Another TED conference video just got posted — this time the always engaging and very funny Yossi Vardi talks about the “dangers” of blogging for men 🙂
(direct link to video if you are reading this in RSS)
Author: Raanan Bar-Cohen
US Solider & blogger Major Andrew Olmsted was killed in Iraq yesterday and left a final blog post
I have run across Andrew Olmsted’s blog posts from time to time, and was deeply saddened to see that he lost his life today in Iraq.
Major Andrew Olmsted, who posted a blog since May 2007, was killed in Iraq on Thursday, Jan. 3. Major Olmsted, who had been based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, began blogging after his unit was sent to Iraq with the mission of helping to train the Iraqi Army. No official details have been released on his death, but reports say that he and a second member of his unit were killed during an enemy ambush in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. Olmsted was determined to make a difference in Iraq. “The sooner the Iraqi government doesn’t need U.S. support to provide security for its people, the sooner we will probably be asked to leave.”
What’s incredible is that he wrote a blog post in case he was killed and asked a friend to publish it:
This is an entry I would have preferred not to have published, but there are limits to what we can control in life, and apparently I have passed one of those limits. And so, like G’Kar, I must say here what I would much prefer to say in person. I want to thank hilzoy for putting it up for me. It’s not easy asking anyone to do something for you in the event of your death, and it is a testament to her quality that she didn’t hesitate to accept the charge. As with many bloggers, I have a disgustingly large ego, and so I just couldn’t bear the thought of not being able to have the last word if the need arose.
You can read the full post here.
New York Times: assasination of Bhutto – slideshow with commentary
Really well done and powerful photo slideshow shot by John Moore of the New York Time – nytimes.com (via davenetics & Howard Weaver )
2007 year-end stats for raanan.com
Always fun to look at year-end stats.
I brought this blog back online March 23rd, 2007 – with the goal of posting about once a week — here are some fun facts for the past 9 months or so:
Overall site traffic:
7,796 Visits
12,747 Pageviews
1.64 Pages/Visit
A good traffic day during the week is about 150 pageviews, and a slow day is around 50 — on the weekends traffic is usually very light. For December 07 this site had 1,261 Visits and 1,869 Pageviews.
Overall RSS usage:
4,894 views of all items
2,813 clicks back to the site
Content Summary:
57 posts
66 legit comments
51 categories
40 tags
I clearly should have waited for tags in WordPress 2.3 — way too many categories 🙂
Spam:
Akismet has stopped 8,000 comment spams. And the rate of increase is astounding — it took about 7 months to get to 4,000 spams, and in the last 2 months spam has doubled to 8,000.
Most popular web posts:
Blackberry Curve 8300 review
Viigo RSS reader for mobile review
Thanks Dow Jones – Hello Automattic !
Hit by the OS X 10.4.10 update problems – having flashbacks to BSOD
Garmin Nuvi 350 portable GPS navigator review
These top posts get most of their traffic from search engines. Clearly reviews and anything Apple related are being searched for.
Most popular posts read in RSS:
Blackberry Curve 8300 review
Video – Splendora Laughternoon Break
Useful Mac apps: Play WMVs, Google Analytics Widget, and Quinn
WordPress Facebook App
Big win for Shahar Peer at US Open tonight
I took a look at overall click-through rates from RSS items viewed to clicked, and the numbers crunch out to a CTR of 57% ! Lots of that is coming from resyndication (both legit and some spammy looking sites) and headline-only RSS readers. Also video doesn’t always render properly in RSS readers and I see posts with video getting clicked on by subscribers.
Top Traffic Sources
12.93% Direct Traffic
28.23% Referring Sites
58.84% Search Engines
Top referring non-search engine sites:
automattic.com
photomatt.net
google.com (most likely Google Reader)
stumbleupon.com
digg.com
Top Search terms from search engines:
viigo
raanan bar-cohen
ringtone ideas
blackberry curve
garmin nuvi 350
Top referring search engines:
( Google is blue, Yahoo is green )
Wow ! I’m sure this includes Google blog search for Google, but I’m surprised how little the other search engines drive traffic to this site. I saw a recent update that overall Google marketshare is now at 65.1% of search — I wonder what that number is for blog content.
