One year ago, we announced Ph.ly, a locally-minded URL shortener that was also home to an experiment: a weekly email service that promised to share the three biggest, most meaningful journalism stories in Philadelphia.

We called it the Ph.ly/NewsWeekly and after getting a rush of some 1,500 subscribers to start, the service has slowly grown to more than 1,700 weekly subscribers.

Big mistake from my part? The first few weeks I A/B tested by way of keeping the A subject line the same for several weeks. The result was that for a portion of the list early on, Ph.ly ended up in the spam folder. That happens often to new regular lists and we’ve since largely grown out of it, but our strong open rates could likely be even higher.

You can see an archive of the recent newsletters and sign up at Ph.ly/NewsWeekly.

Media attention help:

• Technically Philly
• Hidden City
• Curbed
• NBC Philadelphia
• My personal blog

Now that we’ve closed the third annual Philly Tech Week Presented by AT&T, we immediately get the questions about IMPACT.

Who came? What happened? What’s next? The short answer is nearly 20,000 people attended, almost double last year, with nearly 200 partners and 105 events.

We’ll get survey results on this post as we get those answers in, but we’ll start bringing things together here.

BIG HAPPENINGS?

• Venture for America announces Philly as its 8th market
• Warby Parker cofounder Neil Blumenthal returns to talk about growth
• Startup Pitch night offered advice to new entrepreneurs
• Balloon Mapmaking taught aerial cartography
• Philadelphia was the host of the NASA Space Apps challenge
• New coworking space 3rd Ward hosted first open house
• Questlove gave a one-hour on-stage interview as part of a Future of Music event
• The social entrepreneurship conversation and stakeholder group grow
• Bootstrappers Breakfast hosted Councilman David Oh
• The first ever Philly Student Startup Summit was held
• With URBN, we hosted a major Mobile, Marketing and eCommerce event
• First ever Philly Student Startup Summit introduces more than 150 undergraduates to the local technology community.
• With Ben Franklin Technology Partners/SEP, we hosted a major State of Entrepreneurship and Investment event.
• EveryoneOn digital literacy campaign launches
• Developing Philly the web series on the technology scene was unveiled
• The world’s largest video game! ph.ly/pong

HOW MANY PEOPLE?

We easily met our goal of more than 15,000 attendees, even by this conservative estimate. In the spirit of transparency, we’ve included the attendance estimates for all the events below.

Pre-Tech Week

1. Preview Event [4/3] — 150
2. Meta Meetup of Meetups [4/16] — 100
3. 13th annual Fox School IT Awards [4/16] — 200
4. Philly PUG [4/16] — 100
5. Select Greater Philadelphia International Reporters [4/16] — 30

Friday April 19

1. Inaugural Philly Geek Brunch — 20
2. Space Apps Reception — 60
3. The Grandest Game of PONG — 2,500 (Terrace, Art Museum Steps, Parkway)

Saturday, April 20

1. Philadelphia Area Computer Society Meeting – 30
2. International Space Apps Challenge- 50
3. Women in Tech Summit — 200
4. Student Startup Summit — 150
5. Hardware Freedom Day- 30
6. TEDx TempleU — 100
7. Pyramid STEM Cyber Play Day — 10
8. Drink Philly Digital Arts Gallery — 75
9. Philadelphia AppArcade at Science Carnival — 2,000 (Conservative portion of claimed 25,000 attendees at Science Carnival)

Sunday, April 21

1. International Space Apps Challenge — 50
2. Internet Fast Picnic & 2nd Annual Philly Foursquare Games at The Porch — 30
3. Zapping Aliens and Saving the Universe While Drinking a Beer — 100

