everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Year: 2005

  • RSS traffic to nytimes.com grows by 342%

    The Silicon Valley Watcher points to a New York Times press release that states that pageviews generated by RSS feeds increased by 342% over the past year and grew an incredible 39% over the past month. While there is a hint in disappointment that the total number of RSS-generated pageviews represented only about 1% of total pageviews on the sight, one must remember that a visit as a result of an RSS refer may actually be responsible for multiple pageviews.

    If my own browsing habits are any indication, there’s more to this number than meets the eye. I normally follow a link from my reader and than read the through to several more pages on the site. Remember, most feature articles on nytimes.com are spread over multiple web pages so even if you stick to reading through just a single article, you’re going to generate a few more pageviews than your single hit from your RSS reader.

    I recall a snippet of a conversation I had with someone (the name escapes me) that worked at the Times and he told me that on some days the number of pageviews generated by their collective RSS feeds surpassed the number of pageviews from the Front Page. This was back in the Spring of 2004.

    I would agree with the key take-away in this article. The growth in traffic at nytimes.com is being driven by RSS.

  • Automatic Niceties

    I’m behind an older gentleman in the supermarket checkout line and the boy bagging the groceries is clearly on auto-pilot, not really paying attention, just going through the motions. I don’t blame him, it’s the end of the day and this is probably the 350th bag he’s had to stuff. Gentleman is paying for his purchase, a loaf of bread, some cold cuts, and some light bulbs.

    Bag boy drones his automatic response, "Paper? Plastic?" and "Would you like me to help you with your groceries out to the car?" This is California after all – the supermarket checkout folks are downright pleasant, not like the supermarket cashiers back East. But I suspect that this line about helping is written somewhere in the Safeway employee manual but still, it gets bag boy out into the sun every now and then, maybe even a tip or two. But older gentleman is not amused.

    "Help me with my bags!!??" I’ve got like three things in there? If I needed help with this, I should be in a wheelchair!"

    That woke us all up.

    Reminds me of another incident, this one in Japan where these kinds of scripted customer interactions are a science. A slightly pudgy office worker shuffles into a Dunkin’ Donuts, pulls out a list and proceeds to order about thirty donuts. She’s clearly working down a list which she will then call out when she’s brought her delivery back to her office mates.

    Yet, Dunkin’ Donuts cashier doesn’t soak this in and after ringing her up asks the automatic "o-mochi kaidi desu ka?" which roughly translates as "will you be taking this home?" the equivalent of the American "For here or to go?" Pudgy office worker takes offense and leans over to yell, which is highly unusual in Japan.

    "Do you actually think I’m actually going to sit down in your fine establishment and proceed to work my way through 30 doughnuts in one sitting? Don’t be such an idiot!"

    Everyone there sniggered into their coffee.

  • Favorable Review of TypePad

    The Associated Press has done a review of several hosted weblog services including Microsoft’s Spaces and the recently launched Yahoo 360. TypePad comes out on top,

    Unfortunately, none of the five free or semi-free services satisfies
    me fully, and which one you choose depends on the specific features you
    value most.

    To get them all, you must pay at least $4.95 a month to subscribe to TypePad. It pretty much has everything I could ask for. . .

    Full text of the review here.

  • Contextual Advertising & Unintended Consequences

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    The screenshot (click on image to view full screen) was taken from an entry in my feed reader the other day. I can’t imagine that the text of this sponsored link was intentional but it certainly speaks to the the editorial point being made in the article above it.

    Original post here but the contextual ad may most likely will have changed.

  • Projects around the house

    We didn’t get up to much this weekend (short trip out to Japantown for their Cherry Blossom festival, another trip out to Walnut Creek so the kids could pick out materials to construct their own stuffed animal) which meant that Izumi and I got into our own projects.

    I spent time fiddling with a new website that I’m building for Dymag and in between got all muddy digging up and replacing broken fixtures on the built-in sprinker system. Izumi discovered and later documented (see photo) an expecting hummingbird that has taken up residence in the narrow space between our house and our neighbors.

    I never owned a house with a sprinkler system. Our 1/3 acre lot in New Jersey was services by a long garden hose that I would hook up to one of those whirly-gig things that I would wheel out every few weeks when things looked a little brown and that was about it. Californians, especially those on small, semi-urban lots, take much better care of their lawns and almost every home in Alameda has a built-in sprinkler system. During the winter, when torrential rains seemed to come through every couple of days, I thought it overkill to water the lawn as well so I promptly unplugged the thing and never gave it a second thought.

    Now that the days are growing a longer and with nothing better to do, I plugged the thing in and set to learning how it worked. The control panel in the garage has a number of dials and levers so it took some trial and error (with cooperation from the kids) to learn which switch controlled which sprinkler. I’d throw one switch and would wait a few seconds until I heard a yelp from Tyler where the latest spout had emerged from the ground and started spewing water (usually on his backside).

    They’re called “pop-up” sprinklers because when you switch them on, the water pressure pushes up a thin, plastic stalk out of the ground that then sprays the water out in a pattern that’s determined by the shape of the sprinkler head and a fine adjustment of small screws that are embedded in the top of the spout. I learned more about these fixtures over the weekend as I discovered some of the spouts were broken and needed to be replaced.

    There’s a whole sprinkler sub-culture that I somehow overlooked at the hardware store as there are different attachments and spray patterns that all have different purposes. Of course, it took several trips to the local store to work out what I needed to replace and with what exact pieces. Suffice to say that it’s all very advanced and I am loath to call what I have repaired a “sprinkler system.” It’s a goddam irrigation network and is now programmed to fire off it’s various fan sprays, rotating jets, and dribblers at 6:15 AM every other morning.

