Paul O'Flaherty

Baby Megatron Will Have Revenge

I wonder if Megatron will smile about this?

It’s good to see that the idiots are out in full force. If you haven’t heard about it, the online world is buzzing about “Baby Megatron” or at least the baby who may be called Megatron now that more than 1,000,000 (1 million) people have joined the Facebook fan page called:

Browsers, OS, Mobile, Resolution – The Top 10 Of Everything

I’m sure you’ve all heard me boasting lately (probably to the point of wanting to stab me in the eye with your pen) about how happy we’ve been with the traffic that our fledgling humor site, Daily Shite is getting.

Daily Shite is a very interesting site to me, not just because I own it, but because it is an ” every man” site. Our demographics and audience are not the tech crowd. Nor are they of any one particular niche. We’re a bit of everything for everybody, something which has come about by the fact that we don’t post anything with a  visual over roughly PG 13. In other words, no T&A, so you can browse at work, or school or with your girlfriend and not worry

This universal appeal makes the statistics gathered by tools such as Google Analytics (which is where all the stats in this post come from) incredibly interesting because it gives a more real world view of browser and OS usage than looking at the statistics for this blog or TechCrunch would. Niches tend to be skewed one way or the other and Daily Shite manages to avoid all that.

Anyway, the graphs below are based on our Google Analytics for the past 30 days (February 5th 2010 – March 7th 2010) and cover 1,427,403 unique visits (not page views, that’s a far higher number but useless here, all we want is actual user statistics).

The Top 10 Browsers:

Firefox is way out in the lead with a massive 74.77%

The big surprise here is that Chrome (11.28% of traffic) is seriously outpacing Internet Explorer (7.72%). Another surprise is that IE only makes up less than 8% of our traffic.

The break down of IE usage is also interesting with almost 72% using Internet Explorer 8 and just 3% still back on the archaic IE6.

The Top 10 Operating Systems:

Does Linux matter anymore?

No surprise that Windows in the big leader here. I am surprised to see Mac OS at nearly 23% and I’m also wondering how long it will be before iPhone and iPod (and iPad) start to eclipse Linux.

Vista is the dominant Microsoft OS at the moment with at over 40% but a big surprise is the Windows 7 adoption which is already making up over 24% of our windows based users. I expect to see both XP and Vista numbers decline over time as Win 7 adoption continues.

Top Ten Browser & Operating System Combinations

Firefox is the browser of choice

Mac users must not like Safari all that much. Firefox is getting more than 4 times the love than Safari does on it’s native system and Chrome is making decent inroads with 1.27%. Of little surprise however, is that regardless of what operating system you use, Firefox is the browser of choice.

I thought that in 2010 Java support would be almost ubiquitous, however 8.62% or 123,001 or our visitors didn’t have Java support enabled.  This can’t be accounted for by mobile visits because mobile traffic only made up 0.56% of our visits ( a number which we are definitely working to improve.).

Over 8% of users don't have Java enabled

Top 10 Mobile Operating Systems

iPhone and iPod dominate

No real surprises here as the iPhone and iPod dominate with over 78% of the traffic combined. Android puts in a good showing at almost 12% and I wonder if it’s not time to say “bye bye” to PalmOS?

Top 10 Screen Resolutions

1024x768 isn't going away any time soon

While these numbers probably aren’t that interesting to most folks, to developers they are key as we get some idea of what kind of screen real estate we have to play with and what kind of resolutions we need to be targeting.

The most telling resolutions here are the dominant 1280×800, which is probably due to laptop owners and people who purchased early TFT’s, and 1024×768 which is still in use by over 9% of our visitors so I don’t think developers will be able to drop support for that resolution anytime soon.

So, that’s out roundup based on the past 30 days of traffic and 1,427,403 unique visits according to Google Analytics.

There’s a lot of interesting information to be gleaned from this and I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface. I’ll do another post like this in a month or two in order to see how the landscape has changed and what we can learn from it.

Lets Call A Spade A Spade: It’s Influence Media

Spade or shovel?

I woke up Saturday morning with a number of things floating around my mind, such as the amount of time until I next see Sara, how I was going to get all my work done before the Ireland Vs England rugby match and a nagging, scraping feeling in the back of my mind about relationships.

As the caffeine from my first cup of coffee began to work it’s way into my system it hit me that relationships are about 1:1 communication.

