“Computer people are the last to guess what’s coming next. I mean, come on, they’re so astonished by the fact that the year 1999 is going to be followed by the year 2000 that it’s costing us billions to prepare for it.”
– Douglas Adams, 1999 — Cited by Stephen Fry

I was recently remarking to my mate Brian that it was he who first introduced me to the concepts of eBay and portable music players (eg iPod).

I recall him years ago describing the iRiver player he was covetting — and eventually bought, if my memory serves me correctly.

And I remember him describing this new online auctioning system. People would list their items, others would bid, a small fee would go to the auction company, and everybody would be happy. It was called “eBay”.

Brian was always an early adapter, and I hadn’t heard of these things, and neither had most of the general public.

In both these cases I my response was to think “What a stupid name. And what a stupid idea.”

And I thought Gmail was a hoax.

I guess I’m not very good at predicting technology trends.

I’ve seen Google and Yahoo put out reports on the top search terms of the year, and we’re only a week into December. (Happy Hannukah by the way.)

Seems a bit odd to do that before the actual end of the year, but what the hell, I’ll jump on that bandwagon. Here are some stats for my blog, for the year up to midnight Tuesday.

Total posts for the year: 279

Total comments for the year: 2014

Average comments per post: 7.2

Most frequent post categories:

What do I end up writing most about? Posts in multiple categories counted twice.

• News and events 46
• Melbourne 42
• Home life 34
• Consumerism 33
• Transport 19
• TV 17
• Friends and loved ones 15
• Driving 15
• Health 15
• PTUA 12
• Culture 12
• Food’n'drink 12

Most popular categories by comments:

What do people like commenting on most? (average comments per post per category)

• Ranting 17.5
• Clothes 10.1
• Friends and loved ones 9.9
• Adelaide 2007 9.9
• Transport 9.4
• Driving 8.7
• Working life 8.3
• Health 8.2
• Melbourne 7.5
• Culture 7.3
• PTUA 7.3

Least popular? Dreams 0.5. Not really surprised at that; more than any other category, my occasional posts about my dreams are for my benefit, not anybody else’s!

Top popular posts by comment:

And what have been the posts that people have commented on the most?

• 2007-08-27 Thirty-seven 91 — that was where I asked how old everybody is. Results here.
• 2007-02-16 Smoking rant 30
• 2007-06-30 Dumped… by Virginia 24 — See also the sequel.
• 2007-07-05 Guess what these are 23
• 2007-07-17 More on emissions 22
• 2007-08-08 Oh Myki you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind 21
• 2007-01-22 Get a grip, you people 19
• 2007-07-26 Adelaide in November 19
• 2007-07-31 Where are you from? 19
• 2007-01-11 Is aircon turning us into wimps? 17
• 2007-05-22 Winter and water 17

Top ten frequent commenters:

Who’s left the most comments?

• Daniel 191 — I guess I just love commenting on my own blog
• Roger 146
• Toria 86
• Andrew 73
• Ren 51
• Philip 47
• Nathan 33
• Peter 30
• Stitch Sista 29
• Savannah 27

Quickest comments (minutes between post and comment):

Thanks to the web, and particularly with RSS feeds, people can see what you’ve written within seconds of it being posted. Who’s been quickest off the mark to comment? Figures in minutes and seconds between the blog post and the first comment.

• 2007-09-07 APEC Day Tony 01:25
• 2007-10-19 Animal meme Roger 05:21
• 2007-02-12 Somebody set us up the bomb Miss Eagle 06:00
• 2007-01-19 That’s an excuse? Roger 06:25
• 2007-08-31 Clean swear words Roger 06:38
• 2007-07-27 Confuse-a-Commuter Andrew 06:47
• 2007-03-01 Snacking Roger 07:24
• 2007-08-27 Thirty-seven Roger 07:40
• 2007-10-04 Anniversary number four dave 08:31
• 2007-10-02 The mayor Chris Till 09:01

Some comments come in weeks after the post, and probably nobody notices them except me. Comments are normally closed 90 days after the post date.

Finding these stats

Most of the above extracts came out of the database for the blogging software, Wordpress. For those who want to try this for themselves (and for my own future reference if I try this again next year), here’s the SQL I used.

(Pah — Skip this geeky stuff and go to the comments)

(more…)

<geekyPost>

A couple of years ago I wrote a post encouraging people with blogs to make sure their RSS feeds were turned on. I thought I might just repeat it now. RSS helps people like me who have little time to go to one place to catch up on all the blogs we like to read (and might forget to check otherwise).

