The posts in this blog that got the most hits for last year are as follows:
1. Evolution: A picture of a platypus egg, in the context of the evolution of milk. Yet the narrative of egg-laying mammals is more interesting than a mere picture.
2. Science: Some pictures taken from Wikipedia that gave some size perspectives on the planets, their moons, and the various star types.
3. Music: Cancion Mixteca: a haunting Mexican song, and actor Harry Dean Stanton's version.
4. Technology: What does IBM do? - What, you don't know? Answer: not just hardware, these days.
5. Music: Vigrass and Osborne: forgotten 70s pop music - remembered only by those who sought out this link.
6. Technology: Type conversion in SQL Server: varchar to real
7. Tintin: Project O-Light: the intriguing Tintin adventure that never was - or not yet.
8. Evolution: Tunicates: a giant tube worm, and its relationship to us.
9. Evolution: Gondwana and New Zealand: NZ's separation from the southern land mass Gondwana - it's not how most people think. And was there really a terrestrial native New Zealand mammal?
10. Worldwide gun statistics. In fact, it was more about the relationship between gun ownership and homicides. As you'd expect, the more immediate the weapon, the more likely the homicide.
This is actually little different from 2009's greatest hits. Observations: a) I didn't post much last year; b) Google's page rankings over time entrench winners.
Top post of 2010: mention of a Beach Boys concert. However, I'd prefer you to look at the one on Sculptures By The Sea 2010, the stupidity of an art prize award to a plagiarism, and Homo Floresiensis as, potentially, australopithecus.
Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Monday, January 03, 2011
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Why moderate comments? Or, Attack of the spambots
I reckon I just got hit by a spambot.
A comment on a 2006 post of mine on CeBIT (seeking the future at CeBIT) seemed a bit off-topic. So I did a search of one of the less common phrases.
I found that since December 2009, someone had been posting an identical comment on a number of blogs. Something about some research into online marketing. The spammer was obviously not the originator of the words - the original probably resides somewhere in the recesses of Google, buried under this avalanche of spam. The original was making a point that small business was looking to email for marketing (the phrase I extracted was "banner and search crowd a little wary") - not exactly riveting news. But it was buried in a somewhat inscrutable turn of phrase which would make it past someone who was too busy to pay attention.
The comment concluded with a link to a website that basically hawks... stuff. A disparate bunch of stuff, with no commonality save to sell to passing traffic.
It must be a slow way to market. Using http://whois.domaintools.com, I found it to be run from Texas, possibly someone purporting to provide search engine optimisation services.
It's a slow way of making a living. It would make more sense if someone wrote some code to automatically trawl blogs to add comments under a revolving list of names. Maybe: most of the blogs didn't need someone to register to make a comment. One comment was made as a registered user, requiring a registration process (which was created only this month) which is less susceptible to automation, making the effort somewhat less explicable.
...Just investigating the phenomenon, I see Wikipedia has a page on it: Spam In Blogs, which it characterises as a form of "spamdexing": using less than ethical methods to increase a page's profile in search engines. So it doesn't even need people to click through to the site to achieve the objectives; it just needs the comments to hang around to be caught by the search engine(s).
That's one of the reasons I moderate comments on this blog. This means a comment doesn't show up until I get notified to approve it. I'd say I reject more comments than I allow, which shows how much off-topic spam gets posted.
Understandably, this results in confusion over whether the comment has taken hold, so some people try reposting a comment. My apologies; bear with me please. And don't make the comment too off-topic, or it might not make it.
14-Jan-10 Update: Spammers don't even read the posts. Another just tried again!
18-Jan-10 Update: Same again. The phrase this time:"By the way, did you guys hear that some chinese hacker had busted twitter yesterday again". The point: if you are suspicious, drag part of the post into google, see if it's been around the blocks.
22-Jan-10 Update: This is getting ridiculous. 2010 will be the year of the spambot!
I just got another comment that seemed totally innocuous:
"I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often."
- but because it was off-topic, I did a google search, and found multiple copies of that comment - complete with typo (or spelling mistake, if it was Chinese-originated). The only other part of that comment was a web link, which I don't need to reproduce.
Two possibilities: comment spam is trying to get smarter, or they borrowed a contentless comment from elsewhere.
