I take back what I said about Twitter

In "Depth web versus shallow web", I argued that the social-blurbing system called Twitter was devoid of any real substance, shallow, and ultimately pointless beyond logging every random thought one may have. I take that all back. Thanks to Twitter, an American journalism student was able to free himself from an Egyptian jail.

James Karl Buck helped free himself from an Egyptian jail with a one-word blog post from his cell phone.

Buck, a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were arrested April 10.

On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.

The message only had one word. "Arrested."

Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt -- the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier -- were alerted that he was being held.

Within twenty-four hours he was released, upon which he again Twittered a one-word message: "Freed."

My bad, Twitter. Sometimes a blurb is all that's needed. Keep up the good work.

Source (Thanks Tracie)

Random Terminology: Grey's Law

(Note: While ultimately meaningless, I'm having fun posting random terms from time to time. I think I might make it a regular feature. This one was pulled from a deleted Wikipedia article. I guess it wasn't that notable.)

Grey's Law is a less-known corollary of Hanlon's Razor, which imitates the form of Clarke's Third Law. It states that:

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

While the stated principle pays a certain homage to Hanlon's Razor, it is also to some extent a rebuttal of the principle therein, stating that the distinction which the former makes is often moot. It is unclear just who the "Grey" of Grey's Law is. The quotation itself appears to have spread through email sig blocks and various social bookmarking websites, and appears to be of recent origin.

In short, idiocy is harmful, and extreme idiocy smacks of an intent.

X-Files 2 finally gets a title: "I Want To Believe"

Die-hard X-Files fans will instantly recognize the title of the long awaited sequel as the slogan on Mulder's poster in his basement office. The X-Files: I Want To Believe. "It's a natural title," Chris Carter said in a recent interview. "It's a story that involves the difficulties in mediating faith and science... It really does suggest Mulder's struggle with his faith." Yeah, yeah, yeah, just post a trailer already! The Xfiles.com site is looking a little bare, although it is sporting a really cool theme graphic of the intrepid duo's shadows forming an "X" behind them. Very cool. This movie better not suck.

Don't forget: Code monkey like you... a lot!

AMV of Code Monkey, by Jonathan Coulton. AMV = Animated Music Video, a YouTube trend where folks take a favorite song and splice together anime to fit it. Awesome.

One Nation Under CCTV

There's a fine line between vandalism, which I am totally against, and graffiti-as-murals, which I totally support as a form of artistic expression, though technically illegal. Below is one such graffiti-mural that I think is completely awesome.



The graffiti artist known as "Banksy" was able to erect three storeys of scaffolding behind a security fence and paint this mural of small boy, watched by a security guard, painting the words: 'One nation under CCTV' (closed-circuit television) -- all the while an actual CCTV camera was watching nearby. Banksy got away without being detected, having completed his biggest piece yet in central London.



Nice. George Orwell would be proud.

Chasing the Long Tail, Part II

In my last post, I introduced the term "Long Tail" and hinted that a large catalog of web pages could generate substantial traffic, regardless of the quality of the actual content. I also mentioned an experiment I'm conducting to test this theory. I'm not going to go into specifics here as to where I'm conducting this experiment (the web address) because I don't want a flood of traffic from here ruining my traffic statistics. I want those stats to reflect traffic resulting from the test as much as possible. I should also point out that I'm no scientist and there's no real controls here. This is just an informal test.

For my experiment I need pages, lots of pages. I also need to make sure that those pages wouldn't generate lots of traffic of their own under normal conditions (read as boring, unpopular content) and that the web site I'm using for the experiment doesn't already have traffic. Here's what I did to satisfy those three requirements: I picked one of my unestablished domain names I registered and wrote a script. The script fetches Wikipedia articles and stores them locally (totally legal through the GFDL). It also rewrites all the links in the article so that they point internally. In other words, when a search engine indexes the site, a link to Mona Lisa would be to http://(www.mysite.com)/Mona_Lisa rather than Wikipedia's version. When the search engine follows that article link it will, again, cause the new page to be stored locally as well. The general idea is to have the search engine spider all 2,332,000 + articles at Wikipedia, but have them all be at my site instead. That gives me the ungodly amount of content I need for my experiment, but because my site is not popular the content would otherwise never be found in search results.

