Christmas season and blog stats

I don’t know exactly how all those online shops do during the Christmas seasons (probably they are blooming), but I can show you what two weeks or so of Christmas and New Year’s holidays can do to one’s blog statistics.  Here is a screenshot of weekly stats for my blog:

Weekly stats - Christmas edition

X-axis shows a few last weeks of 2007 as well as a couple of weeks of 2008.  Y-axis shows the number of visits this blog had for each of those weeks.  A home-made red marker with a word “here” tries to bring your attention to the celebration of Christmas and New Year represented on this graph.

As much as it was expected, that was quite a dive I must say.  Reasons?  I’d say there are only two:

  1. Many people are busy with shopping, celebrations, travels, and other holiday matters.  Mostly off-line.
  2. Many companies closed their offices and that minimized many employees’ access to the Web.

Gladly, things are rushing back to normal.

On the quality of voice in the phone conversation

Tom Evslin has this interesting observation about the quality of voice in the traditional phone:

The bandwidth of the telephone connection between our homes and the telephone network hasn’t changed in my long lifetime. Although some noise has been eliminated in long distance calls (sometime and if we’re not on a cellphone), voices on the phone still sound like they did sixty-five years ago. We’ve trained ourselves to accept the clipped quality of a telephone voice with its lack of emotional overtones.
You wouldn’t dream of listening to music over the phone. You expect and get much better sound quality from almost any radio and on TV. Movies have Dolby sound. But the telephone is still the telephone.

He suggests that VoIP (think: Skype) is changing that.

On predictive text

Here is a funny quote from the comment on predictive text (think: T9) in the discussion about Android and mobile devices on Slashdot:

Predictive text helps a bit but sometimes it gets things so ducking wrong that I am sure the people who program it are a deliberately unhelpful bunch of ducking aunts.

Maybe I should adopt some sort of predictive text plugin for WordPress for those times when I feel like swearing…

Question: Fuel vs. Internet

What do you spend more more on: your Internet connection bills or your car’s fuel?  Use monthly periods. How does that change if you consider all extras for your Internet connection (web hosting and other web services, extra services from your ISP, extra bandwidth utilization charges, etc) and extras for your car maintenance (oil, service, car wash, etc)?

(I came up with these questions while reviewing my spending statistics at Wesabe, which is an excellent service.  The basis for comparison of fuel to Internet connection lies in both of these being vital for many modern citizens, while they are currently mutually exclusive – you don’t use Internet while driving and you don’t use your car while using the Internet.  Not just yet.) 

Yahoo Life! anybody?

(Side note: punctuation in product names sure makes headlines confusing)

Mashable has a post about upcoming Yahoo Life!

The premise is this: take Yahoo Mail, and make it the hub of your daily online activities; turn e-mail addresses into social profiles; connect e-mail to other services, and use the info from the contacts in these services according to the context.

This sounds good.  This sounds like exactly what I need.  Of course, there is a “but”:

It sounds and looks great, but we can’t know how well it works until the product actually goes live.

OK, we have to wait and see.  But I see that this niche will get a bit crowded pretty soon.  With all those web services and social networks more and more people are coming online.  Social connections will be more and more important, and therefor we’ll see more and more tools that do this.  There are some specialized tools for these purposes already, but none of them have enough functionality and momentum to lead the way yet.  Hopefully it will change sooner than later.  And, hopefully, Google will play some major role in this too…