Spam Clock runs the counter of the SPAM websites that were created since January 1st, 2011. The data is provided by blekko search engine. And the numbers are staggering. Every hour a million of new SPAM pages is created. And there I was, thinking that we mostly have a problem with email, where, any ISP in the world will tell you, SPAM messages account for roughly 99.99% of all emails.
Via Download Squad.
I’ve said it a few times that one of the good things about Cyprus is that there are so many people from so many different cultures living in peace here. But I rarely actually researched how many foreigners are here and from which parts of the world they come. I just judged by my own experiences. Cyprus Mail runs the article which is interesting in this regard.
ALMOST ONE third of Cyprus’ population is made up of foreigners, including other EU citizens, nationals of third countries and illegals, according to statistics for 2009.
I came across an excellent graphical representation of a number of web design and development surveys, such as A List Apart Survey. The infographic pulls results of several such surveys into a single long image with graphs and stats. One thing that I was surprised by was how narrow the results profile the average web designer. There’s almost no distribution of value across the any chart – age, gender, ethnicity, geographic location, education, etc. It almost looks like that web designers are a product of the single factory. Have a look and tell me if you don’t agree.
Being surrounded at work by web designers developers for the last few years, I have to say that even though I know a few exceptions to the average, the majority seem to fit the profile just right. I think we could use more variety, but I have no idea on how we could actually get it.
And while there are obviously plenty of pros and cons to each country in the list, it’s nice to see a summarizing effort.
Google Analytics has proven itself over and over again as an extremely valuable tool for pretty much everyone interested in website statistics. But as awesome as it is, Google Analytics has a number of limitations. These don’t come handy when you need to analyze non-public websites, such as intranets or web-based services behind closed firewalls. Sure, there are plenty of alternatives to Google Analytics that you could go with. But what if you wanted to stick to Google Analytics? I thought you couldn’t (that is without tricks and ugly workarounds). Apparently, I was wrong. You could.
Urchin is a packaged Google Analytics application that you can run on your own servers, under your full control. There are a few features in Urchin that are not in Google Analytics (mostly due to Google Analytics not having access to your server logs). Here are the interesting ones:
These are things that you don’t probably care too much, if you only have a couple of personal blogs to manage. But if you are a company with a few busy websites and large chunks of your revenues spent on the online advertising, you’d want each and every bit of information, including the above.
One other reason that probably only the enterprises will be interested in Urchin is the price. While Google Analytics comes to everyone for free, you’ll have to pay USD $9,995 (yes, almost ten thousand!) for the Urchin license.
And even though the price is quite prohibitive and will leave most people still using Google Analytics, I think it’s nice to have this option.