When
· Naughties
· · 2005
· · · December
· · · · 04 (4 entries)
Google Analytics · Herewith a report on a fairly-typical week of Google Analytics numbers. I was going to work this into the regular weekly statistics report, but I’m not at all sure I’m going to go on running analytics, so as a separate post this will remain available either way. [Update on screen sizes.] ...
Ils sont fous ces Français! · Translating from Goscinny/Uderzo to Hunter S. Thompson: there’s bad craziness going on over in France. Apparently, there’s a move afoot to ban Free Software, and I can only think “Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence”. Malice or incompetence aside, in the unlikely event that this silly thing passes, it could hardly be enforced without building a cyber-police-state of an efficiency and comprehensiveness beyond the wildest dreams of the Beijing regime. If any of my readers are French citizens, you might want to call your local politician’s office or write a letter to your local editor or whatever. Here’s some more from Henry Story, with French-language links. [Update: Gilles Gravier writes: “It’s not all free software that they are trying to ban... Just software that enables distribution of copyrighted material which is not equiped with means of tracing who shares what with whom... Obviously, open-source software makes it easy to remove such tracing means, so is a no-no for SACEM (who are desperately trying to keep alive an old model for making money over artists instead of trying to turn to the future and find new adapted ways).” And now I see that he’s written more on the subject.]
Pix You Like · The idea of the little picture on the right side of the screen, aside from the fact that it pleases my eye, is that it’s supposed to tempt you into wandering into the back rooms here at ongoing. So, does it work? Not very well; there’ve been twenty-five thousand or so such visits since ongoing launched in 2003. It’s evenly distributed; the top article so visited got 476 and the tenth most popular 284. The ten ongoing fragments most visited via the little picture are What Japan Looks Like, California Wedding, Lustre-Lustrous, Javapolis Jet-lag, Warm Wind Off the Ocean, Dynamic Java, The Island Rose Trip: Day Two, Foo Camp 2004, More Patent Funnies, and Genx Status. Unsurprisingly, most of them have lots of pictures, except for the last, which has only one.
Buying Search Traffic · On impulse, I just twiddled the ongoing software on my staging server so that when you do a search in the little box up at the top, it goes to Yahoo not Google. I ran a bunch of searches, and in terms of result quality, there was nothing to choose from between them. Yahoo seemed a little fresher; on this Sunday it had Friday’s entries pretty well indexed, while Google was only half there; they’re both OK for Thursday. So, at this moment in time, my search box, and a zillion others like it, are pointing to Google just because that’s the way we set it up, and it’s actual real work to go changing production systems, and the competition so far isn’t significantly better. I have no idea what the proportion of search coming through this kind of thing is, as compared to the volume going through the search-engine home pages. I bet that if you count the toolbars on the browsers, it’s getting up there. Via Google’s AdSense For Search, you can already get paid for sending searches to Google. I won’t use it, though, because if I read the terms and conditions correctly, you have to include a Google logo. Screw that; I like my minimalist little search box, and nobody but me and my employer get any branding here. I’m sure Yahoo has a competitive offering, but I haven’t tracked it down. I’ll tell you one thing for sure though; if the search engines retain their quality-of-service parity, pretty soon the traffic will be dealt out totally based on who’s willing to pay the most for it. Where can I buy shares in Firefox?
