Even at Christmas, Digg still sucks

admin —  December 26, 2008 — Leave a comment

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The good news going into Christmas for me was strong traffic for The Inquisitr at a time I honestly worried that we might drop right off. Christmas Eve (US time, so my Christmas Day) delivered us our 4th best day for December, and our best day since December 11.

We’ve never had any luck with Digg with the site. I’ve had some interesting conversations with people this year about other sites who rely on Digg; one person noted of another site when I noticed they’d be dropping traffic “they’re weening themselves off Digg.” I never say no to traffic, so it would be nice to have front pages on Digg, but we’ve grown without the support of Digg, except for Day 3 when we hit our only front page. Notably this isn’t the case with a number of other social voting sites who have been far more kind to us over the last nearly 8 months.

After Christmas lunch I glanced briefly at our stats, and I started seeing traffic from Digg. Not huge amounts, but more than we’d usually ever get. My first reaction: OMG, a Christmas present from Digg.

I looked for the post, and found it to be 4th in upcoming by number of Diggs. I couldn’t watch it closely, but the traffic kept coming in from it; in total we did just short of 700 page views from the mention. At about 6pm my time the post was the absolute top of upcoming by votes and sitting pretty for a front page. 11pm PDT Christmas Eve….so I’m thinking lovely, we might have a Digg spike dead on Christmas.

Then it completely disappeared, despite only showing 16 hours old at the time from submission.

It got buried.

This despite posts with half the number of votes hitting the front page before it.

I don’t know if the Digg algo unfairly marks us down, or what the story is, but what could have been, and perhaps should have been, wasn’t.

Even at Christmas, Digg still sucks.

There is a reason I spend most of my social voting time on Reddit. This just confirms it.

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Bleak Shopping Christmas

admin —  December 21, 2008 — 12 Comments

I’ve so far managed to avoid Christmas shopping, not helped by the fact that I can’t stand crowds….probably some sort of medical thing, but I feel claustrophobic in large crowds and ill to the point of near panic. Only at Christmas I might add, I wonder if there’s a phobia for that?

But I digress: she who must be obeyed spent 4 hours shopping on Bridge Road Richmond yesterday, long famed as one of Melbourne’s cut price fashion strips, and usually busy at the best of times. Her exact words to me is that she couldn’t believe how quiet the shops were.

She also said that she’d heard shop owners discussing how quiet Christmas trade was this year, and even customers saying they’d been to Chadstone (the largest shopping center in the Southern Hemisphere) and that they could easily find a park, which in good times is hard any day, let alone a week prior to Christmas.

Our local shopping strip Camberwell has definitely been quieter for months, and while the number of people is up getting close to Christmas, it’s not the mad house you’d expect in a good year. I can drive the strip in under 10 minutes at lunchtime on a Saturday (so yesterday)….

God knows then how the SMH is saying spending will be up $700m this Christmas. I’m going to head to Chaddy Monday morning for a quick shop, and will report back then, but it certainly smells like bad times to me.

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Sure sign News Ltd is bleeding money: The ultimate ad sell out on News.com.au

admin —  December 19, 2008 — 7 Comments

We knew times were tough, but when you see an ad run on News Ltd’s (News Corps Australian arm) news.com.au that looks like this….

Notably I’ve never seen news.com.au with background ads before (both sidebars, a common thing on some celeb blogs), but to force an overlay like this. Either the money was brilliant, or times are tough. I’m betting on the latter

Thanks to Mo for the shot, I couldn’t create one with the elephant overlay on my MacPro.

skitched-20081219-180502.jpg

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How long now for the Australian Car Industry?

admin —  December 15, 2008 — 6 Comments

Key Automotive Statistics 2007.pdf (page 15 of 29)

The above chart comes from Key Automotive Statistics from the The Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.

With GM likely to file for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy before Christmas with the bailout package failing to pass the US Senate, and Chrysler and Ford not far behind it, how long now for the Australian Car Industry?

