These last few days have been fairly laid back. Aside for a quick trip to London for some work, i’ve pretty much managed to keep myself out of trouble and away from stress. For those of you looking for the Retrospect stuff i’m hoping to get that on the roll again very sortly, it’s unfortunately taken a bit of a backseat over the last few weeks. Yesterday i had a rare chance to get arty with my camera. Went on a little walk and was very please with my results. The photoset is here.
A very Merry Christmas, I’ve been neglecting the blog a little bit lately with the Christmas related madness. I’ve had a great time and i hope everyone else has too! Will pick up the blogging again in a few days when everything gets back to normal!
…playing with photoshop
The whole concept of blogging has been one that has fascinated me recently. The way in which people are using it, both to write and read information. The way it seems to be revolutionising media and the expectations of those that consume it. In many ways it seems quite odd that i should be discussing this on my blog! but there you go.
In general i think this subject is one that will take a considerable amount more thought and research before i want to say anything more profound on it. However, today i stumbled on this post on the Viral Garden which looks at the way company’s are trying to use social networking as a marketing tool. A damn good read and one that makes you look at blogging in a different way.
Whilst idly searching through the usual pile of things on youtube, i came across this video of the gig out in Antwerp that i spent so much time and effort on. I thought it would be worth a link!
Yesterday was spent at the Royal Albert Hall babysitting 3 projectors for the last date of the ‘Miss Bollywood’ tour. Unfortunately they had a no photography policy which meant it was hard to get decent photos at all. Any covert ones i did manage to sneak came out blurry! That said, i had some time off in the middle of the day and wandered around South Kensington with my camera.
With my post yesterday about reader trends etc. It appears readers have an ironic sense of humor (and are a little psychic too!). Yesterday i received my lowest hit count in a long time. 3 views!
My latest musical obsession is Sigur Ros. I got into them around 4 years ago and they have wafted in and out of my most played list since then. I picked up their very brilliant DVD ‘Hiema’ last weekend at Fopp, whilst out buying Christmas presents. I’ve watched it about 8 times since! Today i found out they’ve released a pair of EP’s to go along with the DVD release, ‘Hvarf’ and ‘Hiem’. Itunes is downloading them for me now!
If you run your own website or blog a great tool for checking out how many people are looking at it, and where those hits are coming from is google analytics. It started out as just an interesting read, but has now become a complete addiction! Just as i’ll check my emails 2-3 times a day, i’ll now check analytics to see how many hits i’ve recieved too!
I’ve started to notice trends in the clicking. First of all i get about twice the number of hits on a weekend as i do on the weekdays. That seems to make sense, not everyone’s so glued to their computer as i am! Secondly, and much more interestingly the subject matter of each post can make a difference to the hit count too. Around 75% of my hits come from search engine queries, mostly google and yahoo. So i guess that some information is going to be more relevant than others.
Further to that, i tend to get the most hits when i talk about technology and computing. It made me wonder about the kind of people that were reading this and other blogs on the internet. I vaguely recall Robert Scoble saying in one of his podtech videos something along the lines of ‘less than 5% of internet users know what RSS feeds are, let alone use them’ (i couldn’t find the video for the last quote). Which makes me think that those who regularly read blogs, and infact subscribe to RSS feeds are the more technically minded internet users. I’d go as far out as saying that i’d guess that it’s predominately those who’s line of work helps keep their finger on the pulse with the internet and computers.
According to Google Reader i subscribe to 47 feeds, and have read 1465 posts in the last 30 days. Now i know that my feed consumption is by no means high, and i don’t have time to read anywhere near as many as i would like to. There are far too many left unread! But i do manage to peruse a few posts from many of the big players on a daily basis.
It makes me ask: with such a saturated market for tech blogs on the internet, what makes people look to personal blogs for their reading with such frequent and concise posts coming from the big guys?
Still, i don’t complain its nice to see that people read the ramblings i produce. I might add, the hit count here is between 10 and 20 hits a day, with maybe a few more at the weekends. So its not like the hoards are deviating to read my work, but the hits nearly double when i do talk tech so its clear that gains the greater interest.