Okay, admittedly that’s a fairly obvious to most people and not exactly a revelation. It’s something that we all know and many of us have been advocating online for years. If you want to grow your brand or blog you have to foster 1:1 relationships with your readers/followers/fans in order to develop loyalty.

I’ve always thought that social media was about developing and nurturing those relationships. I thought it was about communicating with your fans and followers, about growing that 1:1 connection that would allow organic growth as those you’ve developed relationships with will feel comfortable enough with you or your brand to recommend you to their peers, thus introducing you to a new social circle where you can again begin to develop the 1:1 relationships.

That, in a nutshell is what social media is to me.

What I see happening online today, being pimped and pushed by “those in the know” is not social media, it’s influence media.

In order to get ahead today we are still being told to foster relationships but not with our followers (or at least not so much).  The prevailing school of thought, at least to my cynical eyes, is that in order to grow you must foster relationships with just a handful of influencers and allow them do the work of communicating your message or spreading the word.

That’s a smart marketing tactic (to some degree, it still lacks 1:1 familiarity with the people you want to reach) but it’s by no means social media. It’s influence media.

It’s a numbers game where we use services or look at the follower numbers in order to find people like Scoble or Chris Brogan, suck up to them and hope that they will spread your word to the people you want to reach. Obviously the more of these influencers you can grease up then then the more people you can reach and the quicker you can reach them.

Which leads me to ask why are people promoting this process of finding these influencers and soliciting them to spread the word rather than fostering the actual relationship/social media approach?

The answer oddly enough is that these influencers are actually good at the social media side of things (that’s how they became influencers) but they are also very smart people. They know that by promoting the “influnce media” model they are setting themselves up as hubs.

Promoting social media as being the practice of finding influencers to spread the word for you actually encourages others not to become influencers, which removes competition and removing the competition is key when being an influence hub is a lucrative business.

Has Social Media Legitimized Hotlinking in Web 2.0?

Okay, Maybe Not!

Hotlinking used to be a bad thing. Essentially bandwidth theft, hotlinking is the practice of displaying and image (or video, audio file etc… ) on your site but actually having the file served by someone else’s server. In other words you use their bandwidth to display the file on your site. (This is not the same as content theft, taking someone else work and presenting it as your own. That’s another discussion for another post).

We all know that bandwidth isn’t free.

Last night, as Daily Shite clicked over it’s 1 millionth page view for February, I was looking at our bandwidth usage and wondering where did all of the 423 Gigs we’ve transferred over the past 15 days go?

Obviously on a humor site like ours that aggregates the best content from around the web, hotlinking can be  an issue.

We don’t hotlink. We makes sure that all images and files are hosted on our own server and even go as far as having measures in place to ensure that anything that might accidentally get hotlinked is automatically cached on our server and the link rewritten.

Yet so many people hotlink today and I feel that with the rise of sites like Digg, Facebook, Reddit and even my beloved Google Reader are to blame.  They’ve taken hotlinking and instead of supporting the idea that is unacceptable have played a major hand in making hotlinking acceptable.

There are way and means to prevent hotlinking. It’s easy actually, but the problem comes not with the prevention, but the fact that oft times it is necessary not to prevent it  in order to actually be able to promote your content on the web.

If hotlinking is prevented then the images won’t show in Google Reader. Facebook, Reddit and Digg won’t be able to show thumbnails for the posts. This is a negative thing for most publishers regardless of whether or not they are aggregators (like we do on Daily Shite) or content creators like I do on this blog.

No thumbnails means less incentive for users to click through and people can be such very visual creatures.

I suppose measures could be taken to ensure I had a separate directory of thumbnails outside of the “protected directories” of my site that could be used by other sites but that is quite frankly a huge pain in the backside to organize and something that 99% of people will neither do, think about or have the ability to do if they did.

To be honest I don’t begrudge Facebook or Reddit using my images when someone promotes one of our posts, in fact I encourage it. It’s promotion for us.

But what I do have an issue with is that sites like Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit allow linking to an image directly outside of the structure of the site hosting it and that is a problem for me.

When 20,000 or 50,000 people stumble an image on your site and all they see is the image itself, none of your content or the advertising that pays for the bandwidth that is used to serve that image 50,000 or even 100,000 times then there is an issue.

For some sites 50,000 or 100,000 views of a reasonably sized image could eat their entire bandwidth cap and result in them having to shell out money because the major media sharing sites are too lazy to implement a simple bit of code that could ensure that the page an image is on must be linked to rather than stealing some poor sods bandwidth.

