Listal.com a hit in Czech?

haha, couldn't help but comment on this, since i'm a czech-canadian:

alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=listal.com&url=listal.com

Czech republic leads everyone in page rank for listal.com, and also has 3rd highest visits:

United States: 27.5%
United Kingdom: 10.7%
Czech Republic: 7.8%
Germany 6.6%
Malaysia 5.3%
Canada 4.1%
India 2.9%
etc..

So a couple of thoughts occurred to me.

1. Over the holidays, I added my dad's 100+ czech movie collection, all with posters, nearly all had to manually added thru IMDB number, and I also added as many czech actors images I could find. Could adding so many country-specific links bring a boost of visitors from that country thru google searches?

2. US has less than a third of visits. Though the site originates in UK, I expected a lot more US visits. This could be a good or bad sign. Bad, as in there is not enough US exposure of this site. Good, as in maybe Listal is a lot more multi-cultural than typical social networking sites.

3. Assuming listal.com has a big multi-national appeal, should we perhaps concentrate on the following to boost listal's traffic?
a) create custom language-specific versions of listal, complete with option to view movies in original title, or in that language's translated title.
b) the top users contributers to this site, perhaps pick nations throughout europe and try to manually add as much as you can about their top films, such as Polish films, russian films, swedish films, etc.. It might boost that country's traffic how Czech traffic *may* have been boosted. (i'm assuming my actions helped it, unless Tom did an advertising blitz in Czech Republic recently, lol).
c) any way to boost exposure in the US as well?

4. Should we also concentrate on a seperate review sections, descriptions, and even tags, for language-specific localized versions of listal, or would it be a big mess to do that?

I think the ability to view the pages of Listal in different languages would be a great help to the site. Also, I agree that the correct title for the respective user's country would be a plus (this would include UK release names I hope, as I hate being lumped in with the American titles).

On 3b), I don't think this is quite necessary. I go through all my own foreign films adding as much as I can, but if there is no demand then it may be pointless (especially if the film needs to be manually added). If the film has people who have watched it (and is therefore in the site database) then I might add a missing poster if I can find one, but otherwise it would just give the top leaders more points while leaving the people who might actually be watching the films out.

I think that this topic is interesting. I was online one day and suddenly noticed that there was a huge influx of Malaysian users, and more recently there seems to have been an increase of British. You have to bear in mind however that for some reason Great Britain and the UK are two different entries, which may be causing some miscalculation about the actual number. ;)

Yeah, that Malaysian influx is puzzling as well. But I still think manually adding foreign titles will help bring in more visitors (although perhaps the english-only aspect of listal may keep them from returning). Reason being its not that easy for casual users to add foreign films if they're not in listal's database. If I tried to tell my dad how to manually retrieve the IMDB number and then enter it into listal, he would've told me to bugger off. Instead, I added all those titles myself, and he finds great use in being able to go thru his czech movie collection and see all actors and directors and rate his favorite films.

The handy solution would be for them to already be in the database, but I have no idea how that all works. Tom said something about severing ties with IMDB altogether, so perhaps a better system is on the horizon afterall? I have added a lot of Japanese/Korean films by hand and I know how annoying it can be, but if you haven't watched the film it would get a bit repetative adding it, deleting it and adding all that information that might not even be used. I do see your point though.

I'm from Czech republic and I'm trying to promote Listal as much as I can. I saw Members page (www.listal.com/members/) some time ago and Czech republic was the last country in Top countries. There were only about 5 Czech members that time. :-/ So I wrote an article about Listal on my czech blog (onesork.wordpress.com/2007/03/10/listal/). After this article about 30 new members from Czech republic have jointed.

I think that this boom :) have confused Alexa.com - as you can see at the bottom of this page alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=listal.com&url=listal.com

Where people go on Listal.com:
onesork.listal.com - 1% (my profile ;-))

nice! thanks for the promotion, Jan.

dekuji moc krat. :)

Promotion is good! I've posted it on my LiveJournal too and it's in my signature in most places now. Looks like you did a good job there Jan Onesork! :)

I'm glad I can help :)

All promotion is good, thanks :)

I think alexa is pretty inaccurate especially with relatively small sites like this one, here are some stats from google analytics (top 5 countries) :

United States : 32%
United Kingdom : 15%
Canada : 6%
Australia : 5%
Brazil : 4%

Localized version would be nice in the future and filtering content by country/language would be good to have.

I think the ability to view the pages of Listal in different languages would be a great help to the site. Also, I agree that the correct title for the respective user's country would be a plus (this would include UK release names I hope, as I hate being lumped in with the American titles).

That would be a huge improvement for the site:

1. Some friends of mine would use the site if they mustn't go into deep investigation anymore to find the international title of a movie.

2. I could print out my "Want to watch" and go my local video store without "translating" the titles manually.

I agree. I mean, for me, it's handy to know some of the Czech film's english names, such as the Oscar hits 'Closely Watched Trains' and 'The Shop on Main Street', but in my dad's collection, he finds it aggravating to refer to those movies in English titles if he only knows them by their original Czech name. So I think a system-wide setting to display English titles first, or option 2, display original language first, would be beneficial. Or a 3rd option, display both titles.

Or go different approach, and make each listal entry user-defined, so each user can set his own default title as 'primary' as well as poster image 'primary', and fuse movies and DVDs together. And when a user is logged in, the movie's info page is formatted according to each user's settings.

...is there any chance to get such a feature until... let's say the next 3 months?

I vote for a quick fix to make the 'Original Title' the PRIMARY name, and English title as secondary.