duncanriley.com | blogging is not a spectator sport

The Inquisitr By The Numbers

admin — June 6, 2008 — 11 Comments

Today marks 1 month since The Inquisitr launched. I was going to write something over on the site about the 1 month mark but the last time I wrote a post about the site people used OutBrain to rate it poorly, besides, I don’t do self indulgent well anyway…well my personal blog aside 🙂

Having said that being transparent to a point is an important part of blogging/ publishing 2.0 so here’s some numbers from 6pm AEST June 6. Some constantly fluctuate so hence the proviso in terms of when the figures apply to

Page views

Awstats 5 May- 4:15 5 June: 415080
Google Analytics 9 May – 5 June: 136,768 (note missing the opening big 4 days)

Subscribers
Feedburner: 2155 across 4 feeds.

Technorati
Authority: 339
Rank: 12505

Techmeme
Leaderboard 51st
Bloggerboard (30 day rolling) 51st, (7 day rolling) 32nd
Writers: me (30 day rolling) 29th (includes two TC posts), (7 day rolling) 10th

Webstats
Alexa one week: 36,041 3months: 349,347
Compete: 129,714 “people” for May
Quantcast: predicts a monthly unique of 82,426

Services running on the site
Disqus
ValueClickMedia
BuySellAds.com
Adsense (one unit only…and not for long)
Lijit
FriendFeed (via WordPress plugin)

Services tried but down
Pubmatic
Outbrain (subject to review)

Sponsor(s)
The Metaverse Journal

Widgets Running
Display: Techmeme, BlogCatalog
Available for users: iGoogle | Netvibes | Opera | webpage/ blog

There’s probably other things as well I’ll think of later. My thanks to those who have supported myself and the team along the way. After a low second week the site is starting to trend upwards, not huge overnight growth but sustainable, solid growth. More next time.

In Web 2.0 Inquisitr

Plurk Widget

admin — June 2, 2008 — 3 Comments

Might add this to the sidebar. Let’s see if the wave of new members continues first.

In Uncategorized plurk

GameOn, ACMI and Copyright Stupidity

admin — June 1, 2008 — 8 Comments

gameon We headed into town this morning to see the Australian Centre for the Moving Image’s GameOn Exhibition at Federation Square. The exhibition highlights the history of computer gaming, with displays from various eras and plenty of actual games to play.

Figuring that given it’s nothing more than a big collection of arcade games I took my camera to get some pics, only to be told AFTER I checked the bag that I couldn’t take pics (I was holding my camera…go figure). I grumbled about the insanity of copyright as I usually do, and went into the exhibition.

About 5 minutes in there’s a huge arcade game on a projector wall which you could play. Great, hit the start button, it gives me a list of games to play. Click pacman….and then get a Mame screen telling me that it’s the Z80 version of Pacman. Yep, a display that won’t let people take pictures was using downloaded and arguably illegal ROM’s on a local copy of MAME.

Now to be fair they may have gotten permission from every single publisher of the various ROM’s they were using, but it’s unlikely.

Personally I have zero issue with them doing what they did, but to say that I can’t take pictures due to copyright when they were breaching copyright themselves: FAIL.

Of course the other stupid thing: people were walking around taking pictures with their mobile phones anyway. My iPhone takes poor pics so I didn’t get any good ones, it would appear the ban due to copyright was for dedicated cameras only.

I shouldn’t be surprised by this: copyright has ruined the tourist experience in so many walks of life now. When I was a kid you could go to an exhibition and they’d want you to take photos, now it’s all about control and prevention. The saddest part is this is the world my son will grow up in; and yes, he had his camera with him today as well. Apparently a 5 year old with a Fisher Price digital camera presents a clear and present copyright danger. 🙁

In domestic life acmi, fail, gameon

JustAddMe: Simple Sidebar List

admin — May 28, 2008 — 4 Comments

JustAddMe offers a simple sidebar widget with links to social networks. My only gripe is that the list is a little limited, but please feel free to add me as above. Also FriendFeed here

If anyone knows of a deeper alternative leave a comment. I’m lazy so I like the idea 🙂

In Web 2.0

Microsoft Mix Remixed

admin — May 28, 2008 — Leave a comment

It’s interesting that Animoto chose to show Ballmer during the low point in the song 🙂

In General microsoft

Twitter!

admin — May 26, 2008 — 13 Comments

This post needs to be at the top of Techmeme. That is all.

In Web 2.0 twitter

Playing With Animato

admin — May 25, 2008 — Leave a comment

Twitter Fail

Macworld Keynote (my pics)

In Web 2.0 animato

Twitter Bollocks

admin — May 22, 2008 — 15 Comments

I know the new me isn’t overly negative, and I’ve got to say that the last couple of weeks personally has been amazing. I’m discovering new things, seeding great conversations about the new wave of blogging, and I’ve perhaps never been more excited about the 2.0 space since my days at the Blog Herald.

But every now and then you have to call a spade a you know what.

This post from Twitter makes me feel ill.

