They talked about everything from uncovering hidden interest points in lesser-known players during the NFL draft and Glenn Beck using online audience interests to inform his radio and TV content to the fear of the “tyranny of the popular” in the newsroom and how being great journalist is just like being a great parent.

Have a listen to it all, and let us know how you think data has impacted how you create and consume the news.

    _sf_async_config.disableCookies = true

With disableCookies set, the Chartbeat cookie (_chartbeat2) will never be created.

How does this change affect what I’ll see in my dashboard?
As we mentioned, Chartbeat currently only uses cookies to track if a user is new or returning. So, when you set disableCookies to true, Chartbeat will not be able to tell if a user is new or returning. In the future, other metrics may depend on the presence of the cookie, but we’ll keep you posted on anything that does.

Depending on your implementation, you may have some visitors allow cookies and some not. If that’s the case, Chartbeat would report new and returning values for only the visitors who have allowed cookies.

As always, if you have any questions hit up our Chartcorps on Twitter or via email.

For a long time people have looked at the social audience, in particular, as its own discrete segment living in a vacuum to be treated totally differently from the rest of your audience. But really, they affect your site traffic and engage with your content like everyone else, don’t they? Shouldn’t you know just how much they’re affecting your site? We sure think so.

So within the new Social View on your Chartbeat dashboard, you’ll see the whole world of your social visitors. There’s a ton of easy-to-digest information about what’s going on with your site as seen through the social web.

In a single view, you can see what people are saying about you, how many of your current visitors came from social channels, and what pages are powerhouses on social networks.

Social traffic can make the difference between an ordinary day and an extraordinary day. It’s important that you can now dig through that list of your most social pages and figure out what makes them different, so you can get the same kind of oomph out of the rest of your pages.

If you see a big spike in traffic at the same time as you’re blowing up on Twitter, embrace it – see what people are saying, engage in conversation, retweet. People want to interact with you – make it easy for them to know there’s a real person behind all that HTML…

…and behind all that iOS code.

Your iPhone and iPad app is kind of like an entirely different site. It reaches a potentially totally new audience for you. It’s important to track the differences between your site and your apps.

So, we’re beta testing an iOS app tracking feature, too. If you have an iPhone or iPad app, install away through your dashboard sites page and let us know what you think. (Remember: the key word is “beta,” so we’re looking for your feedback and understanding that it’s not done yet).

And don’t forget to sign up for the Chartcorps virtual workshop to get a more in-depth look at social, iOS tracking and everything in between.

While your site is amazing at some stuff, it probably needs some TLC in other areas. But which ones? Is your audience ending up with your competitors because their search results are amazing while loving you because you’re killer at social?

It’s time you knew how you stack up against sites like you. As part of the Chartbeat network, you’re one of thousands of sites we monitor every day.

Peer Stats

We’ve anonymized (so no one knows your site is compared to theirs and you won’t know exactly who is in your Peer Group either) and aggregated our network of data, filtered it through some intense algorithms and will now be delivering it in context for you in a new feature called Peer Stats.

Peer Stats let you see information about sites that are similar to yours. What does similar mean, you ask? Great question. Right now it’s based on a bunch of stuff like your daily traffic pattern, size of your site, and your industry. This last part we need your help with.

The first time you log into your dashboard, we’ll give you a quick survey asking you what kind of site you have, so we can make sure you’re matched up with the right competitors.

Big sites are different from small sites, and your tech blog is different from that guy’s Tumblr with pictures of dogs standing on things. You treat yourselves differently, and so do we.

Notable Pages

In fact, because we know your site is different from all the others, we’ve also given you new ways to learn about your own content. Until now you’ve seen top pages content – only those pages with the most traffic.

Now, we’re introducing Notable Pages, which highlight the most interesting aspects of your site, regardless of the amount of traffic they’re receiving.

Say you have a page that’s suddenly getting 99% of all traffic from Social sources. Whoa. Huge. Important to know why that’s the case when the rest of your site is averaging around 20% of its traffic from Social, right? Maybe you can learn from this page and apply those insights across your site immediately.

Or there’s a page that’s suddenly surging with new user visits vs. the returning users that it normally gets. You should probably create some new content or related links or the like to make sure you treat these new users carefully to convert them into loyal members.

Notable Pages and Peer Stats give you a bit more context to the story of your site. They give you an instant answer to how your site’s doing today.

Remember, our Chartcorps team is hosting a weekly virtual workshop for you to get the full rundown of all the new dashboard can do. Sign up!

Everyone wants it, no one knows just how to pin it down. So we’ve all been stuck with our second choice, the back up, plan B — the page view. Ick.

Who cares that people are loading your page? We need to know how they’re interacting – with what and for how long. As we’ve already ranted and raged about back in January, that’s the only real measure of great content.

Well, it’s your lucky day/week/forever, friend. We’ve wooed engagement out of her secret hiding place and pinned her down for all to use.

