Although my blog here saw a good 100,000 visitors over this search trend, my men’s site Manolith saw even more (above).

As usual, people love a good nakid celebrity.

A lot of big blog these days are running what I like the call the carousel. This typically includes 3-4 featured stories, accompanied with images, and little sub-headings. It also appears in the header of the site, above logos and post content.

In addition to looking pretty, the carousel DRAMATICALLY helps increase page views.

For a blog, 3 to 4 page views per session is GREAT. So you want to do everything you can to encourage those additional clicks. The carousel helps to highlight your best content, so regardless of how the visitor enters your site, they can easily discover it.

I thought it might be interesting to take a look at a few carousels, along with my two cents on each of them.

Off we go:

Gawker

Gawker basically pioneered the carousel for blogs. They’ve made little tweeks along the way, and now feature four stories along with a 300×250 ad flushed right. Traditionally publishers have placed a 768px wide banner up top, but this never really looks good. The square ad blends in much better here, likely increasing CTR (click through rate). They also write some of the best headlines for these items.

TechCrunch

The Crunch soon followed Gawker and rolled our their own carousel. It features 3 stories and uses nice beefy images. With MG Siegler writing some of the headings, you may find yourself giving a little chuckle, followed by your click through. Lately TechCrunch has been running big stories here over several days. This helps ensure visitors don’t miss them. Should you (heaven forbid) stay offline for more than 24 hours.

Mixergy

Mixergy founder Andrew Warner recently overhauled his site, greatly improving its design and layout. Part of the upgrades included a carousel that highlights his recent interviews with various tech luminaries. Andrew doesn’t use headings here, but does include a subtle play button in the lower right corner. This helps signal the visitor that beyond that click they are likely to find some form of video or audio.

lalawag

So for my own site I opt for 3 stories with headlines. I include the post title as well, using some text formatting that is annoying enough to be interesting, therefore drawing your eye. I go for high impact images as well and always try to include an illustration when possible. I go overboard on some of the CSS formatting, trying to make each unit pop. Finally I keep the logo at the same level of the featured content, because, well I’m a brand fame-ball like that.

Ok ride is over, please exit safely to your right. Let the ride operator know your favorite carousels in the comments below.

What would the news look if the Apollo XI Moon landing happened today?

Internet users are continuing to heavily search for Erin Andrews peephole pictures, and of course the infamous video. The other day I posted some notes about the typical life cycle of this type of content.

Really though it comes down to one simple idea, people like seeing other naked people. Especially when those people happen to good looking and somewhat well known.

Now a lot of attention is being focused on who shot and distributed the video online. However the likely hood of finding this person is slim. After all not even Erin Andrews can recall which hotel the footage stemmed from. The issue is further complicated when it was revealed the video was actually online for awhile, like months. It just hadn’t received press, and that wonderful butt was not attributed to Andrews until recently.

Beyond all that, the major catalyst of this story DeadSpin (Gawker’s sports blog) posted some interesting perspective today in their post Erin Andrews And Guilt, Imagined And Otherwise.

In the wake of the awful video that hit the Web over the weekend — actually, it had been hanging around for months, apparently, but no one had seen it — everyone is pointing fingers. It’s blogs’ fault for objectifying her. It’s fans’ fault for often caring more about what happens off the field than on. It’s ESPN’s fault for not strangling this story in the crib when they had the chance. (And they did.) It’s her fault. It’s our sports culture’s fault. It’s the fault of the thin walls of a lousy hotel.

None of these things are true, of course, and all of them are. Obviously, the fault lies in the assbag who shot the video in the first place, something this person has made a habit of, ultimately stumbling on someone in the public arena. (Let there be no doubt, though: This could happen to you, your wife, your girlfriend, your daughter. These slugs exist because it’s impossible to find a way to kill them all.)

Of course this is after DeadSpin benefited from millions of visitors this content brought in, but hey, that’s publishing for ya.

Click here to see the rest of DeadSpin’s coverage of Erin Andrews.

Some of the great infographics we’ve put together for Manolith.

Big thanks to Infoshot who create this wonderful artwork.

I’m really getting into infographics and unique ways to visualize data. So I’m going through some personal exercises, creating flow charts and other weird stuff too abstract to ever post. The latest one I worked up is a simple timeline that covers the recent #twittergate story.