Top Browsers:
Firefox 49.77%
Internet Explorer 35.12%
Safari 11.04%
Camino 1.77%
Opera 1.18%
A bit surprising, but the people I know personally who visit my site on a regular basis are all on Macs or a Linux setup.
I also recently added the Quantcast pixel tracker, and you can see some interesting demographic info about raanan.com here.
Here’s to a great 2008 !
Iowa Bloggers playing a big role
Wired has a story on how influential the bloggers are in Iowa and the role they are playing in this year’s caucuses: As Caucuses Near, Iowa Bloggers Enjoy Their Day in the Sun
Google Apps email flags Google alerts (sent to gmail) as Spam
I’m playing around with google apps, and one great feature is the ability to import in existing gmail accounts – all email messages and even labels.
One thing I assumed was that no messages from my gmail spam folder would be imported – and that turned out to be true. But after the gmail import I noticed a bunch of message in the new google apps account’s spam folder. On closer inspection they were all legit messages including google alerts sent to my gmail account. A bit convoluted, but if this is still making sense to you, it looks like google apps email hasn’t white-listed google messages.
Odd, no ? See screenshot below showing google alerts for a stock I follow, MVIS:
Video: Gotta Digg
Pretty impressive, with nearly 80,000 views on youtube and 5,000+ diggs on digg.com .
Now where is the WordPress music video ? 🙂
WordPress and our Toni Schneider nominated for Crunchies
What are the Crunchies you ask ?
The 2007 Crunchies is our first annual competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. The Crunchies is a collaboration project between GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch. Best of all, the internet community is invited to choose who wins.
As they say in Hollywood “it’s an honor to be nominated” – and it’s great to see Toni and WordPress in the mix.
BlackBerry update: battery died, google maps update and google calendar sync
* I was in DC wrapping up a trip last week when I couldn’t get my blackberry curve 8300 to boot-up. I figured the battery just drained to zero, but after plugging it in I quickly realized the battery was dead. Luckily I had access to another blackberry curve and was able to borrow that battery for a day. I called around to a few at&t stores in DC, and to my surprise they did not sell batteries. Anyway, long story short, after calling at&t customer care, they fedexed me a new battery and I’m back in action !
* The new google maps update came out a week or so ago ( from your mobile browser: http://google.com/gmm ) and it now has “My Location” which is pretty sweet. If you don’t have GPS, it can now use cell tower triangulation to approximate your location. When I was in NYC, it was accurate within a block. In DC it was within 500 meters or so, and in SF it seems to be within 1000 meters on average. So it’s by no means a replacement for GPS, but when doing a search for a cafe for example, it’s great that you can search within your area without putting in the street or zip code.
* Google Calendar Sync was just released. It syncs your google calendar to your blackberry’s native calendar – which for me has been a wish-list item for a long time. After running the initial sync, you may want to hop into the the options menu on the mobile app and make sure it’s grabbing all the calendars you wish to have. In my setup I have a few different calendars being imported into gCal, and the mobile app appears to default to only one calendar. So far it seems to work really well.
Time Out New York: Bloggers vs critics
A good read in the December 6, 2007 issue of Time Out New York about the roll of bloggers and the intersection with traditional critics. The article starts with “Opinions are like…Now that cranking out a blog is easier than getting a library card, what does this new panoply of voices means for the institution of criticism?”
Q: We’re at this crossroads, where print and online content are intertwined, and no one’s sure how it will all shake out. So, deep breath: What’s the essential question facing the future of criticism?
A: Alex Ross, music critic, The New Yorker; blogger and author, The Rest Is Noise
The growth of online criticism means that the conversation about various art forms is widening. With huge gaps opening in arts coverage in the mainstream media—in classical we’ve seen the almost total disappearance of criticism from national publications—blogs and websites have allowed the conversation to go on. The essential question is whether critics are doing their utmost to make the art come alive for readers.
Raanan Bar-Cohen 
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