Presidential Executive Orders

The baseball statistician Bill James wrote a great article called Boycott the BCS! this week in Slate, calling for his colleagues to boycott the BCS system for post-season college football.

His best quote relates to the perception that it’s the "computer" at fault when the results aren’t as expected:

This is reflected in the fact that the rankings are routinely described as "computer" rankings. Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do. If you’re driving to Cleveland and you get lost and wind up in Youngstown, you don’t blame your car. If you’re doing a ranking system and you wind up with Murray State in western Kentucky as the national football champion, you don’t blame the computer.

Seafood Watch (part of the Monterey Bay Aquarium) has published their Seafood Guides for quite a while — giving cooks and diners helpful guidance about the impact to eating different types of seafood. Now they’ve created an online mobile edition in two forms: a Seafood Watch iPhone application, and a Seafood Watch mobile website.

The guide is split into several regions of the US and is also available in Spanish. Fish are categorized as Avoid, Good Alternatives, or Best Choices. Each fish type is linked to a short summary of how the recommendation was assigned. For example, you can find out why Alaska wild-caught salmon is a much better choice compared to farmed salmon!

I haven’t tried the iPhone app yet to see how it’s different than the mobile site. The only change I’d make on the mobile site would be to swap the order so that Best Choices are shown first and Avoid at the end. Otherwise, it’s a nice mobile reference.

Previously I’ve reported on the top mobile websites as determined by outgoing clicks from Cantoni.mobi, my collection of websites dedicated for small-screen devices. Today I ran the numbers again to look at all of 2008.

First, a quick summary of the methodology: I’m using a MyBlogLog widget to track all incoming and outgoing links from the website. For this kind of analysis, I simply download from MyBlogLog the detailed report for the whole year of 2008. Note that because the widget requires JavaScript, mobiles browsers without JavaScript enabled won’t be counted. But, the comparison of outgoing links should still be valid, even if the total numbers are under counted somewhat.

Without further delay, here are the results for the most popular mobile websites of 2008 (as determined by the readers of Cantoni.mobi). I’m showing the top 50 results with total number of clicks shown in parenthesis.

1. Maxim (7,517)
2. YouTube (6,564)
3. CNN Mobile (6,007)
4. Break.com (5,826)
5. American Express (5,022)
6. Bank of America (4,743)
7. Google Maps (4,485)
8. Covergirl Mobile (4,412)
9. Discovery Channel (4,254)
10. Mobile Stream Center (4,143)
11. PDA Animated Weather (4,032)
12. GameGeek (4,007)
13. Gas Buddy (3,982)
14. The Onion (3,862)
15. Netflix Mobile (3,850)
16. Car and Driver (3,811)
17. Flickr Mobile (3,712)
18. ESPN (3,705)
19. The Weather Channel (3,693)
20. Mobile MapQuest (3,525)
21. Thumb Games (3,498)
22. Fandango (3,406)
23. Men’s Health (3,374)
24. Mobile speed test (3,322)
25. PayPal (3,221)
26. AccuWeather (3,133)
27. MTV (3,095)
28. Gameloft (3,053)
29. SKY.fm Wireless Edition (3,024)
30. TV Guide (3,016)
31. Mobile DrinkBoy (3,001)
32. eBay mobile (2,991)
33. ZooVision (2,865)
34. Amazon (2,843)
35. MySpace (2,829)
36. Film-TV.com (2,799)
37. Traffic (2,785)
38. USA Today (2,776)
39. BBC News (2,766)
40. Facebook (2,756)
41. Wall Street Journal (2,729)
42. Mr Movie Mobile (2,722)
43. Calculators (2,712)
44. FOX News (2,652)
45. CNET (2,591)
46. New York Post (2,556)
47. Google (2,545)
48. Food Network (2,500)
49. Wapedia (encyclopedia) (2,480)
50. Song Lyrics (2,457)

Overall there were about 420,000 clicks on about 320 mobile links. Here’s a chart showing the total click distribution:

For those that might be interested, I’m also posting the full set of data in CSV format (CantoniMobileClicks2008.csv). If you do anything further with the data, please let me know.