So let’s show off your newest metric Engaged Time:

Engaged Time is dissected in a few ways:

1. Total amount of time your visitors are have spent actively browsing your site – in human terms: days, weeks, months or years. Not billions of absolutes because, well, what the hell would you do with those massive numbers?

Think about it this way: Total Engaged Time is how long you’ve had your users’ undivided attention today. If 2,000 people have been interacting with your site for an hour each today, that means you’ve had about three months of attention on your site in one day. Three months is how long it takes Mercury to orbit the Sun. Your site engagement being that long is pretty nuts.

Oh, also, since today is Monday, we also let you compare today’s total to Monday last week, the week before, and so on for the past month. You can gauge how your site is doing and see if your sparkly new content is making the difference you’re hoping it does. It shows if you’ve had a good day compared to your usual days.

2. Average amount of time your visitors are spending on each page.  There’s more to understanding a page than just seeing how many people are there – let average engaged minutes help you understand how much they really like it – like, this very second.

Oh, and there’s more! Check out the Content View in your dashboard. See that list of pages? Below each one, you’ll see how many visitors are on that page (like you always could), but now zero in on that nifty little click icon on the right.

That’s the average engaged time for that page – and you can compare and contrast to see which of your pages are doing well at keeping people’s attention.

See a page that’s getting a ton of engagement? Click on that.

This is your Page View that has detailed information on its traffic and engagement. Right under your usual traffic timeline, you get a timeline of average engagement over the course of the day. And that number on the right? That’s the total amount of engaged time it’s gotten today.

Now do something about it

You know what everything is, so let’s talk about how you should put it into action.

Picture a page on your site with particularly low traffic. It happens to all of us. But then you notice that this page has ridiculously high engagement compared to your other pages. People are into this page, way into this page. The people who come to it aren’t just bouncing off, but actually sticking around to check out the content you’ve crafted.

A page with high engagement but low traffic

You made this, so give yourself a pat on the back. But then get back to work.

You need to make sure other people see this page too, so send it to everyone you know: put it on Facebook and Twitter, and make sure people notice it on your homepage. Figure out what it is about this page that’s keeping people engaged and apply that genius to the rest of the content.

Oh, but you work isn’t done with that one page. Not when you notice something about another one of your pages – that one that you’ve known to have a ton of traffic, so you generally left it alone.

The flip side: high traffic with low engagement

But, now that you have Engaged Time, you see it has really low engagement. So, there’s something about it that’s drawing people in – maybe a good title, an interesting topic, or you got lucky with a link from Reddit. But the low engagement stats are showing you that it just isn’t keeping people’s attention. Is it the writing? Do you need to spice it up? If your traffic is coming from a link, do you need something that’s more interesting to visitors from that other site?

The possibilities to awesome-up your pages are endless. In fact, our Chartcorps team is hosting a weekly virtual workshop for you to get the full rundown of all the new dashboard can do. Sign up!

How are you hoping to/already using Engaged Time as the ultimate kick-ass metric?

Today, I’m excited to announce the next chapter in Chartbeat’s history: a new round of funding, new look, new dashboard, and a whole bunch of new features. That’s a lot to get through, but I promise to be brief.

A New Round and A New Partner

We’ve just closed a $9.5m Series B round of funding led by Josh Stein at Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Saul Klein at Index Ventures, and they’re joined by some of our favorite Angel investors.

Saul has been a constant friend and guide over the last three years and helped us take the time to find the right partner that will continuously help us push Chartbeat and the real-time revolution forward. We found that partner in Josh Stein. Josh took the time to get to know us over the course of a year, has incredible experience of building great SaaS companies like Box and SugarCRM. Most importantly, Josh just plain got it. Thanks Saul, thanks Josh, we’re going to make you proud.

A New Look

The first thing you’ll notice when you hit Chartbeat.com today is a very different look. We’re growing up. And growing up means making sure we’re as good looking on the outside as our dashboards are on the inside.

We’re also making things simpler. Newsbeat has become Chartbeat Publishing: the command center for all serious publishers of media and content.

A New Dashboard

We’re also rolling out a brand new dashboard with advanced functionality to all Chartbeat users over the next few days. When you get your hands on it, you’ll see a few key elements that we’ve focused on:

1. Real engagement

Common understandings of engagement have always relied upon explicit actions (a like or a share) taken by a few people or traditionally inaccurate guesstimetrics like “time-on-site.” At Chartbeat, we wanted to accurately understand how engaged each person who visits your site is, not just the people who hit the like button.

So we built Engaged Time. Window open in another tab? Doesn’t count. The visitor isn’t actively viewing, reading, commenting on the page? Doesn’t count. With Chartbeat’s unique way of measuring, Engaged Time counts the amount of time someone spends actively interacting with your site and enables you to see your site from a completely different perspective.

