Dave Naffziger's Blog

Not that I’ve been posting terribly regularly, but I’ll be traveling for the next 9 days and expect intermittent connectivity. In the meantime, have fun with the newest version of Desktop Tower Defense.

Interesting:

• Sharks repelled by magnets. Not just repelled, but they actively turn away. Check out the wired article for a few cool videos.
• More efficient text reading online. An entirely different, more efficient way to read text. Students that read text books using this technology are seeing 10 to 15% higher achievement scores.
• Map of US States renamed for countries of similar GDPs. (From John Ludwig). Fascinating map, although it will only fuel those with a US-centric view of the world.

Cool:

• Google Solar Panel Output. I love that Google placed solar panels on its roof. I love even more that they put real-time power output on a webpage.
• Personalized Action Figures. The perfect gag gift (although pricey at $400). Thanks Jeff.
• Steampunk keyboard. I’m becoming increasingly fascinated by the incredible things built by steampunk artists/engineers. This keyboard is a pretty cool mod.

Useful:

• Are expensive HDMI cables worth it? Finally, someone tested this.
• Mailbox Maps. Find where the blue post boxes are and when they get picked up. Brilliant maps mashup of public data (I assume).
• Ruby to MySQL connection on Windows. Getting Ruby to connect to MySQL on Windows when Ruby isn’t on Rails is a pain. This download makes the pain go away.

Hilarious:

• http://www.1-click.jp/ Really hard to describe this one - see for yourself. Totally hilarious. Thanks SA.

Maybe because we’ve all gotten way too many emails with cute cat pictures and cheesy captions…

Maybe because they’re rumored to be based on ‘Caturday’ a Saturday cat forum tradition that involved, well, cat photos. Caturday has since been co-opted by forums on topics as broad as WoW to Auto Enthusiasts, and guitar players.

Maybe because they’ve been taken way too far. You can now program in LOLCODE.

Maybe it is just the juxtaposition of geek humor and cat photos.

Or maybe we all just secretly love cute photos of cats.

I couldn’t sleep and just burned 30 minutes looking at cat photos. Have fun!

Ever since Digg announced their API, I’ve been eager to see what stats I could generate. Since my wife is out at Book Club tonight, I spent a bit of time with Digg’s API. All of the analysis below was conducted on all of the stories submitted in May:

How long does it take for stories to get promoted?

Very few stories get promoted within 2 hrs. And very few stories get promoted after 24 hours. There is definitely a window of opportunity that lasts for 24 hours after submission.

Introducing ‘Promote Rate’

Up to date, the most interesting studies done on Digg have involved basic analysis of already promoted stories. Pronet Advertising has a good look at the top 10 brands on Digg, and SEOMoz has a YouMoz article on Digg that talks about the best time to submit a story.

While both of these articles are quite interesting, I think the greatest indicator of success on Digg is something I’ve been calling ‘Promote Rate’. Basically, it is the percentage of stories of a given set of characteristics that were promoted to the first page.

Best Time of Day to Submit to Digg:

Promote rates are higher on the weekends and in the evenings. A story submitted around 9PM on a weekday enjoys a 66% higher promotion rate than an 8 AM post.

Best Category to Submit to:

OK, so submitting an article to “Linux/Unix” looks to be 16x more likely to get promoted than if you submitted an article to “Business & Finance”. Certainly Diggers prefer Linux stories to the latest TPG buyout.

How much of this preference is topical vs. the category of the article? I looked at all of the stories submitted with the word ‘Linux’ in the title inside and outside the “Linux/Unix” category:

Articles with the word ‘Linux’ in the title are promoted 9x more frequently if they are submitted in the “Linux/Unix” category.

Does having a user image matter?

Users with images have more stories promoted than users without images. I would posit that a user image may indicate an active user with more friends, but submit stories without an image at your own risk =).

Anyway, that’s all for this evening. I’m looking at a few more things and will post a follow up in a little while.

Notes:

• Be careful with causality. While I think some of the conclusions are reasonable, I haven’t always gone to the extent necessary to prove causality - we may just be seeing correlation.
• I experienced XML errors with a small fraction of the calls to the Digg API - I didn’t try to recover these records, so the dataset is not 100% complete.

Yes, even Google has indigestion.

The graph below is a disconcerting sight to any website (this is from our deals subdomain). Organic search traffic from Google plummeted on Friday, and was down 90% on Saturday and Sunday. By Tuesday everything was normal. We had changed nothing. Throughout this ‘fart’, organic traffic to our www domain was unchanged.

My thought on Friday was that Google Analytics was having one of its all to frequent data update delays. I was out this weekend, and fortunately didn’t check the stats (If I had, I’d have spent most of the weekend trying to find a non-existent problem). On Tuesday when I got in, I shifted into troubleshooting mode. SEO troubleshooting small sites is difficult, but troubleshooting large sites can be very time consuming.

By midday Tuesday, the data looked normal so I stopped digging. I only burned a few hours on this non-existent problem, but could have easily burned a lot more (for example if the problem persisted for another day or two).

I can’t help but feel (wish?) that at some point Google will be held liable for crap like this.