Tuesday, 28 February 2006

The Young Women From The East

While checking on Simpy system health and various monitors and metrics, I noticed a sudden spike in the number of network connections. This typically means one of the two things: network//images/emoticons/laugh.gif)DoS attack (bad) or sudden popularity (good). So which one was it tonight? Neither. After some poking (yeah, pun intended, see below) around, I found out that a very popular blog with several pictures of dancing and sparsely dressed young women from the Far East, decided to add Simpy's logo to their page, and lazily load it directly from the source. Lovely - there goes a good chunk of bandwidth. For the curious.

What's with the sudden(?) surge of photos/videos/blogs with "The Young Women From The East"?

Whatever the answer, I thought of sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and YouAreTV. They must be loving it every time Nyp Tammy or some other will-regret-it-tomorrow-when-sobered-up kid posts their last night's video on line! Since I can't provide you with better photos, here is a sexy chart instead.

Posted by otis at 3:50 AM in /
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The Fall of Person Brands in the Blogosphere

Just as I wrote the previous post about the rise of personal brands in the blogosphere, I remembered I wanted to comment on something I had read on Guy Kawasaki's blog the other day. Several months ago, I read one of Guy Kawasaki's books, and I liked what I read. I thought of buying a few more of his books. But his post about how to suck up to a blogger is absolutely awful! How spineless! Talk about the fall of a personal brand! After reading that I stopped and wondered: perhaps he is just kidding, perhaps he is just being sarcastic. Unfortunately, I think he was completely serious. Unfortunately, what he described does happen. Yuck, it makes my skin crawl. Apparently, I'm not the only one who feels this way.
Posted by otis at 1:20 AM in /
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The Rise of Person Brands in the Blogosphere

I dislike analyzing this (blog) medium using the medium itself, but... you can't always do only things you like. Or can you?

I find it really interesting to watch what blogs have done for some individuals. Take, for instance, Niall Kennedy. The man clearly built his own brand, a brand around "Niall Kennedy"! Impressive! The same goes for John The Search Battelle, Om Giga Byte Malik, Michael Captain Crunch Arrington, Steve Early Dawn Riser Rubel, and many others. Here is a collective chart:

Posted by otis at 1:06 AM in /
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Tuesday, 21 February 2006

Alexa Exposes Instability

The other day I mentioned some errors that messed up people's Simpy experience. In addition, the servers (read: the kernel) also had some issues and wanted to take time off. I did not like the sound of that, so now they have new kernels, and I hope they bring more stability. In the mean time, I thought it would be interesting to share what instability does to a public service such as Simpy:

Note the dip on the right side of the chart. Not pretty. Learn on others' mistakes! Don't let your service go down! Easier said than done, of course.

Looking at the brighter side of life, this presents a good fantasy investment opportunity.
Posted by otis at 9:18 PM in /
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Friday, 17 February 2006

Sucking Transparently

This week wasn't great for Simpy - some lame ___ (see below) caused errors to appear in the UI, and people couldn't get to their links for several hours (ok, maybe it was more than just a few hours, yes, yes).

Judging from the number of emails I got, a lot of people regularly use Simpy. Of course, I know that because of various Simpy usage reports I run periodically. What I didn't know, however, was how many dedicated users Simpy has! (read: how stuffed my Inbox was when I woke up one morning) It takes time, will, and interest to write an email and say even something as short as "hey, your stuff's kaput". Even if you use the negative tone. It's an investment, and I appreciate it! What pleased me even more was that I received so few negative emails! I got only one email where a person "threatened" to go to a sit.ethats.hard.towri.te when I failed to respond the same day. I'm not blaming the person - I'm surprised I got only one such email.

"So what happened?", people asked. "Can you blog about it?" "Growing pains?" ...

While Simpy has grown a lot in recent months, this wasn't about growing pains. I'm afraid it's nothing very exciting. It's got 3 letters, starts with a 'b' and ends with a 'g'. One of the resources that is used for computation of "Related Users" (if you are saying "huh?" now, look at the right side of this for example (scroll down if you have to)) got messed up, and caused the errors to bubble up and display Simpy's error page instead of users' links. I kicked Simpy... where it hurts...a lot, and needless to say, Simpy quickly got its (his?) act together. The problem has also been fixed, should the mentioned resource get in a funky state again.

There you have it. Sucking transparently, the 2.0 way, by the book. Sorry for hiding your links temporarily!

Posted by otis at 5:21 PM in News & Announcements
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Tuesday, 14 February 2006

Simpy For Sale

No, not really for sale, although you can buy some Simpy shares here, while they are still relatively cheap. I suppose I should buy some, too. You'd also be wise to follow Mike Arrington's investments.
Posted by otis at 9:42 PM in /
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Google Gobbles MeasureMap

As one of the early users of MeasureMap (history), I just got the email from Jeff Veen of AdaptivePath that MeasureMap, which is still in alpha(!), got gobbled by Google. And I didn't even get the chance to write about how I integrated MeasureMap into this blog and what information it provides...

So, what happened with Google Analytics? Redundant or complementary?

Posted by otis at 9:02 PM in /
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Numa Numa Dance, South-East Asian Version

All this Simpy talk, AdSense talk, tags, bookmarks, search, money... how about something different. Remember the Numa Numa Dance video? Well, check out this South-East Asian version! You've got to love people who do this, who are not embarrassed to put themselves on-line, and who have so much fun doing this (the guys can't wipe off their grins off their faces!).
Posted by otis at 4:24 PM in /
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Tuesday, 7 February 2006

More AdSense For The Long Tail

For those of you making use of Simpy's AdSense give-away, you might have noticed the numbers have started to increase. This is because the AdSense with your Id (if you entered it into Simpy, of course) are now also being shown to logged out users/visitors on your tag and search pages. If Google is doing its job right, this should be show even more relevant and targetted ads to visitors. Finally, I am happy to say that the number of people hitting users' tag and search pages directly from Google and other search engines is steadily increasing, which, of course, is good for everyone.
Posted by otis at 12:33 AM in News & Announcements
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