It’s getting so bad that even Toyota is starting to make cuts, be it primarily at the top, although reports from the States also indicate some production lines are stopping due to a backlog of inventory as well.

No amount of money from Rudd is going to save the Australian car industry now.

Ironically it may be our best export earner and best local innovator who may be the first to go. According to stats, the bulk of our export market is to the Middle East, with the bulk of those sales coming from Holden.

Maybe they might hold on to Holden even in bankruptcy, but don’t count on it. The chart above shows 3 years of losses leading into this year; the product might be good, but a couple of billion in exports doesn’t counter growing loses that are bound to be far worse this year with Australia slowly sliding into a recession (and we’re only not in one due to farm output).

Ford is the best placed of the US car makers going forward financially, but they still lag behind GM (Holden) locally, so the Ford plant will be at risk.

Toyota is easiest to swap out, after all Toyota makes Camry’s the world over, and the Aurion is just a Camry with a V6 engine and some different body work, not exactly hard to replace with an overseas plant.

My prediction: at least one manufacturer will quit Australia in the next 6 months, possibly sooner. If we have any car industry left by 2010, it will be either by miracle, or so much Government subsidy that each car could be given away for free.

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On servers and MediaTemple

admin —  December 11, 2008 — 16 Comments

I had to bite the bullet today and upgrade from MediaTemple’s Dedicated virtual Extreme to a proper dedicated box for The Inquisitr. It may sound strange that we even started on a DV but the MT specs are the equivalent of a basic server anyway, and actually better than a few dedicated boxes I’ve had over the years. I also loved being in the cloud, and one thing I’ll say for it: it never crashed. Sure, we’d have the occasional heavy load, but even under complete stress, the DV server never once failed, and that wouldn’t have ever been the case with a dedicated box.

So now we’re going to the Nitro. $750/ mth US. Expensive when you’re going from $150 US a month, but it’s a gamble.

It’s a gamble in terms of traffic. We’ve had 3 days now of slow server due to traffic, and we got a front page on Fark this morning AND a link from CollegeHumor and the site shit itself in unprecedented fashion. The server never died, but DB errors, site not load etc etc. Not MT’s fault, simply a volume of traffic vs resources issue.

I didn’t want to upgrade yet, and on our usual daily load what we had was fine (which these days is 30-60k page views a day), but the issue then becomes one that if we do 100 or 200k days (yesterday was 197k) we’re actually losing more traffic due to slow provision or no provision at all. It’s an investment in future growth and to best cater for our peaks.

One thing I did want to say about MediaTemple: just brilliant. No migration on this end: I get the same IP, same control panel, same everything except greatly improved resources. Better still: the server will be on for us in 2-6 hours MAX. I know of no company that can provision servers so quickly. Brilliant, and I can’t speak highly enough of them…well, presuming everything goes smoothly with the upgrade 🙂

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Fence sitting on an Australian Bill of Rights

admin —  December 10, 2008 — 6 Comments

So the Governments latest shiny media promotion tool is an Australian Bill of Rights, starting with a “nationwide consultation on human rights.”

I’m not quite sure where I sit on it, at least until what’s going to be in it becomes clear. The Libs have come out hard against it naturally, and any over extension of the nanny state caused by a Bill of Rights is something that should concern most fair people.

However I might be for it if it included one magic ingredient sorely missing from the Australian Constitution (and presuming a Bill of Rights would be enrished by Constitution amendment you’d presume it would have similar standing). Free Speech.

Free speech that includes freedom of the press and freedom for any citizen to speak within reason.

Sadly though it would appear at least now that an Australian Bill of Rights would result in a chilling effect on free speech, with targets including “promotion of religious tolerance and fundamental human rights” sounding an awful lot like you can’t speak out against a religion for example.

Free speech IS a fundamental human right. The fact that the Government hasn’t mentioned it isn’t surprising given they’re trying to censor with internet and they arrest journalists for keeping sources secret. The nanny state has a fringe of big brother about it in 2008, lets hope that a Bill of Rights doesn’t make the situation worse.