Monday, April 22

1. Philly Tech Week Kick-Off Breakfast presented by AT&T– 80
2. What You Need to Take Your Business Mobile — 40
3. Philly Robotics Expo 2013 sponsored by Drexel University — 750
4. Indy Hall & Nat Mechnics Blood Drive — 20
5. Powering Creativity, Technology and Community — 150
6. Innovations in Green Technology – Lunchtime Series — 50
7. Everyone On Launch — 100
8. Temple University Urban Apps + Maps Studio Open House — 30
9. The Transformation of a Digital Incubator — 70
10. 3D Printer / OpenSCAD modeling class — 50
11. The Entrepreneurs Prenup — 50
12. Blackout: Reinventing Black Media in the Digital Age — 200
13. The Engineers’ Club of Philadelphia Networking & Tour of NextFab — 30
14. Mobile Monday Mid-Atlantic 6th Annual Demo Night — 300
15. Scaling on AWS for the first 10 Million Users — 120

Tuesday, April 23

1. Bootstrappers Breakfast — 40
2. Node Philly 2013 — 130
3. Getting Underserved and Minority Youth Access to STEM – Lunchtime Series — 75
4. Villanova Pitch Day — 100
5. Useful, Usable & Desirable: Designing for Users — 50
6. PhillyForce Mini-Conference — 100
7. Data Processing with Mechanical Turk — 50
8. Living Responsively: Creating Websites that Work Across Devices — 30
9. Combat Robotics Demo — 50
10. CMS – Content Management Showdown — 50
11. Apps: From Concept to App Store — 30
12. Biomimicry & The Future of Sustainable Tech — 50
13. Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis LLP Diversity Cocktail Reception — 100
14. Switch Philly: Edtech — 100
15. Crowdfunding Happy Hour — 50
16. To DB or not to DB? That is the Question — 50
17. Digital News Media and Culture — 20
18. “Geek Out” First Person Arts Story Slam — 120
19. An Evening with MongoDB Philly — 100

Wednesday, April 24

1. Live Event: Managing Mobility in the BYOD Era  Little Moves Make a Big Difference — 30
2.  Little Moves Make a Big Difference — 30
3. The Innovation Quotient (IQ): 7 Sparks To Your Company’s Innovation Success — 60
4. Getting Technical with Online Media — 75
5. Balloon Mapping Workshop — 30
6. Build your first Mobile App with HTML5, jQuery, PhoneGap and a BaaS Apigee — 40
7. All Hands On Technology: A Senior Learning Event — 75
8. Product Prototyping in 60 Minutes — 75
9. Philly as the Social Entrepreneurship Hub – Lunchtime Series — 120
10.  2013 Wharton Business Plan Competition (WBPC) Venture Finals — 150
11. Open Hack Night at Hive76 — 50
12. Philly.com Presents A/S/L: Love and Tech — 50
13. Digital Civic Engagement Tools: Are Planning Officials Talking to Anyone New? — 50
14. Philly Startup Leaders & Philly Founded Entrepreneur Expo — 600
15.  Technically Challenged — 50
16.  Build Guild Happy Hour — 30
17. “Developing Philly” World Premiere — 50
18. The Grandest Game of Pong on the Planet (Day 2) — 2,000
19. CaveCast 006: Turntablism — 75

Thursday, April 25

1. Philly TechBreakfast: Inaugural — 150
2. Entrepreneurs Opti-Match — 50
3. Breakfast with Software Industry Veteran, Tim Buckley — 50
4. Making Broadband Broader: Connecting tech communities to bridge the gap — 75
5. Build your first Mobile App with HTML5, jQuery, PhoneGap and a BaaS Apigee — 40
6.  The Future of Tech Transfer – Lunchtime Series — 40
7.  Ready, Set, UPstart: Fostering the Entrepreneurial Spirit at Penn — 250
8.  2nd Annual Startup 101 — 50
9. Music Hack Night at Hive76 — 30
10. A Very Spatial Happy Hour — 60
11. How Data Can Help Your Social Good Success Story — 75
12. Building iOS Mobile Apps 101 — 50
13.  I-SITE & PhillyCHI Present: Tech + Design Quizzo — 150
14. “Left To Your One Device” Contest Reception — 150
15.  Increase your “Brandwidth”: Self-marketing in the Digital Age — 50
16.  Can Health Tech Help Us? “Escape Fire” Screening — 50
17.  Philly Give & Get Charity Auction — 100
18. Startup Pitch Night — 75
19. Philadelphia WordPress Meetup Workshop — 50
20. Ignite Philly Youth Media — 50