For the very first time, you can finally go beyond eyeballs and clicks and understand which content is making an impact, what’s engaging people’s heads and hearts.

2. Data in context

When you’re looking at your data – whether Chartbeat or otherwise – I bet the first question you ask yourself is “Is this good?”. You generally know if you’re doing well compared to yourself, but what about your competitors — those that are fighting for the same eyes and hearts that you are?

We’re introducing Peer Stats, which does just that.

Now, you can see your data, put in context with the anonymized, aggregated stats of your sites like yours all in real time.

Are we getting as much social traffic as we should? Is our page load speed fast enough? For the first time you’ll have a frame to understand your performance in the context of the wider web, so you know where to focus and when to celebrate.

3. Your data wherever you are

When something important happens, you want to know about it — whether it’s on your site, your iPhone or iPad app or across the social web. So why should you only see real-time stats of who’s on your site? You shouldn’t.

Chartbeat is going beyond the site. From now on you’ll be able to get real-time data from your iPhone or iPad app as well as your site. This feature is currently in beta so we’re going to need your feedback, but we’re super excited about it.

We’ve also launched a new Social View that brings the social data you need into one dashboard. You’ll get loads of insight into not just who’s talking about you where, but how that’s affecting your site traffic.

We hope you like all the new things we’ve been working on. The only thing we ask of you in return is your feedback. Let us know what you think about your new dashboard as you’re rolled into it over the next few days.

We can’t thank you enough for the love and support thus far. We’re excited to get to work and take this thing to an even higher level.

When you hire world-class engineers, you need to give them freedom to build and create. Some people think that’s a scary challenge. We don’t. Because we’ve developed a unique and crazy successful solution.

Percent Time
It’s fairly common in the tech world to have “percent time,” or a set amount of time given to employees to explore ideas outside of the set product roadmap.

The thinking here is that when you allow engineers the ability to scratch their own itches, you end up with happier hackers, less burnout, and most importantly new ideas. Many of the products you use every day started out as a small hack project like Google’s Gmail and Facebook’s birthday calendar.

We take this itch-scratching, happy-hacker time very seriously, though also a bit differently than most companies.

Every six weeks we press pause on roadmaps, projections, and meetings. During this week, affectionately known as Hack Week, everyone is given free reign to build, create, or design whatever piques their interest. The only rule is that you have to demo something once Friday rolls around.

Hacks range from data visualizations to monitoring tools to Arduino-powered empty-water-cooler sensors.

Chartbeat Labs
Hack Week projects are often way too amazing to keep to ourselves, so we blow them out and polish them up and share them through Chartbeat Labs, a public directory of awesome visualizations and tools built around Chartbeat data.

We’re still working on getting everything up there, but there’s a wealth of interesting stuff just waiting for you:

• Around the World: A real-time map of who’s visiting your site and where they are in the world.
• Big Board: For real time to be a success, you need to live in it, in a full environment of data. The Chartbeat Big Board is perfect for having an ambient view of activity on your site.
• Universe: Your site is a galaxy of pages. Watch them pop in and out of orbit.
• Traffic Control: You know there are people on your site, and you know what pages they’re on. Using Traffic Control, you can watch them move from page to page and understand where your most popular and most important paths are.
• Big Board Mosaic (just for Newsbeat clients): Easily understand your traffic at a glance. Big colorful blocks that tell you how much traffic a page has, and where on the web they came from.

Most importantly, we try to open source anything and everything we can. We love seeing what you guys can accomplish using our API and your own data to create something truly unique.

Want to get in the hack game? Share what you’ve done with us on Twitter. Or if you’re the shy type, kick it over to us at support@chartbeat.com.

Nick Denton said it best on MSNBC’s Rock Center segment when he shows off the Chartbeat Big Board  - your top pages, all prettied up for the big screen – and talks about just how important it is for Gawker Media.

These guys display the Big Board in every room of their office. Seriously. We’ve seen it. It’s up there so everyone – not just the research analysts and strategy execs in their back offices – can instantly see how they’re doing.

That’s how real-time data should be used. Front and center for everyone to see and take action on.

Are you guys using the Chartbeat Big Board? Take a pic and tweet it our way.

Video courtesy of MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/46662714#46662714

Direct traffic. It’s a nebulous beast. Most web analytics products toss any visitor without referrer information into this category. That means any number of people like those who have:

• Typed in the exact URL
• Bookmarked the URL
• Come from a URL using HTTPS
• Clicked on a link from a non-browser-based application (e.g., email, Twitter, IM)

Basically, we just took some time to really understand and identify the purpose of each page from your user’s point of view. That led us to understand what Direct Traffic means on a more intelligent level. And that allows you, in turn, to understand your users on a more intelligent level.

What does all this mean in the end? It means you should go buy your social team a beer – they’re doing a lot more than most people give them credit for.