Sunday conspiracy humour

17 comments on “Sunday conspiracy humour ”

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1. Steve Withers 1

   22 March 2009 at 9:28 pm

   Thanks for the post. I’d wondered about Alexa. Seems pretty useless. My own Google stats show my (year old) blog averages about 75 visits / day……sometimes more (300 on one day last week) and sometimes less (56 so far today – Sunday – including 2 from India reading about USB pen drives).

   Readership has more than doubled since I started using Twitter just over 2 months ago….including a fair number of hits from India looking at my posts on tech subjects – like Ubuntu Linux, pen drives (above), Adobe AIR, PCTV nano Stick and others. My more general political posts get NZ traffic and my ‘global’ political posts get global traffic. Just as one would expect. My posts about minor stuff that interests me tend to be read by me and my dogs….and maybe some guy in Romania. Trying to work that one out.

   Barnsley Bill and people like him are a toxic part of the Net. Don’t waste too much time or thought on them. (not that you do, anyway………just saying…)
   • lprent 1.1

     22 March 2009 at 10:06 pm

     Get Google Analytics and attach. That seems to be about the most innocuous of the bunch.

     I do like pointing out to the worst wingnuts exactly what I think of them…
     • Inventory2 1.1.1

       23 March 2009 at 12:06 pm

       Thanks for the tip Lynn – even right-wing wingnuts are always open to techie suggestions!
       • lprent 1.1.1.1

         23 March 2009 at 6:08 pm

         You know I just like stirring. 😈
2. infused 2

   22 March 2009 at 11:39 pm

   “Alexa also looks at the IP and tries to reverse it to find the country of origin, which is a procedure that frequently gets false results.”

   Wrong. Uses GeoIP which is %98 accurate.
   • lprent 2.1

     23 March 2009 at 12:25 am

     Yes and irrelevant – it is not 100%. Do you understand using statistics on small populations? Did you read my December post and understand the implications to the population size of Alexa users?

     In this case, between 1 and 2 people per hundred (it is apparently 98.7%) would have an incorrect country location on average in a large sample.

     All it takes is one address to be allocated to an incorrect country from the small population of users who use Alexa toolbar on our site to change the percentages. How big an effect would happen depends on the population size – ie how many people use Alexa.

     Based on the response of Alexa to my putting the toolbar on my browsers, I think that there are less than 20 people (and probably closer to 10) who do, out of the thousands who regularly read the site on a weekday. Otherwise my use wouldn’t have had such a marked effect. If I’m correct and about 10 people use Alexa Sparky, then there is a significant probability that GeoIP gave us a false country for one, and therefore we got a significant population.

     Given a small population of Alexa users it could be that one was reading from India from a internat cafe with alexa sparky installed that week.

     I’d add that last year and early this year for our site, I’ve seen large percentages from Poland, Netherlands, USA and few other places. The percentages for particular countries rise and falls rapidly over the weeks.

     In essence Alexa is crap because too few people use the toolbar. That is the real significance of BB’s observation. However instead of looking at it, for instance looking at a few other sites in alexa, he just jumped to a hypothesis that he’d prefer to believe. Sure isn’t smart thinking. If he’d been smart he’d have looked to see what was happening on other blogs..

     Right now for instance

     Kiwiblog.co.nz users come from these countries:
     New Zealand80.7%
     Netherlands7.4%
     India3.1%
     United States2.3%
     United Kingdom0.8%

     Thestandard.org.nz users come from these countries:
     New Zealand81.3%
     India9.2%
     United States5.9%

     Publicaddress.net users come from these countries:
     New Zealand67.0%
     Australia8.7%
     United Kingdom7.4%
     Netherlands2.7%
     United States2.6%

     Whaleoil.co.nz users come from these countries:
     New Zealand87.0%
     Netherlands7.4%
     Other countries5.6%

     etc.. Yeah Right – Notice any trends here ? Looks like the evil Netherland IT companies are at it as well….
   • ghostwhowalks 2.2

     23 March 2009 at 12:01 pm

     I was trying to use a local web site which is restricted NZ IP addresses but it said I was outside the country.
     when I rang them and gave my IP address they said that was listed as Hawaii.
     Yes it seems Xtra is borrowing addresses. A quick disconnect of the telephone line for a few minutes meant I was moved back across the pacific
3. illuminatedtiger 3

   22 March 2009 at 11:53 pm

   I don’t understand why you would bother responding to this kind of rubbish – by doing so you’re just giving him the attention he so craves. Perhaps if the little V-wannabe had done his research he would know that if a site was faking it’s traffic the IP addresses would come from all over the place as the botnets employed in this are global.

   [Update – His post has been deleted. I think he owes the writers of The Standard an apology.]
   • lprent 3.1

     23 March 2009 at 12:49 am

     Because it is quite amusing to demonstrate that given a range of possible hypotheses, a wingnut will automatically jump to the one they prefer – the one with a conspiracy. It appears to be an inherent attribute of the wingnut view of the world.

     Whale does it, Wishart does it, No Munster does it, BB does it, etc

     BTW: I suspect that BB just looked at kiwiblog Indian percentage. He updated his post with the 3% odd that KB gets. Still hasn’t picked up on the terrible Netherland SEO’s that other blogs MUST be paying for
4. Killinginthenameof 4

   23 March 2009 at 9:29 am

   Everyone, it’s the Ian Wishart school of truth coming into play, “I haven’t been sued for saying it, so it must be true!”
5. barnsleybill 5

   23 March 2009 at 12:12 pm

   My ears are burning..
   Have not updated the post or deleted it…
   No apologies being offered either.
   vero “corrupt 24” .
   hmmm
   • Inventory2 5.1

     23 March 2009 at 12:22 pm

     lol BB – I thought there were only nine of them 🙂

     No – must be 24 – my captcha was “confirming 24”
   • lprent 5.2

     23 March 2009 at 6:32 pm

     Ummm never seen anyone snort whiskey out of there 🙂

     However your post is still technically incompetent. Were you being spiritual at the time?
6. barnsleybill 6

   23 March 2009 at 12:21 pm

   you simply failed to put the link in properly at the beginning of your post
7. lukas 7

   23 March 2009 at 1:24 pm

   ** update – looks like BB decided to update his post. I wonder why?

   Looks like LP forgot the l in the html at the end of the link.
8. lprent 8

   23 March 2009 at 6:14 pm

   Umm that is weird. You could be right. I was distracted with some code at the time. Worked when I first tested it. Guess the finger slipped when I edited. I’ll update the post when I get near a computer. There I’d no way I want to edit from an iPhone
9. Phil 9

   23 March 2009 at 11:23 pm

   This has ignited another round of hysteria

   Since when does a couple of blog posts count as ‘hysteria’?!

   Get over yourself Lynn, thestandard is not special

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