Lets see, here’s a company that just took $15m, a company that sees itself as a utility player, which is a fair call, and yet we get this

We’ve gone through our various databases, caches, web servers, daemons, and despite some increased traffic activity across the board, all systems are running nominally. The truth is we’re not sure what’s happening. It seems to be occurring in-between these parts.

I’m sorry, but WTF???

Ah, but there’s a solution, apparently it’s about usage widgets:

We’re busy working on instrumenting and adding meters to provide visibility into what’s slowing Twitter down. We’ll use this data both to alleviate the current woes and to help inform our long-term architecture work to make Twitter a utility service people can count on

I noted in the Inquisitr post the argument that people who complain about Twitter downtime will never leave, and that’s a fair call, but how can Twitter, this far into the process, have zero idea as to what is going wrong? More importantly, how can VC’s invest in a startup that is apparently completely clueless?

I’m all for transparency, and the post from Twitter is beyond overdue, but at the same time admitting things are going wrong is one thing, saying you have absolutely no idea why this is the case should scare small children.

It’s like the X-Files, I want to believe, but I read this and I see complete and utter bollocks.

In Web 2.0

Is Labor’s Class Warfare Anti-Environment?

admin — May 13, 2008 — 15 Comments

The new Labor led Australian Government will announce its first budget tonight and harking back to the class-warfare of the past, Labor is expected to increase taxes for the so-called rich, and at the same time reduce or remove non-means tested benefits such as the baby bonus.

I won’t spend the post writing about how the seriously rich hardly pay any tax anyway and that a couple earning $100k a year in Australia isn’t rich in an age of unaffordable housing and astronomical rents (for the record we pay $550/ wk for a 3×1 in Canterbury, VIC). Consider that the average weekly wage for men in Australia is now $1101, or $57,000 a year, and a women the average is $725/ wk ($37.7k/ yr), so presuming both couples work the average family with 2 people working brings home $95,400 per year. (source). So apparently Labor wants to strip away breaks and bonuses from average Australians.

But I digress, because I wanted to talk about the tax increase for so-called luxury cars. Labor thinks that “luxury” cars start at $57,000. WTF? It can cost $30-$40k (even more) to put an Australian built car on the road. 4WD’s, needed in regional areas and the bush are higher than this (indeed Land Cruisers can go as high as $100k), no luxury there.

But consider this: European cars are frequently offered in Diesel variations. It’s less common with other makes, although we are slowly seeing more diesel cars. What’s the one great trait of diesel powered vehicles: they are frugal on fuel use, resulting in less consumption of oil and less environmental damage. In the age of the great Global Warming scare, shouldn’t an allegedly green friendly Government be encouraging motorists to buy more diesel cars? Wouldn’t a tax break on cars based on fuel consumption be better than INCREASING taxes on these very same cars?

For the record I drive a 2003 Toyota Echo which I’ve owned since new, it does roughly 4.5l/ 100kms.

In Bizarre

A quick week 2 Inquisitr update

admin — May 12, 2008 — 2 Comments

I’ll save all the formal stuff for a post at The Inquisitr later this week, but I’m sitting here on a Monday, nearly a week into the process, and thought I’d share some thoughts and numbers.

– I’d forgotten the joy (or pain) of running my own large WP blog. I’ve managed to break the template a number of times, including Sunday night where I thought it would be smart to auto-update the plugins. Big mistake

– Feedburner is still like a Rollercoaster years after launching. I can’t give an accurate subscriber number because it’s up and down, but it’s roughly 1200 subscribers on average one week in (highest count has been 1500+). Not huge, but more than the 300 or 400 I thought the site would get. BTW: why isn’t Feedburner using Google logins yet? have they forgotten about the service?

– All the missing bits are now fixed: about page with full bios, contact page complete with form (3 form plugins later), Twitter account here which auto updates via plugin, but painfully posts on pre-posts.

– The site is averaging around 18,000 page views a day as of yesterday (but including the entire month including pre-launch). The biggest day was Thursday (US time) where a post hit the front page of Digg. If the average holds (it wont) about 750k page views month. I’m betting on 500k, but hope it’s higher. When planning this I thought 100-200k, so I’m more than happy (its nearly hit 200k now)

– Started running some basic affiliate ads to demo the 125×125 spots. I’m not going to actively try to sell them until there’s a month worth of traffic to use, but if anyone is interested and would like to buy one now, I’m certainly open to offers.

– The writing team is working really well, I woke up Saturday to find I didn’t have a post on the front page. It was magical knowing that there was a pile of content up and I wasn’t pressured to add to it. Spent 2 hours playing with my son: it’s been a long time since I’ve felt able to do that without stressing about getting content up. I still worked both days of the weekend, but it was more leasurly and fun…well the Sunday night breaking the template and coding part aside 🙂

– slowly working my way through some value adds and partnerships. Couple of small announcements hopefully in the next few week.

– Haven’t had one headline on Techmeme yet, only the odd link in. Reddit and Digg headlines therefore have become easier to obtain. Bizarre.

In Uncategorized Inquisitr