So if it is the year of the spambot, don't bother publishing comments unless they are clearly on-topic. Otherwise, you're propagating free advertising at best, or carrying links to nefarious sites at worst.
A comment on a 2006 post of mine on CeBIT (seeking the future at CeBIT) seemed a bit off-topic. So I did a search of one of the less common phrases.
I found that since December 2009, someone had been posting an identical comment on a number of blogs. Something about some research into online marketing. The spammer was obviously not the originator of the words - the original probably resides somewhere in the recesses of Google, buried under this avalanche of spam. The original was making a point that small business was looking to email for marketing (the phrase I extracted was "banner and search crowd a little wary") - not exactly riveting news. But it was buried in a somewhat inscrutable turn of phrase which would make it past someone who was too busy to pay attention.
The comment concluded with a link to a website that basically hawks... stuff. A disparate bunch of stuff, with no commonality save to sell to passing traffic.
It must be a slow way to market. Using http://whois.domaintools.com, I found it to be run from Texas, possibly someone purporting to provide search engine optimisation services.
It's a slow way of making a living. It would make more sense if someone wrote some code to automatically trawl blogs to add comments under a revolving list of names. Maybe: most of the blogs didn't need someone to register to make a comment. One comment was made as a registered user, requiring a registration process (which was created only this month) which is less susceptible to automation, making the effort somewhat less explicable.
...Just investigating the phenomenon, I see Wikipedia has a page on it: Spam In Blogs, which it characterises as a form of "spamdexing": using less than ethical methods to increase a page's profile in search engines. So it doesn't even need people to click through to the site to achieve the objectives; it just needs the comments to hang around to be caught by the search engine(s).
That's one of the reasons I moderate comments on this blog. This means a comment doesn't show up until I get notified to approve it. I'd say I reject more comments than I allow, which shows how much off-topic spam gets posted.
Understandably, this results in confusion over whether the comment has taken hold, so some people try reposting a comment. My apologies; bear with me please. And don't make the comment too off-topic, or it might not make it.
14-Jan-10 Update: Spammers don't even read the posts. Another just tried again!
18-Jan-10 Update: Same again. The phrase this time:"By the way, did you guys hear that some chinese hacker had busted twitter yesterday again". The point: if you are suspicious, drag part of the post into google, see if it's been around the blocks.
22-Jan-10 Update: This is getting ridiculous. 2010 will be the year of the spambot!
I just got another comment that seemed totally innocuous:
"I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often."
- but because it was off-topic, I did a google search, and found multiple copies of that comment - complete with typo (or spelling mistake, if it was Chinese-originated). The only other part of that comment was a web link, which I don't need to reproduce.
Two possibilities: comment spam is trying to get smarter, or they borrowed a contentless comment from elsewhere.
So if it is the year of the spambot, don't bother publishing comments unless they are clearly on-topic. Otherwise, you're propagating free advertising at best, or carrying links to nefarious sites at worst.
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
2009 blog statistics: What questions did people ask?
Following is an aggregation of search terms that led to my blog, with some insights. In each case, the search term was some variant on the heading.
1) What does IBM do? That was by far the most common question. Askers landed here because of the heading of a post: "Just what does IBM do?", which discussed the corporations transformation from computer mainframe manufacturer to software and services vendor. Most people asking this question seemed to come from the US, as it happens.
2) Vigrass and Osbourne: the underrated 1970s duo, who are perhaps most famous for the original version of Forever Autumn, used in Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds.
3) Worldwide Gun Statistics: perhaps again popular due to the post's heading. The queries were typically variants of gun ownership statistics, followed by gun homicide stats, followed by gun control stats.
4) Error converting data type varchar to real: In Microsoft's SQL Server database (more specifically, in Transact-SQL), I had difficulty translating a text data type to a real number data type. So I researched the answer, and published it. It's a common enough need that it ought to be reasonably intuitive, but on the basis of those searching for the solution, it wasn't.
5) Cancion Mixteca: Harry Dean Stanton sang this mournful old Mexican tune beautifully, on the soundtrack to the Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas. Given the rendition was so moving - and so was the film - you would expect the song to be in the film. But for some reason it's not - the film carries only a snatch of Ry Cooder's instrumental version.