Friday, April 26

1. Digital Inclusion Beyond the Internet — 50
2.  Customers in Focus: Warby Parker Keynote with Chamber of Commerce — 150
3.  Games and Gamification in Marketing and Management – Lunchtime Series — 50
4.  Entrepreneurship & Investment in Philadelphia with Ben Franklin Technology Partners/SEP — 200
5.  Educator Forum @ School of the Future — 75
6. Mobile, Marketing and Ecommerce Trends Hosted By URBN — 300
7.  Philly Tech Week Signature Event presented by AT&T and hosted by URBN — 1,000
8.  PTW 2013 Signature Event Afterparty — 100
9. The Art of Fashion and Technology — 75
10. Startup Weekend: Day 1 — 150

Saturday, April 27

• Startup Weekend: Day 2 — 150
•  BarCamp NewsInnovation and News Hackathon — 150
• Content Camp — 30
•  Comcast Cares Day Digital Resource Fair — 300
• TechServ Community Genius Bar — 100
•  The Ruby Workshop — 50
•  Hive76 Ultimate Open House and Expo — 30
•  HACK Philly 2.0 — 75
• N3rd Street Gamer Party — 150
• Make & Toss: Light graffiti and cocktails at 3rd Ward — 200

Sunday, April 28

•  Future of Music with ?uestlove — 200

Four years after first launching a simple WordPress theme (thanks Woothemes for Typebased from 2008!) to serve as the home of TechnicallyPhilly.com, we are launching a rebrand as Technical.ly, which will be the replacement for the Philly theme and our Baltimore site, a custom theme called StartupBmore from our partner there Mike Brenner.

Consider it a proof of concept that went a little further than a proof of concepts usually go.

Ahead of launching our new site, and a year after we purchased the Technical.ly domain, we wanted to share some lessons from using the same theme for that time.

Monthly page views for Technically Philly, peaking in January 2013 with 93k and staying strong in February with 85k. Click to enlarge

Traffic growth has been steady but should jump

I wrote a bit about how we moved from about 50,000 page views a month this summer to 95,000 in January and more than 80,000 in February here, but broadly I’d note that we had never focused on audience growth because our revenue has come from events (and consulting before it).

We have a lot of traffic growth to come and the redesign should push us ahead of 100,000 pageviews and more, with 50,000 or more uniques for Philly alone, let along Baltimore and Technical.ly site-wide traffic.

Click to enlarge.

Mobile traffic growth has been explosive and will likely continue

Considering one in five visits to our site in 2013 was on a mobile device, up from as little as six percent in 2011, we were eager to roll with a responsive design in our soon-to-be-launched new site and further increase load time. We have made steady growth on improving the speed with which our site loads, as depicted below, always a sign of better user experience.

Monthly average load time in seconds for TechnicallyPhilly.com. Click to enlarge.

Referral traffic to TechnicallyPhilly.com, in which BLUE represents Google search results, GREEN represents direct visits, yellow and light blue represent Twitter, orange represents Twitter and GRAY represents OTHER.

Referral traffic hasn’t changed much, which presents an opportunity

What hasn’t changed much over our four years is referral traffic, which might be a sign for movement in traffic.

As depicted to the right, search traffic from Google alone accounts for more than a third of our traffic (blue), a fifth is direct (green) and 12 percent social (yellow and light blue for Twitter and orange from Facebok) and four percent from our RSS feed.

We are drastically underperforming in the email space, in addition to RSS and, relative to our staff time, social media.

Google Chrome is the dominant browser used to visit

Over the life of TechnicallyPhilly.com, Chrome holds a sliver of a lead over Firefox and Internet Explorer represents more than a fifth, but when looking over just the last year, as shown in the graph to the below, Chrome is the big user at nearly 40 percent. Firefox is just below a fifth with 17 percent for Safari, 15 percent for IE and others below it.