Sharing on sites like Digg, Facebook and Stumbleupon is a partnership. They may promote our content for us when it is submitted, but we also provide them with content for their community to view and to discuss. Without our content these sites are nothing and we get considerably less traffic without them.

It’s a partnership, or at least it’s supposed to be. When it comes to images and hotlinking, the partnership is sorely one sided.

Lazyfeed Is Not Serving Sushi. It’s All Spam!

Lazyfeed boasts that is is like a conyevor belt of sushi.

Have you tried Conveyor belt sushi? At a conveyor belt sushi restaurant, sushi plates are automatically delivered to you literally on a conveyor belt, so you don’t have to move around.

Lazyfeed is Conveyor belt sushi for your interest. Lazyfeed is all about letting you watch live updates on every topic you care about. Just add the topics you are interested in and start watching. Real-time updates on those topics will continuously flow in automatically.
Don’t surf. Let the web come to you.

I love sushi and I love the internet, but while others may love Lazyfeed, I find that the vast majority of the result served up by the service are nothing more than spam and splogs. There is no curation, no moderation and no apparent form of spam filtering of any sort. Some of these results are more than obviously spam, they are down right blatant.

In the 10 minutes I was on the service tonight (I’ve been using Lazyfeed for a long time, well before the new conveyor belt design), almost all of the results I clicked through too were splogs.

It would appear that the real “lazy” in lazy feed is the filtering and because of that I won’t be going back.

What we need is a curated system that points to good quality articles at their source (and a little birdy told me that one may be on the way).

It's not sushi on the conveyor but predigested spam!

Google Buzz Reduces The Noise? My Irish Arse It Does!

I listened yesterday and started to believe the crap I heard about how Google Buzz was going to make my social circle more relevant, reduce the noise, filter out the crap and generally make right the wrongs of the universe.

Why then Google, have I woken up this morning with 1000+ new items in my Google Reader, which were shared by people I am following on Google Buzz?

Google Buzz = Less Noise?

This is a perfect example of what Sara was talking about in her post yesterday when discussing Googles need to have a singled shared address book or set of contacts across all their services. Google doesn’t get that sometimes you don’t want to follow the same people everywhere.

For example, I had (prior to Buzz) my Google Reader set up just the way I like it, but now, on top of the items form the 300+ blogs and news sources I check a day, I’ve got all the shares from many of the same people I am already subscribed to? What gives? I did not subscribe to their shares in Google Reader!

That’s like saying that because I subscribe to your blog, I have to get all your tweets as well!

Sorry Google, but this is a major fail – You’ve just increased the noise to signal ratio that I receive exponentially!

Has Google Gone A Step Too Far By Forcing Buzz On Users?

I know Google desperately want people to use Google Buzz, but as Steven Hodson pointed out, growth of the network will always be limited by the fact that you have to have a Gmail account in order to use the service.

Google Buzz is a clever trap, but a trap all the same. It is the hunk of cheese to get more people using Gmail which in turn locks users into Google even more.

Google, in it’s attempts to ensure adoption have taken the kind of  step that hasn’t been seen since the Microsoft of the 90’s and actually forced all Gmail account holders into being users regardless of whether they want to or not.

As Mark Davidson said on Facebook earlier tonight:

I’m not sure why but I’m bothered by Buzz. I don’t like it, I don’t want it. But I have it. Sure I don’t have to us it. I think maybe it’s because for the first time, Google has forced a web tool on me. I’ve been using Gmail since 2004. If I love Gmail, and I do, I’m forced to have Buzz. I’m about 10 minutes away from …re-installing MS Office so I can use Gmail as a relay for Outlook again. You know what I like? Choice. That’s what got me using Google web tools in the first place. Today is the first day, I’ve ever viewed Google in the same light as I viewed Microsoft in the mid-nineties.

It’s this kind of move that could result in a temporary boost for Gmail and Googles other services, but as I’ve already seen tonight people are complaining about things like unremoveable messages in their inbox, and of course the pre-existing faults caused by Googles need to have a universal address book and not allow you to delete contacts from one Google service without deleting them on all.

This forced use could ultimately be detrimental to Gmail as users who don’t want an intrusive social network clogging up their inbox choose to go to less crowded and more traditional email systems. Yes, you can stop Buzz features from appearing in your inbox after the fact but once you are in, you’re in.