    Izumi, on the other hand, looked on with greater concern with each successive trip to the hardware store and shook her head sadly and went back to her observations of the yet-unnamed avian visitor. It must be a sign of good luck that a creature as gentle as a hummingbird (the thing is about as big as a wine cork, it’s eggs must be the size of a pea) has chosen our house as a safe place to welcome its young into the world. The mother sits on the nest all day, shifting around from time to time to make sure the egg is warm on all sides and cocks its head every now and then when it hears a plane flying overhead. The kids press up to the window and look so at times, all four of us, and any guests that are visiting at the time, look on at our own private nature show.

    The lawn is now watered automatically and the birds are coming home to roost. Somehow, this weekend marks some kind of milestone. We’re no longer in the process of moving in, we have settled.

  • The New News at Yahoo

    Richard MacManus of Web 2.0 has some initial thoughts on the redesign of Yahoo News. More branding for the content providers, clever uses of collapsing menus so that it’s easier to flick between categories and top headlines from different sources, and a new "drill down" feature which lets you run a Y!Q search on words and phrases that have been enabled within articles. There’s even a cool little slideshow feature that lets you play the through the top photos of the day (I see now this is not a new feature but it’s cool nonetheless).

    Yahoo’s editorial touch is evident as well with links to articles that have been pulled together to cover popular topics. Yahoo’s had these "Full Coverage" pages before but having them highlighted in the top right brings this feature to the fore. Links at the bottom of stories allow you to IM a story to someone and an interactive ranking system for each story no doubt feeds into the "Recommended Stories" section.

    RSS junkies would be happy to hear that almost everything you can think of is RSS-enabled so you can bring your own slice of what you see into your reader.

    I think I see Neil Budde’s vision taking place. Neil joined the Yahoo News team in November and was one of the original minds behind wsj.com. This is what happens when you give someone with editorial vision access to a team of talented engineers.

    Online Journalism Review coverage of Yahoo News
    Online Tour of Yahoo News

  • Julia’s Special Day

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    I took the morning off on Wednesday to take Julia to school for her “special day.” On this day, a parent stays with their child for the whole session and the child gets to sit up in front of the class next to the teacher and her parent and lead the activities for the day.

    She has been going pre-school two days a week since we moved here and was very excited to show me her school. We sang Julia’s favorite songs (I finally learned the words to I’m a Little Teapot) and she was the line leader as we headed out to the playground. Later, we came in and ate a snack (sliced oranges and milk crackers) that Izumi prepared and picked up the artwork they had worked on earlier.

    It was great to hang out with a room of three year-olds for a morning. I spent most of the free play time quizzing the kids on the various action figures that were in a bucket in the corner of the room. They knew them all – each of the Rugrat kids, various Star Wars characters, the members of the Incredible family, and of course the Disney animals. We also read a few books which they all enjoyed and was one way to quiet them down.

    It’s always neat to see your daughter within a group of her peers. Julia’s on the quiet side, she keeps to herself a lot, pays attention to what’s going on and doesn’t get involved with the gossipy girls in the back of the class. But inside, you can see that she’s got lots of energy and is taking it all in like a sponge. Her teacher’s nickname for her is “Julia Jumping Bean” and when we went out to the playground you could see where that came from – everywhere we went, she was hoping around or up on her tippy toes.

    Several times during the class, Julia would lean over to me and whisper, “Daddy, I like you very much!” I think she was pretty happy to have me there. Thanks for having me.

  • Mr. Smiley the Bus Driver

    One thing I love about living in the United States is the sense of humor that finds its way into daily life.

    The baggage handler at JFK that shouts out “Welcome to America!” at the top of his lungs as he hauls your bags off the conveyor belt.

    The Bart train driver who takes the time to explains the history of the West Oakland shipping cranes and how they were the inspiration for George Lucas when he designed the Imperial Walkers for Star Wars, all in the tone of a pleasantly brain dead Disney tour bus operator.

    The New York subway driver who tries to convince commuters from rushing into the same door at the bottom of the stairs by yelling into the intercom, “REVERSE PSYCHOLOGY. Everyone please jam into the same door at once!”

    Today’s wisecracking bus driver is the latest example of this very American humor. The ride back home on the Transbay bus is usually a mundane affair – folks are tired after a day in the work-a-day world and the muffled quiet on the bus is deadening as most just want to sink into their seats and reflect quietly on the day gone by. I have a choice of three buses to take me home so before boarding a bus I usually glance at my watch just to gauge if I should take the local before me or wait for an express. As I ran through the mental calculation the driver hailed me with a greeting and then said, “What are you lookin’ at your watch for, I’m on time. You want to leave earlier? I can do that too.”

    As I climbed on board he went on, trying to snap me from my post-work haze, “Hey, you dropped a $20 bill behind you.” when there was none there. Made you look is written on the faces of all the other riders already seated as I took my seat.

    Now alert, I patted the driver on his arm, thanking him for the joke and taking my seat. Each new rider was greeted with a new round of jokes and quips as he poked and prodded each commuter out of their automatic pilot.

    “I almost have enough, can I get on?” says a student. “I almost can take you, is that ok?” the driver shoots back.

    We’re pulling out of San Francisco and we’re all smiles, heading over the bridge with the sun setting behind us, a bus full of kids on a field trip.

  • We got Hats! We got T-Shirts!

    A shameless plug for the Six Apart Store. Be the first on your block (maybe the only one ever on your block) to wear a T-shirt that says “My other shirt is rebuilding” Shweet!