Depicting the browsers used to visit TechnicallyPhilly.com from January 2012 through February 2013. Click to enlarge.

In the inaugural Baltimore Innovation Week, our community pulled together more than 30 events, 25 partners and 1,500 attendees over 10 days.

Read the full status report on Technically Baltimore here.

Some takeaways:

• Together, we started an annual way to highlight and connect our entrepreneurship, technology and innovation conversations.
• More than 30 events from 25 partners with more than 1,500 attendees over 10 days that ranged in focus from entrepreneurship to economic development to arts to hacking, design and development came together and brought out new faces.
• Startups and products launched, including NewsUp, social discovery mobile app Crowdstich and Easy WebContent’s Presenter.
• GBTC held Maryland’s first hackathon that featured representatives from city, state and federal government agencies.
• 15 projects launched as part of the latest Startup Weekend Baltimore, including winner TeamPassword.
• Venture for America unveiled plans to launch its fellowship program in Baltimore.
• TechBreakfast continued its growth as the region’s premiere startup demo event.
• Pitch Across Maryland brought Gov. O’Malley to Baltimore to show off his entrepreneurship-fueling work.
• The University of Maryland Biopark launched a new entrepreneurship demo series, starting with its incubated healthcare applications platform startup Analytics Informatics.
• Education Ignite welcomed more than 200 people to hear about the changing education climate in Baltimore.
• Leaders Kickoff breakfast featured event organizers and community leaders celebrating Baltimore’s wide technology community, including entrepreneurship, digital access and smarter government efforts. That event featured Western High School RoboDoves robotics team captain Keimmie Booth.

In what is now a yearly tradition, at the end of every April we organize Philly Tech Week, a week-long celebration of technology in Philadelphia.

Now that we’re more than a month removed from 2012′s big event we’d like to share statistics in the interest of transparency.

While some events measure success by seemingly ambiguous metrics based on a mix of attendees and marketing reach, we like to focus on the infallible measurement of actual human beings that actually attended an event. A tweet about Philly Tech Week is not the same as someone that attended. A newspaper article’s circulation is not the same as an attendee, either.

Facts:

• 8 days length
• 88 events (added 20+ events compared to 2011)
• 60+ event organizers (added more than 15 from 2011)
• 10,000+ attendees (more double last year’s attendance)
• 300,000+ web impressions (grown from 100,000 in 2011)
• 5,000 print publications distributed (from 4,000 last year)
• 5,000+ Twitter mentions (5x 2011 mentions)
• 30 legacy media hits
• 45 blog hits

Attendee survey response:

• 73% of attendees agreed that Philly Tech Week offered “great programming, great speakers and a great networking experience.”
• 59% of attendees said that Philly Tech Week brought attention to the tech scene locally. Thirty-six percent of attendees said that Philly Tech Week brought national attention.
• More than 50% attendees are interested in using services or products provided by sponsors of Philly Tech Week

For comparison, last year’s Philly Tech Week had 45 events with 4,000 confirmed attendees.

We look forward to continuing the growth of Philly Tech Week for years to come and thank all of the event organizers and attendees for their support.

We talked to him about his history at the WSJ.com (Wall Street Journal) and at Yahoo News, and about what he plans to do with the new organization.

Whiskey Chats — 04 — Neil Budde

How? A mix of advertising, optimizing for the open graph protocol, and Facebook Comments. I’ve distilled what we did to boost our likes and Facebook engagement and now, Facebook is our highest source of referrals. Learn the exact steps we took in this presentation to the WordPress Philly Meetup.

When it comes to branding an online property, one of the first things you should consider in the process of naming an entity is the availability of a possible domain name.

Like good real estate, the neighborhood and address you land at can help your online property thrive.

But good real estate gets speculated quickly, and with a finite number of memorable and catchy domain names available in the top-level .com domain spectrum, many brands are looking to international domains as an additional resource.

