A little while back I sponsored two pages at Baseball Reference. It was mostly for fun, and because it’s one of my favorite sites on the whole internet, and it’s cool to give something back. So I thought I’d give a report on how that sponsorship is going in terms of referrals. My sponsorship of Mark Knudson has resulted in TWO new visits to the site. Since I’m surprised that two people have even looked at Mark Knudson’s career stats since April 7th, that seems like a good result. And my sponsorship of Chad Bradford has resulted in FOUR new visits to the site. Bradford’s status as an active player having a good year (Small sample size, but he’s got a 1.03 WHIP and a 297 ERA+ in 12 innings, can’t complain about that) means that he’s probably getting more traffic, so it makes sense that he’d drive more people here. To put the traffic in perspective, though, over the same time period, I’ve had 504 total visits (It’s been a slow posting time, so my traffic is down). 27 of those hits are from people Googling “vector security”. Five are from “mccain nude”. Six are from outside.in and twenty are from Facebook. Anyway, I’m certainly not going to quit my day job anytime soon and make a living here. Of course, since I don’t sell ads here, paying for traffic is kind of silly, but that wasn’t really the point of my sponsorship.
Tag: internet
Nike fails the internet
Gizmodo points out that Nike is offering their little running companion device without the iPod starting April 10th. This is good news to me – I’ve been wanting something like that, and didn’t want to spend $200 on a wrist-mounted GPS. $60 is a more reasonable investment. Gizmodo didn’t include a link to Nike’s site, but just copied the press release or whatever it is. I didn’t really read it. So I went to Google and looked up “nike+”. The first hit is the right one, but it’s very, very wrong. Look, Nike, I understand that you’re all about selling your image, not just shoes that I can’t wear because of the high arches and workout clothes that aren’t any better than generic knockoffs from Target. But I’m pretty sure you’re still in the business of taking money in exchanged for goods. I can’t be positive of this fact, because at no time did your website ever suggest that you have products that may be purchased. It hints that there are methods for possessing Nike products, and that you may (nay, should) already possess Nike products. Seriously, Nike, for the amount of money you pay Tiger Woods for six seconds of looking at a camera, you could have a credible online store where customers could give you money and you could mail them products. I will bet you a bazillion dollars that Amazon would make one for you in exchange for some sort of exclusivity deal. I will bet you two bazillion dollars (that’s bazillion with a b!) that a twenty minute search of Craigslist could find you dozens of web developers who would do it for a dozen pairs of shoes. And they would do it without the hideously awful navigation that you currently have on your site, too. If your site contained a “Preorder now!” link which would take my credit card number and my address and send me your product on April 10th, when you release it, there is a good chance I would have given you $60 today. I’ll probably still give you $60 later. But now I’m going to be annoyed about it.
Oops, I broke IE
Oops. I was playing around with CSS last night and never bothered to check the site in Internet Explorer 6. So if you’re using that contemptible piece of junk to view the site, you’re going to see the right sidebar in the wrong place. Unless you’re at work, or somewhere else where you can’t change your browser, you really, really should go get a real browser. I am a huge advocate of Firefox. It is a better browser than IE in almost every way, and it’s free. You should try it. Anyway, I’ll fix the CSS at some point, but it will probably be over the weekend. For now, you’re out of luck.
Please let this mean that there are no more Flash websites
Adobe cripples Flash video with DRM – Boing Boing
Amazingly, Adobe seems to have entirely missed the fact that the reason that the Flash video format has taken off is that it’s so fluid, versatile and remixable — not because they sucked up to some Hollysaurs and crippled their technology.
I know there are good uses for Flash (Homestarrunner, Google Analytics, YouTube). But for every good usage, there are probably 100 bad uses. If you’ve ever been to a site that takes forever to load, and then when it does, it’s impossible to navigate, it was probably made with Flash. It’s not that the technology itself is necessarily bad, it’s just that the potential for abuse is so great.
Now, with the introduction of DRM and the inevitable flood of DMCA takedown notices, perhaps we will see the end of Flash. Not that I think the absence of Flash will prevent bad websites, but maybe it will help.
I cant believe they said that
Techdirt: Yahoo Now Thinks AOL Will Be A Savior?
Then, late Sunday a new rumor arose: Yahoo! might try to keep Microsoft away by merging with AOL. That seems sort of like trying to keep a wild animal from eating you by covering yourself with feces. It might make awful sense for about a second, but it’s just a bad, bad idea. First, it’s unlikely to work — and, second, it’s just pathetic.
I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much at an article on Techdirt. Comparing a merger with AOL to covering yourself in feces? Do they have a new intern writing articles? Wow.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a great analogy, and really funny, but totally not what I expect from Techdirt.
I don’t really care what happens to Yahoo. My only request is that they make sure that someone with a soul gets control of Flickr. That is the only part of Yahoo that I care at all about. When Yahoo bought them, I was afraid that Flickr would be ruined, but Yahoo has pretty much left the site alone. There is a really good community there (Slightly obsessed with half-naked women, but isn’t that why most people pick up a camera anyway?), and it’s one of the only things online where I actually pay for the “pro” version.
Anyway, I hope Yahoo finds a buyer and everything works out. I doubt they’ll ever catch Google, but they can at least keep nipping at Google’s heels, keep them from getting soft (And putting out a product like Windows Vista).
Welcome to five years ago
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency – finally with RSS! While they offer a title-only feed, which I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen, at least they’re making progress.
I guess they want you to come to the site and see the ads for their various books and subscriptions and such, but it still seems very odd not to at least offer a teaser in addition to the title.
Put the full text in your blog feed and Ill read it
Techdirt: Why Full Text Feeds Actually Increase Page Views (The Freakonomics Explanation)
Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well.
I hate partial text feeds. It’s very true that I am much less likely to read an article if I have to click through. And with so much content on the internet, much of it pretty decent, there’s a good chance that I can find something else just as good as what you wrote.
I ‘m looking through my RSS reader, and there are hardly any feeds that I read regularly that don’t do full text. Uniwatch doesn’t, and I frequently forget to read it. The Hardball Times doesn’t, and I only read articles there where the subject line is intriguing. Almost every site I read every day, including the above-linked Techdirt, has a full feed.
And look – here I am, blogging about something that they wrote at Techdirt, proving their point.