I suspect a given post's heading was the chief deterimant of a search engine directing traffic here. So it pays to consider the heading carefully: pithy and direct.
In fact, if you count image searches, the above would be swamped by people's searches for pictures of stars, planets, and moons in perspective, and platypuses, or their eggs.
1) What does IBM do? That was by far the most common question. Askers landed here because of the heading of a post: "Just what does IBM do?", which discussed the corporations transformation from computer mainframe manufacturer to software and services vendor. Most people asking this question seemed to come from the US, as it happens.
2) Vigrass and Osbourne: the underrated 1970s duo, who are perhaps most famous for the original version of Forever Autumn, used in Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds.
3) Worldwide Gun Statistics: perhaps again popular due to the post's heading. The queries were typically variants of gun ownership statistics, followed by gun homicide stats, followed by gun control stats.
4) Error converting data type varchar to real: In Microsoft's SQL Server database (more specifically, in Transact-SQL), I had difficulty translating a text data type to a real number data type. So I researched the answer, and published it. It's a common enough need that it ought to be reasonably intuitive, but on the basis of those searching for the solution, it wasn't.
5) Cancion Mixteca: Harry Dean Stanton sang this mournful old Mexican tune beautifully, on the soundtrack to the Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas. Given the rendition was so moving - and so was the film - you would expect the song to be in the film. But for some reason it's not - the film carries only a snatch of Ry Cooder's instrumental version.
I suspect a given post's heading was the chief deterimant of a search engine directing traffic here. So it pays to consider the heading carefully: pithy and direct.
In fact, if you count image searches, the above would be swamped by people's searches for pictures of stars, planets, and moons in perspective, and platypuses, or their eggs.
Saturday, January 02, 2010
Most popular posts in 2009
The most popular of last year's posts on this blog were:
1) a discussion and illustration of the relative sizes of star types and the solar system's planets and moons;
2) an overview of Data Provisioning, Karen Heath's proposal for new generation business intelligence and data warehousing (now moved to my technical blog);
3) Some words on Ellie Greenwich, the 1960s songwriter who died last year (with a discography lacking in Wikipedia);
4) Evolution and the eritherium, an odd elephant relative from the early days of the mammal;
5) An overview of BI Survey 8, the annual analysis of the market and use of Business Intelligence tools;
6) The music of the revered New Zealand new wave band Toy Love, with a comprehensive discography;
7) An insightful comparison of Madonna's and Van Halen's touring contracts, after Madonna's stage collapsed last year;
8) An appreciation of the duo Georgie Fame and Alan Price, two British musicians of the 1960s who collaborated in the 1970s (again, with discography);
9) A discussion of corporate ethics and the underhanded actions of the Australian corporation James Hardie, who tried to escape their obligations over asbestos poisoning;
10) A discussion of the eventual fate of the Beatles' songwriting catalogue, and royalties.
So it would seem that the most viewed posts were music-related (comprising half the most popular discussions), followed by business intelligence (two pieces), then general science, evolution, and corporate politics.
That may be a bit misleading. In fact the top post, on planets, moons and stars, positively swamped everything else. And like some of my posts, the only reason it arose was my personal curiosity: to improve my understanding with a bit of research.
Let's look at overall traffic last year, for all posts since 2006. The story is a little different:
1) The abovementioned discussion of moons, planets and stars;
2) The evolution of milk (simply because it included a photo of a platypus egg);
3) IBM's evolution as a software and computer services company, from its earlier incarnation as a mainframe computer manufacturer (the traffic came mostly from people asking the question: 'What does IBM do?');
4) Vigrass and Osbourne: sparkling forgotten pop music from the early 70s, with discography and links;
5) The giant tube worm: an evolutionary oddity;
6) The relationship between handgun ownership and homicide in different coutries (most people were seeking statistics on gun ownership around the world);
7) A discussion of the breakup of Gondwana and the formation of New Zealand, in the context of the discovery of an extinct egg-laying mammal in New Zealand (the SB mammal, or waddling mouse);
8) A discussion of the evolutionary significance of heterochrony (although it's possible people were just looking for a picture of an axlotl);
9) About Harry Dean Stanton's haunting rendition of Cancion Mixteca (with lyrics and translation);
10) How to solve the issue of translating type varchar to type real in SQL Server.
