During the period between Christmas and New Year's it's traditional to look back on the past year. Here at Nestoria we're no different, and, especially given that we just passed the six month mark since we launched Nestoria, it seem fitting that we take a bit of time to look back.
In today's entry I'll focus on the performance of the Nestoria blog. In total we've posted 74 times since launch! Which stories, did you, our dear fans, find most compelling since we launched in June of 2006?
In terms of visitor numbers the top five posts were:
- Open source mapping experimentation.
Our proof of concept use of OpenStreetMap map data in the Isle of Wight generated enourmous interest from the global geohacker community. Rest assured, we look forward to continuing innovative trials with online mapping thought leaders in the new year. - Add an interactive map to your website.
The launch of our DropIn Map tool that allows webmasters to quickly and easily add maps of property and local information to a website via cut and paste proved a major success. We've recently been in touch with a few more UK sites who will be using our DropIn maps. We'll be profiling them here on the blog in the near future. - Seeing is Believing – Geograph.org.uk photos live on Nestoria
We're continually on the lookout for innovative websites we can partner with. Geograph.org.uk is an amazing online community of amateur photographers documenting every corner of the British Isles. These amazing images are a great addition to the local information we provide to property searchers. - How do you spell that? Most common London property misspellings.
For anyone who likes data mining, working at a search engine is heaven. There's a continual stream of interesting data like seeing how people misspell place names. We recently used this data to launch a much improved spelling auto-correction functionality. - The Glass is Half Full
An output of our work on natural language processing, our tongue-in-cheek analysis of some of the euphemisms estate agents commonly use to best position their properties was widely linked across the web.
The success of these last two stories shows that there's wide interest in the meta data that a search engine generates, so we'll be focusing a bit more on these types of stories in the coming months. The first of these will be a look back at the most popular property searches of 2006.