In the 90s, before the boom of web businesses, domain names came cheaply because market demand was low. Domains still cost as little as $9.95 to register. But because companies have moved quickly into the neighborhood, valuable online real estate is limited. Now, the market is controlled by individuals and companies that invested early, out of speculation opportunities or simply because they got there first.

Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures who has funded a number of recognizable online startup companies, says that a short, quality domain should be highly coorelated with investment:

We used to advise companies to spend $10k or less on a domain, then we upped that recommendation to $25k. We recently upped it again to $50k.

In line with our own plans for growth, Technically Media recently acquired Technical.ly, a top-level Libyan domain, a decision that did not come lightly. After the jump, some lessons in that decision-making process.

What is your brand?

For the past three years, we’ve operated Technically Philly, a local news organization focused on technology in the Philadelphia region. We own TechnicallyPhilly.com, TPhilly.com, and a handful of variable domain names that encompass the name of that brand.

Should we grow outside of the Philadelphia region, and taking that inevitability into account, we decided that a national brand name was necessary.

Two options became apparent: develop a new national brand name or take advantage of what we already had going. Quite frankly, the availability of domain names helped us shape that decision. None of the dozens of names that we developed were available as a .com, which should be a first choice for most businesses—it’s the most recognizable domain on the web internationally.

Having done a great job branding the Technically name both through our local tech news product and our parent company Technically Media, it made sense to take advantage of that effort. We decided to seek domain opportunities relevant to that name, and found one in Libya’s .ly domain.

Should you make an investment in a domain outside your country?

With the .com crunch evident, there are dozens of top-level domain names worth exploring. Many are sold through U.S. registrars, like Network Solutions: co, .de, .asia, and the new, controversial .xxx, as examples. International names are harder to come by because those countries often hope to keep the registration of their domains local: .me (Montenegro) and .ly (Libya) being a great examples. With those, expect to purchase from registrars that require some extra research for reassurance.

We found that you should ask why you shouldn’t invest in a domain outside your country. If it makes sense for your brand, it’s certainly worth exploring.

Who benefits from the sale of those domains?

In the U.S., companies like Network Solutions, GoDaddy and Dreamhost sell domain registrations, and they are overseen by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Libyan domain names have an extra layer: they are registered by several accredited for-profit businesses that are overseen by Libya’s national registry NIC.LY , which was given permission to accredit those for-profit registrars by ICANN.

Who is accountable?

In our research, we were certainly worried about a case of NIC.LY seizing at least one .ly domain; in that case, vb.ly, a URL shortener that catered to sexually explicit content (though clearly educational in nature), was found to be in violation of NIC.LY’s Terms of Service. An official at ICANN confirmed to us that NIC.LY is completely responsible for oversight of its domains and that no appeals process is available through the international agency. That’s unfortunate considering the situation at vb.ly, but we decided that since we won’t be sharing explicit content, we felt comfortable with the registry.

What have others experienced?

We wanted to understand who had purchased .ly domains in the past and from which registrar they had purchased them. We landed at several well-known entities that had purchased .ly domains, like the URL shortener bit.ly (which, in fairness, has since registered bitly.com) and Active.ly, a small startup based in Seattle. The latter, at least, had acquired a domain from Libyan Spider, a broker and registrar founded and run by Hadi Naser, based in Tripoli, Libya. With several identifiable western-market domain transactions, including a $100,000 acquisition reported by TechCrunch, Naser’s Libyan Spider seemed like a best fit. And Active.ly’s founders confirmed that experiences with Naser had been professional and enjoyable. Our experience so far has been the same.

What if that domain opportunity is in a politically volatile country?

We continue to worry about the future of Libya’s political strife, but with Arab Spring contributing to the fall of dictator Muammar Gaddafi, democratic elections taking place, and the added oversight of ICANN, should strife result in unexpected consequences, we are as confident as we can be that our domain will remain ours.

What’s next?