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More sloppy newspaper reporting on job ads

admin —  December 8, 2008 — 4 Comments

You’d think it was the end of the world when you see things like this crap from The Oz

“Ads in newspapers suffered the biggest two-month fall in the 30-year history of the ANZ job ads survey.”

Of course the newspaper figures are always quoted first

Jobs ads in newspapers fell by 12 per cent to 11,767, following October’s 12.1 per cent fall, and declined by a yearly pace of 42.7 per cent.

And then the internet job stats follow

Internet advertisements, meanwhile, dropped by 8.4 per cent in November, to a near two-year low of 199,433, following October’s 5.5 per cent drop, and falling by an annual pace of 16.6 per cent.

Notice the meanwhile, because the internet job ads are an after thought.

But look at the hard figures: 11,767 newspaper job ads vs 199,433 internet job ads.

Memo to Australian journalists: no reasoned objective view of these figures could possibly maintain the primacy of newspaper job advertising rates in any report on job ads. Indeed, the newspaper job advertising marketplace in Australia is so low, there would be a reasoned argument that they shouldn’t be mentioned at all.

You wouldn’t mention a drop in the sales of Alfa Romeos as being representative of the whole car sales market, so why in 2008 are Australian newspapers still doing the same with job ads.

Fail with a dose of delusion on top.

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Ghostbusters Video Game

admin —  December 5, 2008 — 6 Comments

Via Lee, Want. Imagine playing this with a Wii remote.

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Missing F9 + F11 new Mac Keyboard

admin —  December 4, 2008 — 7 Comments

So my old Mac keyboard died earlier this week, or to be more precise the TAB and CAPS LOCK keys stopped working, so it was time for a new keyboard.

I’d seen the new flat key Mac keyboards before, but after 25 years of typing I liked having raised keys. However I wasn’t impressed by the non-Apple keyboards at StreetWise (a great Apple reseller in Hawthorn) so I purchased one of the flat keyboards instead.

Not the wireless one, because bizarrely Apple did away with the numeric keypad on that, and I need a numeric keypad, 2 years at Bankers Trust in 94-95 where I spent a couple of hours a day data entering numbers into Excel means today I can enter numbers with 99% accuracy blindfolded using the numeric keypad. Hence I also rarely enter numbers using the numbers on the Qwerty side.

First let me say a couple of days in: best keyboard I’ve ever owned. The flat keys make typing easier. I’m not sure if it’s the angle, the need to press them less, what ever it is….but I’m typing more quickly and my fingers are taking less stress.

But there was a catch: the F9 and F11 keys weren’t working.

F11 is Expose and F9 clears the Windows off the screen. Combined they are two of my favorite features of a Mac, and I use both constantly.

Stranger still, unlike my Macbook Pro, the new keyboard doesn’t have a function key, so that wasn’t the trick.

Hit Google, and here’s the answer if you ever get caught: F11 is now F3, and F9 is Command+F3. There’s even a little Expose graphic drawn on F3.

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The Inquisitr November

admin —  December 2, 2008 — 5 Comments

Pageviews: 1,085,598 (per Google Analytics)

Traffic profile: highest post accounted for only 5.8% of traffic. Top 5 posts accounted for less than 20% of traffic.

Finances: profitable (that is, more income than the cost of paying writers excluding me)

Cash Flow: same as last month, tight. Net 60 on ads, so we won’t be making any significant changes until February 09.

Technorati Rank:764

CPM: steady, although can vary in a wide range day to day.

Short term risks: it’s silly season for web traffic, so we’ll either go up in December/ January, or down. Working naturally towards the former.

Note: lots more people read the Month 6 report than normal. My thx for dropping by. I have never, nor do I intend to give a long report every month, but instead at milestones, so I’ll likely do a long report at 9mths and 12mths. Also I’ve switched to month reporting not anniversary reporting, at least for now.

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