Being buried in search results is no problem. That's what I want. I want to test the idea (Long Tail) that given a substantially large content catalog, you'll end up with traffic anyway, even if you're not popular. Where this traffic comes from, who knows, but I sometimes click page 10 or more when I search just for fun, sort of pulling from the bottom of the deck in a search result. Plus search engine results are based on a combination of keywords rather than a single word, and it's possible one might have just the right combination the searcher is looking for, a combination that wouldn't be in the original content, and thus drives the page to the top of the results. Who knows, who cares. The experiment is just to see if a lot of traffic comes naturally from having a large catalog of content, regardless of the quality of the content. We're testing quantity over quality.

Here's the results thus far:

I started my experiment in mid-March, with a small handful of links to articles at the test site posted in a blog. The first step was to see if the search engine would even follow the links and index the subsequent pages. They did. They followed my handful of links, which led to more links, and more, and they indexed those too. It's been slow going. To date, with a "seed" of links less than 10, they have indexed approximately 1,200 pages. It appears that it is exponential growth as well. In the first few days, it was one or two pages indexed at a time. Towards the latter end, it's been hundreds of articles at a time. In the last week or two, the amount of indexed pages doubled in size. Cool. 'Cause there's plenty more left to go. Ultimately I'd like to see all two million plus articles indexed because then I have some serious data to examine.

The traffic stats would seem less than noteworthy to someone who doesn't see the significance of the increase. With roughly 1,000 articles indexed, the number of people who visit the site has grown by 5 people per day. That's nothing to write home about, but the point is there was an increase. It's evidence that the idea is sound, and that things are working as they should.

The greater thing to get giddy about is that if we assume a traffic increase of 5 people per 1,000 pages, and if all 2 million pages are covered, then that is a total daily visitor count of 10,000 per day. That is definitely something to write home about. One could earn some serious extra income off a site that generates approximately 300,000 visits per month. Assuming an average of four page views per visit, we're looking at 1,200,000 page views per month, and that's only using simple, uninteresting content borrowed from some other site. The content's not augmented with other services that might cause a visitor to return, or see the page as a useful resource.

If augmented with other services, who knows? Guess we'll have to find out as the experiment continues.

Chasing the Long Tail, Part I

The Long Tail is a term coined by Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson to describe the tendency of companies such as Amazon.com and Netflix to realize a significant profit from adding large quantities of less popular or obscure items to their inventory right along with widely popular ones. These thousands of inexpensive obscure titles often collectively match the popularity of a mega-blockbuster, for the same price or less. Anderson describes the effect in his (must-read) book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. According to the Wikipedia article on the topic:

Anderson argued that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough. Anderson cites earlier research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, that showed that a significant portion of Amazon.com's sales come from obscure books that are not available in brick-and-mortar stores.

In other words, quantity over popularity (or even quality), a model where so-called "B" movies collectively equal a blockbuster in revenue.

*****

The Long Tail isn't just applicable to ecommerce. Bloggers, for example, see the same effect the longer they blog. One really popular post that generates an enormous amount of traffic may become overshadowed by years of boring, less-popular posts, your very own long tail. Each page on a website of any type becomes yet another entry-point that gets indexed by Google. Your posted pic of Paris Hilton's boob slippage may end up with less traffic on a day-to-day basis than the hundreds of articles you've written about your cats. To Google it's all the same. While keywords such as "boob" may be more popular and generate a hundred hits in a day, various combinations of keywords that generate a few hits, let's say one each, collectively outshine your Hilton exposé if there's enough of them. In a nutshell: One thousand blog posts with one reader each per day generates one thousand hits for your site, far outshining your popular post that generated one hundred hits.

This is why you should stop procrastinating and go start your blog already, just to get that long tail growing. Fret not my blogging friends if your blog sucks. The more you post that garbage the more traffic you'll receive, even if it does suck something fierce.

In Part II we'll examine an experiment I'm conducting on the Long Tail concept.