We couldn’t be more excited about the new domain name. For now, we’re redirecting Technical.ly to TechnicallyPhilly.com, but it will eventually become its own entity. It’s opened up a ton of possibilities for us, and the punchy name feels just right.

For a room of Leadership Inc. class members, our Christopher Wink discussed why budding corporate and nonprofit leaders should take personal use of social media a bit more seriously than some may think.

See the presentation slides above or see them here.

Campus Philly is a small, regional nonprofit dedicated to a mission of attracting, engaging and retaining college graduates to the Philadelphia area.

Their mission rocks; they host popular events and lead interesting research.

Yet, in summer 2011, even they said their website sucked, and they had no clear strategy about what to do with it anyway.

Their platform was a dated, proprietary Lotus framework, their editorial interns had little focus for their content and the organization’s social strategy wasn’t much more than an afterthought from a busy staff.

Our job was to get their web strategy a little bit closer to the expectations set for an otherwise interesting and meaningful group that is the envy of graduate-retention program throughout the country. In six months time, from June to December, Technically Media did just that, by focusing on three clear efforts:

1. Create information architecture, develop user experience and lift a new homepage — The focus here was to look clean, simple and be incredibly easy and accessible for a staff with no full-time tech or web staff.
2. Create clear editorial strategy for the web and social space – The focus here was to use the existing workflow of a small staff to have the biggest impact and to begin follow the norms of the online world to welcome more traffic, links and attention.
3. Offer basic workforce development for the basic staff skills necessary to support the first two goals — Though entire degrees are based on the concepts, we offered a slew of bootcamps for Campus Philly staff around its platform management, web basics and many content creation topics. Much more is needed here, but the level of staff savvy went through an impressive upgrade in a half year’s time.

Lessons:

• Whizbang web solutions are not good recommendations for small staffs — Campus Philly needed a simple solution that its staff could largely run autonomously, so, after some deeper analysis, we recommended a WordPress solution and custom theme, designed by staff.
• Highlight staff assets and use them — Campus Philly had a great on-site designer who was fun to work with, passionate about the project and already had designed the look of the site. Rather than start from scratch, we welcomed her direction, worked with her to think more functionally about user experience and its relationship to existing WordPress structure. We offered further development assistant and partnered with a third-party firm to turn the design into a WordPress theme, continuing to focus it to Campus Philly workflow.
• Look for cost-cutting measures — Most often, organizations are underinvesting in IT and web architecture, but still, there are sometimes ways that organizations could cut costs, in ways like hosting, processes, third-party work and more. We found some in this project and were able to make our costs seem increasingly sensible.
• Focus and look to the future — Campus Philly also had a career site and other projects it had interest in moving forward. Rather than taking on too much or losing focus, we called to stay on point for our three clear objectives, noting that we can move on to other projects if there’s interest there.
• Facebook Comments ease nerves — There remains a lot of concern about authentication of comments. Though not perfect, implementing Facebook-based comments is of great interest to many partners.
• Happy staff make work easier – When we look for projects to accept, a priority of ours is a work environment that seems welcoming. Campus Philly was a small staff, but they were excited by their mission and genuinely interested in the project and the organization’s future. That made the project a much more meaningful and enjoyable one.

Some Results:

• Old: temperamental, dated, cluttered and ugly site
• New: dependable, secure, clean and fresh-looking site
• Old: Required third-party development for any additional features
• New: Supported by rich open-source WordPress community
• Old: No staff with wide-ranging ability to impact website structure
• New: Deeper, more flexible staff understanding of WordPress structure to website
• Old: No search, available archives or welcoming SEO taxonomy
• New: Standard search, a decade of archives and WordPress SEO-friendly URL structure
• Old: No clear editorial strategy.
• New: Developed staff and intern goals, editorial calendar and content basics.
• Old: No social workflow.
• New: Clear strategy for sharing and developing greater social audience.
• Old: No basic staff understanding of content basics.
• New: Documentation and bootcamps offering foundation for content creation.
• Old: No clear place for support, direction and education
• New: Ample documentation offered, in addition to clear open-source community for development and content lessons.