As I’ve said before, the right tool for the right job, and morphing Gmail into a full featured social network may stop it being a tool of productivity and turn it into another Facebook/Twitter timewaster.

Google Hasn’t Built A Twitter Killer: Goolge Buzz

FYI: I started writing this before the Google announcement today and am writing it as I watch it live and as a product GBuzz looks great.

Google doesn’t want to build, nor is it trying to build a “twitter killer”. What Google wants is your information in order to better target advertising.

Every time you send an email, update your status, chat on Goggle Talk, share an item on Google Reader, post a video to YouTube or a picture to Picasa, Google gets a little bit more information about you that it can use to better tune the advertising you see in the hope that you will click on one of those ads.

Information like your status updates disappear as soon as they are used but by offering timelines where you can see the status updates of your friends Google  can keep you on in their service a little longer and in front of their advertising a little longer.

By associating Facebook and Twitter id’s with your Gmail contacts Google learns a little more about both you and your contacts. They have already announced that you will be able to import RSS streams from other services, connect with twitter, and there was a hint of facebook connect. It was driven home that the platform will be made as open as possible and noted that if you tweet and it gets imported into GBuzz then it could end up on somebody elses recommended list.

GBuzz is shaping up to be a wonderful looking social experience, but it boils down to being a content gathering service. It will allow you to pump information into Google from all your other services, consume information there and ultimately spend more time in from of Google advertisements while providing it with the information necessary to fine tune those advertisements to you and your friends.

At the end of the day it all boils do to gathering more information about you in order to target advertising. They don’t need to build a Twitter killer. Twitter and Facebook already do a great job creating the information that Google wants.

What they have built however, is a marvelous looking social experience for those people who already use Gmail and Googles mobile services and given them the means to pour information about themselves and others into Googles servers.

What A Week

I love weeks like this, where everything unexpectedly starts to come together.

Sara and I have been plugging away at out pet project, humor site Daily Shite, for months now. We’ve been watching it grow slowly and celebrating as we’ve hit various milestones. We’ve watched with pride and more than a fair few glasses of wine (to celebrate the occasion) as 100 views a day went past, then a 1000, then 5000, 10000 and 20000. We whooped and cheered like we’d one the lottery when we broke our first 50000 day, and last night we sat back in sheer amazement as we soared beyond our first 100000 (one hundred thousand) day.

This post isn’t to pimp out Daily Shite although you really should visit and join the Facebook page while you’re at it. It’s to say thank you.

Thank you to everyone who has visited, stumbled and dugg posts, retweeted us and pimped us to their friends. To our authors for their contributions and to our readers and friends who have been emailing and sending contributions via IM.

Most of all I want to thank Sara. She’s done a ton of work behind the scenes, not just putting up posts and pimping Daily Shite left, right and center and deserves more credit than I for us hitting this milestone.

Now, bring on our next challenge – the 200000 day

Twitter Can’t Remember Lists?

I’ve been running into the phenomenon of people who are not on Twitter lists showing up in the results when the lists are clicked.

Have a look at the screenshot below and you will see what I mean. None of the people above @John_C are on the “Daily Shite Authors List” yet there they are on the list page, clear as day.

I’ve also been seeing something similar happen when I view my @ replies, where there are results that quite plainly are not replies to me in any way, shape or form.

FYI Inquistr: Auto Refresh Is Intrusive, Makes You Look Shady

Trust me the numbers are fine!

It’s a rare occasion that I break away from reading an excellent post to write a post of my own. Usually I wait until I am finished, have digested it and then put fingers to keyboard.

My friend, Steven Hodson, wrote what has so far, been an excellent post called “The return of the LP and the future of book publishing” for the Inquisitr, but I haven’t had the opportunity to read it all because I was rudely interrupted by The Inqusitrs need to auto refresh their pages.

I don’t run into this problem too often and normally Inquisitr posts aren’t lengthy enough for me to ever encounter it but I have to ask why sites make their pages auto refresh?

For those of you who don’t know you can make any web page automatically reload after a set period of time by putting a small piece of code in the header like this:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="900" />

Inserting code like this is good for only two things:

1. Updating a page that pulls some sort of dynamic content and would otherwise require the user to hit refresh.
2. Artificially inflating your page view numbers.

FYI: Unless it’s for point number 1 all it does is piss people off.