It’s also worth making sure that your RSS feed is providing full posts, rather than just excerpts. It helps readers see all of your post without having to click through to your site, not just the first sentence or two. I know some people like to get comments: for me, I’m more likely to comment if I can read the entire post quickly. If I’m only seeing excerpts, unless the first sentence grabs me I won’t bother.

(Some people — myself included — use Google Ads etc to try and get some dosh from visitors to the web site. It’s true that providing full feeds means some people won’t bother visiting the site, but but for me the ads aren’t a priority… anyway some claim that you do get more visitors overall.)

So unless there’s a good reason not to, do turn on your feeds. For those many people using Blogger, the instructions are here.

And if you want to try reading others’ blogs via feeds, try Google Reader or Bloglines. You can also get software to deliver those feeds onto your computer if you don’t like reading via web pages, or use the features in Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 or Safari to easily see which blogs have been updated.

</geekyPost>

My friend Greg is on a quest to become an evil genius. He spotted an abandoned missile base for sale on ebay, and is trying to raise the money to buy it.

He writes: “People have donated to help some ditz pay off her credit cards, some kid go to college, some stripper get breast implants… why wouldn’t they donate to help a budding evil genius get his first lair?”

He’s a pretty nice guy, so I bet he’d be a benevolent evil genius.

See how you can help at evilgreg.blogspot.com.

Cameron Reilly’s done a podcast followup to his Age article encouraging people to “get off the bench”.

Listening to it reminded me of something I once wrote:

“Every person has the potential to create a great work of art; to work for the benefit of humanity; to become a spokesman or a great leader; to do good. Your role as a member of the human race is to reach your potential, and to help others to reach theirs.”

– Me, obviously feeling philosophical, January 1996

PS. Call me an imbecilic philistine, but I didn’t know Moleskine is pronounced “molly skeena”. But apparently they’re Italian, so fair enough.

PPS. Cam’s helping to run the MODM (Melbourne’s Online Digital Media) gatherings to talk about various aspects of this new digital thingamebob age we’re living in. I’d hoped to go to the meeting next Thursday night, but alas something else has clashed with it. Maybe next time, it sounds kinda interesting.

I used to be such a fast typist. From memory, in uni I could top 80 wpm.

I seem to be slowing down, or at least, my accuracy has dropped. I’m not sure if it’s due to

a. getting old

b. the crap keyboard I have at work, which periodically seems to ignore what I press, and has annoyingly unclacky(*) keys

c. lack of practice because I never use ICQ/IRC/any other chat thing anymore

Or all three.

But actually it may be my imagination: I just tried an online typing test and reports I’m still up at 73 wpm (net). So maybe it’s not so bad after all.

Actually it’s probably just (b). Maybe what I should do is replace that keyboard at work with a better one.

(*) That’s a technical term

From the Daniel’s been playing around with web stuff in his copious spare time and trying to learn PHP and here’s a blatant plug department:

You know how sometimes you go to the cinema and you can’t remember which membership card you need to show to get the discount? Is it the RACV card? Or some other card? Does the cinema around the corner give a bigger discount? And what’s that deal to get cheap train tickets? Or if I’m going sightseeing in Sydney, is there a discount for the Sydney Tower?

www.findmydiscounts.com (Alpha)

See what you think… Is it useful? Would you use it? Leave a comment here…

Yeah it mostly concentrates on AU/Vic at the moment, but if you know of other cards that give discounts (anywhere in AU for now), email …

And tell your friends if you think they’d like it.

Ah, it’s the long weekend… perfect for sleeping in, reading the paper, lazing around the house and… updating your blog. I’m doing some tweaks, to upgrade the software (to get anti-spam filters working properly; you should see the amount of comment spam I get), fiddle with the template etc. So if you notice it looking funny or not responding momentarily today, you’ll know what’s going on.

10:44am. Did a database backup. Uncompressed backup files: 18.3Mb. Total published posts: 1932. Total published comments: 6185.

11:18am. New version of Wordpress and template installed. Some tweaking still required, but that’s the main stuff. Going to look at Akismet for spam filtering.

1:30pm. Akismet spam filtering installed. Neato. And found some comments from my old school friend Konrad that had been incorrectly labelled as spam. Odd, since he wasn’t trying to sell me Cialis…