WoW, various stuff.

Friday, July 07, 2006

First some housekeeping.
WoW is pretty popular, now averaging about 400 unique veiws per day. Since March when we began, we have had just a shade under 9,000 unique veiw, and there has been an exponential increase. March and April only saw 1000 uniques combined; May and June, that increased to almost 5000 combined. July already has 2400, and it is only the 7th. This is obviously due to your hard work, and interesting/funny/controversial articles. We have even had a couple of reviews. For some reason I can only find one right now, it is located here, if I find the others, I will post links. The site is Qaisamazing.com. I am really not sure what the site is all about, it seems to be some type of directory, with a ranking list for particular subjecst (but this is not explained anywhere on the site, nor is clear how the rankings are done). WoW has a short review in its "Amazing Raciest" section. Problem. Becuase a lot of the site is misspelled and has a lot of bad grammar, I am not sure if "Raciest" refers to racisim or being racy. But what the hell, here's the review:

Wand Of Wonder:
Which is itself pretty amazing to have the top spot considering the site is only a week old. ... I am not a raciest person, (I hate everyone equally), but this story burned me.

Of course, it does not link to the story that "burns him" so I have no idea what he is talking about.

As for ort somewhat prolific traffic, where is it coming from? Well, here is a list of the top ten countries that visit WoW:

1. UNITED STATES - a full 68% of our visitors, no real surprise there
2. UNKNOWN - Unknown refers generall to three things, government agencies, some weird spiders, and spammers. This is real interesting for a site so recent created to have this many unknowns. - 17%
3. CANADA - Our Northern Neighbors make up 5% of our visitors, eh?
4. SPAIN - Surprisingly the UK is not the first European country on this list, but our bearded lady friends from Spain. 3%
5. CHINA - Nice, we haven't been blocked by the Chinese yet! 2%
6. INDIA - YPG and Auto C our resident Indians are doing a hell of a job driving Indian traffic here - 1%
7. BRAZIL - Those crazy Brazilian with thier waxed pubic areas make up 1%
8. UNITED KINGDOM - UK not really in the house with .5%
9. AUSTRALIA - Even worse with the Aussies at only .3%
10. MALAYSIA - and of all places Malayasia fills out the top ten at .3%

Surprisingly we got no Arabs here until Saudi Arabia at 19, with .1%. .1% also comes from Burkina Faso, a country I have never heard of, but looks like a cool place to visit. You can see by this top ten, the reason for the extreme amount of translation site hits.

Our most popular pages? This blog as a whole (with a full 52% of the visitors, the Main Site Page, The Podcasts, the RSS Feed, and the TOM info page. Our 5 most popular blog posts: Soccer and the United States, A Couple of Quickies (yeah weird, but this one has a couple of permanent links from Trumba and Technocrati), If I Were Leader of the Free World (heavily promoted on MySpace), Flight 77, and Ohh Daniel San! MY ARM! (again heavy MySpace Promotion). I think this shows how much traffic can be driven to a particular post from a few well placed links.

As for links? Where is traffic coming from? Again top 5: MySpace profiles, Links from Blogger (that includes individual blogs, advertising by blogger itself, and random links from blogger, Invision Free (several forums), Bitacle, and Google. The Keyword most used to find this site: third-option.com/wow. The Keyphrase: Yellowstone Death.

Rules vs. Guidelines
I would like to expand upon Murk's post from yesterday. I really don't want to create a set of hard and fast rules for this site but on the other hand, this is not a forum, nor do I want a extreme free-for-all post as your whim dictatestype of blog either. I would like a balance here. As for rules, there is one or two: no posted porn (now this is not a hard and fast rule, there are exceptions, stuff that might be funny, or interesting from a news standpoint, or for example weird site links like Suicide Girls, or someone you went to high school with). In addition I don't think we would support any type of extreme violent racist propoganda or something like How to Make a Homemade Bomb (here come those Unknown Visitors).

As for some guidelines. Guidelines are just that. They are not rigid but more of suggestions. I would prefer not to see people posting multiple posts in a row, I really don't see the purpose to posting 3 different entries in a row. I would also prefer not to see more than two posts in one day by a particular contributer. Again, this could change based upon case by case situations. I would also prefer to limit the amount of profanity within main posts (comments don't matter). There is a reason for this. I don't want this site labeled as a mature +21 site. This will allow much more visitors to the site, and the site not to be blocked by blocking software. Spiders, pick up on the language and categorize it. While I am not saying never swear, limit it, make it more effective when you use it. As general if I were going to rate this site for minimum age it would like it to be 14+ with occasion forays into 17+. As for posts, blogger has a spell check. Use it. (I also understand that some of our contributers, English is a second language, don't worry about it so much if that is the case). As for posts themselves, again just a guidelines. Short posts. I don't mind short posts, but would prefer people not post multiple short seperate posts over the course of a 24 hour period. Blogger has a nice feature of "save posts as drafts". So I propose instead of post three short posts over the course of of the day, post them all in one saved draft and at the end of the day publish them. Again not a strict rule, sometimes events beget multiple short posts. Also (this is not meant to pick on anyone), short post like this while interesting could probably be made more interesting with a bit more thought put into it and the post expanded. On the other hand, this is a very short post, but well done.

As a whole, I would prefer to leave this blog for longer posts, and not someone's personal dumping ground for everthing interesting you find. I fear losing readers if the fun stuff going on gets buried too fast (and I have the main page set to show 14 days worth of posts). I also don't want to discourage anyone from posting. That what has makes this blog awesome. Moderation I guess is the key. And I have no problem with people advertising their own stuff. Link to your site when you post. Link to posts on your blog if you want people to see your stuff. Example: Murk has 5 things he wants to talk about, Murk could post half here (the half here in one post) and half at his blog and link back and forth, or he could post one thing here he wants to expand on and the rest on his blog, with a link saying "for more of Murk's thoughts go here (with a link)".

Again one extreme, too much posting, is as bad as the other, no one posting. Use your onw personal common sense.

Funny Stuff.
Check out 419eater.com. Basically, these guys mess around with scammers/spammers, going along with their schemes (IE the Nigerian Scammers), and convicing the scammers to send them things like pictures. There are some funny, funny things on this site, for example the case of Samuel Eze. It is funny some of the stuff they got this guy to do.

I am Malach and I rule with a pillow fist.