I’m like a bus, don’t blog for ages, then blog two days in a row.
I had to share a couple of things, one I think is very cool and something which sums up the whole blog thing for me.
I’m a big fan of the elegantly-simple presentation of complex information and the appropriate use of technology, so for me, this representation in the NY Times of the number of Olympic medals won by countries over the last hundred years or so is compelling:
The blogosphere has a lot to answer for, me for one thing, but also the Stuff White People Like. As someone who is involved in a healthy internship program, this post raised a smile this morning:
Under the banner of “Web Metric Abuse”, I also wanted to bring to your attention the blog’s claim of its stats, currently 37,667,292 hits. Wow! that’s a big number and they’ve only been going since January… all those people…
Not so fast. To quote Tyler Gage played by Channing Tatum in Step Up 2: The Streets: “Yo. Lemme brek it dahn for youz”.
A web hit is a single object on a web page, e.g. a graphic – but they’re not a very good indication of what’s going on with your website, the number of people is much more informative. The SWPL blog pages are pretty object rich, let’s say 50 objects per page: 37,667,292 / 50 = 753,346 pages viewed. The blog has been going for about 240 days so 753,346 / 240 = 3140 pages viewed per day. Let’s say on average, each person views two and a half pages: 3140 / 2.5 = 1,256. So about 1,200 people are reading the blog per day – a big difference from 36 million which is the impression this metric gives.
In case you hadn’t guessed, this kind of thing drives me nuts…
Our local Longs Drug Store is already stocking for Christmas, so here’s a great stocking filler:
Guesstimation: Solving the World’s Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin by Lawrence Weinstein and John A. Adam
