Writing is primarily a solitary activity. But, as Stephen King wrote in On Writing, “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open”. At some point you will share your work with someone for editing – and that’s where the art of writing gets technologically tricky. Microsoft Word has a well-documented compatibility issue between versions of the software; Google Docs doesn’t have an easy way to track changes; Pages for Mac doesn’t play nicely with PCs… the list goes on and on. Luckily, it seems that collaborative writing has become the focus of some reasearch and development and a recent start-up. Medium isn’t meant for editing – consider it a new way to blog –  but it’s moving in a direction of organic community-based creation that is just waiting to be savored by tech-savy writing groups. Ev Williams, Medium’s midwife, was the man behind Blogger and the cheerleader that brought Twitter to the online world’s attention. What is he accomplishing with his latest project? Medium (currently in closed Beta) invites users to create a theme and generate or curate content with invited collaborators. Within your freshly written content, you and your collaborators can leave notes for each other, easily edit the text, and upon publication receive credit where credit is do. Imagine, with your writing friends, piecing together ideas and eradicating typos before publication. It’s an entirely new way to think about blogging; the solipsistic nature of Twitter and personal sites is intrinsically absent from Medium. Critics say its…

 Analytics for Authors blogs have been edited to reflect the 01/16/2013 Google Analytics update. — You’ve gotten a feel for your audience and how they visit your site using Google Analytics, but you still might not have a clear idea what page is getting the most traffic. To get a good look at your content’s metrics, click on Content then All Pages in the left hand navigation menu.*   Again, you’ll get an ordered list of your most popular pages and their bouncerate percentage, average duration of visit, and other metrics your familiar with by now. Is your Landing Page your most popular page? Off the bat, scope out whether your most popular page is your landing page. Chances are, your landing page (yourdomain.com) or your blog feed will be your most popular page. Why? Your landing page is the easiest URL to type directly. Your landing page is the straight-up easiest way to get to your site – chances are, people won’t remember a long string of words to get to a certain page. Your blog page is where the action happens, and its the first place many people will click when first visiting your site If your landing page or blog isn’t your most popular page, is the #1 section of your site something that suprises you? Think about why your most popular pages got that rank – and how you can work their popularity to increase engagement on your site. Popularity and Bouncerate Check your most popular pages bouncerate…

Analytics for Authors blogs have been edited to reflect the 01/16/2013 Google Analytics update. — To navigate to Visitor Flow, click on its name on the left hand menu when you’re logged into Google Analytics. What you’ll see is a visual map of how visitors used your site. The large veritcal columns are nodes: Nodes represent a single metric – the first column defines where the visitor came from, what language they speak, or any other demographic or campaign metric you collect. The subsequent nodes are pages on your website. Connections are the spaces in between nodes. They represent how a group of visitors traveled through your site. Dropoffs are represented by the red waterfall. Instead of carrying a connection, a dropoff is where someone left your site. Bouncrate is affected when a dropoff occurs on the first page a visitor arrives on. Focusing on a Specific Segment in Visitor Flow By default, Visitor Flow visualizes the country-of-origin for your traffic. To see other areas of interest, click on the dropdown menu above the first node. Source is a good place to start; although you can find all the information about dropoffs and bouncerate on the Traffic Sources page, visualizing the data can be more useful than just looking at a series of numbers and percentages. After you choose to focus on a certain segment in visitor flow, you can focus further. By clicking on a node, you can choose to highlight the path a visitor took through it. Here, we clicked on the…