November 28th, 2006
Anthony
A new report has some disappointing results for us:
“E-mail systems are overloaded or melting down trying to keep up with all the spam,” said Dan Druker, a vice president at Postini.
His company has detected 7 billion spam e-mails worldwide in November compared to 2.5 billion in June. Spam in Britain has risen by 50 percent in the last two months alone, according to Internet security company SurfControl.
He goes on to claim that the United States, China and Poland are the biggest sources of spam. Hmm, I guess the Great Firewall of China is not as good at keeping spam in than its real-world counterpart was at keeping the Mongolian hordes out.
November 24th, 2006
Anthony
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that office workers are turning to the web to find out the cricket scores.
SMH says Akamai (an internet content delivery firm) indicates that Australian news sites are receiving more than 126,000 visitors per minute - thats 70% increase.
This reminds me of the recent Melbourne Cup - I was looking for some info there, and couldn’t find much in Google.
I’m thinking that ’special events’ create a special niche which has not yet been filled. Visitors are currently turning to news sites to find out whats going on. Maybe you can jump on board? Create a site for next year’s Melbourne Cup or Ashes Tour, and just quietly get some content and backlinks going over the next year. Then, come next events, you’re in a good position to get plenty of visitors for specific terms.
Just a thought.
November 9th, 2006
Anthony
Site loading time is a hot issue among web developers. Most traditionalists hold with 10 seconds before visitors start dropping off at a rapid rate.
With the exploding growth of broadband users, load-time is often discounted now. “Oh, who cares if our homepage is 600kb - our visitors have faster connections nowadays!”. Well sure folks, your visitors have faster connections now, and they’re getting used to it. They have less patience now than the good ol’ days of dial-up. They’re used to sites loading faster now, so if yours doesn’t make the grade, you’re in trouble.
Akamai and Jupiter Research have released a new study saying that online shoppers will wait a mere 4 seconds now before abandoning your site.
Four seconds is the maximum length of time an average online shopper will wait for a Web page to load before potentially abandoning a retail site. This is one of several key findings revealed in a report made available today by Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), commissioned through JupiterResearch, that examines consumer reaction to a poor online shopping experience.
The report ranked poor site performance as second only to high product prices and shipping costs as leading factors for dissatisfaction among online shoppers.
In the interest of full disclosure, it appears that Akamai provide content-delivery services (to the likes of Apple and IBM), so this report is definitely in the favor. Whether its biased or not, who knows, but the findings make a lot of sense to me. I know I get frustrated with sites that take more than 2 seconds before I can start reading the content while the images load.
November 9th, 2006
Anthony
Well this is cheery news. Apparently there’s a bid to change Australian copyright law. The government has introduced legislation aimed to modernize copyright laws, because they’re apparently a bit out of date.
News.com.au says:
At present, Australian citizens technically break the law whenever they record their favourite television program or copy or download music for their own use.
You know what? I can’t really see this changing. Read the rest of this entry »
November 8th, 2006
Anthony
Interspire is a software company who I bought some software from a while back for a client. They send me periodic email, most of which gets deleted. Their latest newsletter I liked, thanks to one article titled “The 12 Most Popular Headlines Of All Time”.
They give examples like “They laughed when I sat down at the piano - but when I started to play!“, and explain how this makes people want to read more - “what happened when he started to play? I assume she was really good and nobody knew?” etc.
The article is linkbait (designed to get lots of people to link to them, just like I am doing now) but its a good read, so they’ve earned it!
November 8th, 2006
Anthony
A couple of weeks ago, Brendon wrote a post on “Why You Need To Keep Your (Online) Nose Clean“. Short answer: because anybody can look you up, and once you write about that drunken party on your blog, its pretty much there forever. Deleting the page doesn’t mean its gone from the internet.
According to CareerBuilder.com, 26 percent of hiring managers say they have used search engines to research potential employees, and one in 10 has looked on a social networking website. Thats getting a bit high, and it’ll only grow from here.
So I was interested when I stumbled across a Wired article titled ‘Delete Your Bad Web Rep‘. It introduces a company called Reputation Defender, and lemme tell ya folks - this is interesting stuff.
Read the rest of this entry »
November 7th, 2006
Anthony
The Netcraft November 2006 Web Survey shows some interesting results. Apparently, there are now over 100.1 million web sites on the internet. Thats up from 97.9 million last month.
So apparently the we’ve had over 2.5 million sites pop-up in only one month. This leads me to wonder how many of these are contributing members of internet society? And how much is just blogspam and trashsites.
Read the rest of this entry »
November 2nd, 2006
Anthony
Wait for it… today, the Queensland Premier, Mr Peter Beattie, is praying for rain. And I’m not just saying that - this seems to be his strategy in combating the drought.
Read the rest of this entry »
November 2nd, 2006
Anthony
Spam levels are still growing and striving for new heights. More than 3 out of 4 emails intercepted during September by one company was classed as spam. (77%)
From the article:
MX Logic also noted that the percentage of September’s junk mail that complied with the federal anti-spam CAN-SPAM Act hit an all-time low of 0.27 percent, down from 0.3 percent in August and 0.75 percent in July. A year and a half ago, compliance rates averaged 3 to 4 percent.
Techdirt says:
When the CAN SPAM bill was first signed into law in the US, it seemed pretty clear that it had little to do with actually stopping spam, and plenty to do with letting some politicians pat themselves on the back for stopping spam.
Sounds about right to me. So they wrote a law to say “Don’t Spam?” Who cares! As long as spammers are making money, they will continue to spam. Depressing. I think closer to 80% of my own email is spam.
November 1st, 2006
Anthony
One of the sites owned by my employer (Tailored Consulting) is called Brand Boots.com. Today, Brendon tells me that BrandBoots is ranked #5 in Yahoo for the phrase “ugg boots” - and thats great news.
BrandBoots was a venture by Brendon and Mel to sell Ugg Boots (Ugh boots, Ugg boots, Ug Boots - however you want to spell it!) from an online shop. Over Christmas etc, they would sell LOTS of boots overseas. (Don’t forget, its hot here in Australia - but other countries can get snow, and warm sheepskin boots are great in cold weather).
Read the rest of this entry »