1) a discussion and illustration of the relative sizes of star types and the solar system's planets and moons;
2) an overview of Data Provisioning, Karen Heath's proposal for new generation business intelligence and data warehousing (now moved to my technical blog);
3) Some words on Ellie Greenwich, the 1960s songwriter who died last year (with a discography lacking in Wikipedia);
4) Evolution and the eritherium, an odd elephant relative from the early days of the mammal;
5) An overview of BI Survey 8, the annual analysis of the market and use of Business Intelligence tools;
6) The music of the revered New Zealand new wave band Toy Love, with a comprehensive discography;
7) An insightful comparison of Madonna's and Van Halen's touring contracts, after Madonna's stage collapsed last year;
8) An appreciation of the duo Georgie Fame and Alan Price, two British musicians of the 1960s who collaborated in the 1970s (again, with discography);
9) A discussion of corporate ethics and the underhanded actions of the Australian corporation James Hardie, who tried to escape their obligations over asbestos poisoning;
10) A discussion of the eventual fate of the Beatles' songwriting catalogue, and royalties.
So it would seem that the most viewed posts were music-related (comprising half the most popular discussions), followed by business intelligence (two pieces), then general science, evolution, and corporate politics.
That may be a bit misleading. In fact the top post, on planets, moons and stars, positively swamped everything else. And like some of my posts, the only reason it arose was my personal curiosity: to improve my understanding with a bit of research.
Let's look at overall traffic last year, for all posts since 2006. The story is a little different:
1) The abovementioned discussion of moons, planets and stars;
2) The evolution of milk (simply because it included a photo of a platypus egg);
3) IBM's evolution as a software and computer services company, from its earlier incarnation as a mainframe computer manufacturer (the traffic came mostly from people asking the question: 'What does IBM do?');
4) Vigrass and Osbourne: sparkling forgotten pop music from the early 70s, with discography and links;
5) The giant tube worm: an evolutionary oddity;
6) The relationship between handgun ownership and homicide in different coutries (most people were seeking statistics on gun ownership around the world);
7) A discussion of the breakup of Gondwana and the formation of New Zealand, in the context of the discovery of an extinct egg-laying mammal in New Zealand (the SB mammal, or waddling mouse);
8) A discussion of the evolutionary significance of heterochrony (although it's possible people were just looking for a picture of an axlotl);
9) About Harry Dean Stanton's haunting rendition of Cancion Mixteca (with lyrics and translation);
10) How to solve the issue of translating type varchar to type real in SQL Server.
Friday, January 01, 2010
This blog in 2009: the subjects
The next few posts will let you know what people viewed on this blog in 2009.
I started including a traffic counter in July 2009, so all the statistics here relate to the latter part of the year.
There were around 50 page views per day, of two and a half years' worth of posts. The main subjects viewed were:
- Evolution: nearly 50% of page views;
- Science: about 25%
- Technology: about 10%
- Music: about 10%
It's hardly surprising that Evolution tops the list: that's my most frequent subject. But the overall figures were slightly skewed by two pages that turned out to be particularly popular:
- An illustration of the relative sizes of the planets, moons, and different star types (in fact, most searches were asking about the relative sizes of different stars);
- A picture of a platypus egg, in a discussion of the evolution of milk.
Those pages each garnered over 20% of page views, making up about 45% of site traffic. In particular, much of the search engine traffic was drawn to the platypus egg - because, I guess, mammal eggs are such an oddity. In today's world, at least.
I started including a traffic counter in July 2009, so all the statistics here relate to the latter part of the year.
There were around 50 page views per day, of two and a half years' worth of posts. The main subjects viewed were:
- Evolution: nearly 50% of page views;
- Science: about 25%
- Technology: about 10%
- Music: about 10%
It's hardly surprising that Evolution tops the list: that's my most frequent subject. But the overall figures were slightly skewed by two pages that turned out to be particularly popular:
- An illustration of the relative sizes of the planets, moons, and different star types (in fact, most searches were asking about the relative sizes of different stars);
- A picture of a platypus egg, in a discussion of the evolution of milk.
Those pages each garnered over 20% of page views, making up about 45% of site traffic. In particular, much of the search engine traffic was drawn to the platypus egg - because, I guess, mammal eggs are such an oddity. In today's world, at least.
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