Head on over to lalawag to check out Le Twitter Hack.

En depth detail of the hack can be found over on TechCrunch.

Popular ESPN sports reporter and blogger Erin Andrews is making headlines once again, this time for a unauthorized online video that shows her naked in her hotel room via peephole. From Manolith “Erin Andrews Peephole“

I’ll be honest, I’m not a huge sports fan, actually I’m not a sports fan at all. I enjoy the World Cup when it comes around, but obsessively following your favorite sports team and players always seems like a huge waste of bandwidth to me.

That being said, I do waste a ton of bandwidth (both literally and figuratively) tracking online trends.  During my travels ESPN reporter Erin Andrews has come up several times. Usually it involves how inappropriately hot she is, other times she’s getting hit in the face with objects.

Her latest online trend with this peephole video is going down in classic style. The nature of the content, and target audience isn’t hard to break down. I could unwrap the demographic like an onion, but it would likely offend a few of you. So instead let’s go through the typical life cycles of this type of juicy digital content.

1. Birth: These types of photos or videos are usually first published by some random site few people have heard about. The domain name is almost always horrible and difficult to spell. In this case it was NSFWpoa.com.
2. First Shots: Almost right away this site is hit hard by lawyers representing the party involved. Because these blogs are usually small home based operations they cave, who wants to get sued to death after all?
3. The Great Hunt: Once the original source removes the material, the hunt is on. Word begins to spread about its existence and the desperate masses converge trying to find those illusive copies. In almost every case, content like this is copied locally by someone, somewhere. It’s just not hosted anywhere yet. This forces users to go into a “deep search”, hitting some 10-20 sites in the process.
4. Opportunity: As major news outfits break the news, the spammers and adsense opportunists come out in droves. They create a huge network of performance focused (read: shit ton of ads) blog posts and lure in eager clickers. Done right they can easy bring in 100,000 or more visitors. They almost never include the actual content people are looking for.
5. Re Birth: Once a risky piece of content hits the net it will never disappear completely. It may not be easy to find but it’s out there. It lives on questionable file-sharing sites like RapidShare, in BitTorents and of course the dark corners of IRC. Those with the dedication (there is no shortage) will eventually find what they are looking for, satisfy the need and move on. In the process they begin to share the content with a broader audience through back channels. They use email, IM services and the classic “Hey dude, come over here and check this out” modes of distribution.
6. Retirement: Eventually (within 1-2 weeks) interest in the content dies down. Those who wanted to see it have, others have just given up. The content continues to get long tail like exposure, but never like its initial buzz.
7. Reincarnation: Hooray! There is life after death, even for content. Down the road (even years later) an event will trigger renewed interest in a video like this. This usually happens in the form of a radio broadcaster rehashing the story during a show. Howard Stern is probably the best known trigger for something like this.

So there you have it, a snapshot of what this video will go through. To those who landed here looking for the actual video I apologize. See Opportunity above, oh and happy hunting.

SHOCKING!

Some more docs over here.

TechCrunch is running one hell of story about confidential Twitter documents landing in their inbox. It’s not pretty, and I can’t help but feel bad for those hacked. An event like this is every geeks worst nightmare, at least it should be. I know it’s mine. As we put more and more sensitive information into the cloud (Google Apps in this case) this is going be a real problem.

So about those docs, Mike is going to publish some of them and likely take a lot of heat for doing so. TechCrunch will exclude anything too confidential (employee information, access codes etc), basically just use good judgement with the material. A lot of people are going to cry foul regardless, but I think you’ll see the released material is nothing earth shattering. If anything, more entertaining than damaging.

Judging by the bravado of this hacker, these docs are getting out one way or another. In fact the whole lot of them will probably circulate in some form. Mike is pushing the envelope here no doubt, and I can’t help but admire that. But really if he can some how stop all these docs from getting broader distribution, he would actually be helping Twitter.

So while we wait to see the docs in question, go grab some popcorn, oh and start deleting those uber sensitive docs from your Google Docs.

Update, are the docs:

• Final Tweet: Twitter TV show pitch
• Twitter’s forecast for users and revenue

I’m not sure if this is a mistweet or not, but it appears funny guy John Mayer mistakenly posted his cell number to Twitter. We called and got voicemail, here is what I said:

I hope he gets the msg and comes to pickup these damn dildos.