Mr. Topp and the Big Bad Blog

Last week, I decided to finally upgrade my blog to the latest version of WordPress. I always try to avoid jumping in too soon on these things. That way, I avoid many of the little bugs and compatibility issues that tend to plague initial releases.

There is value to be gained by being an early adopter, sure. But there is also overhead, and free time is scarce enough without adding anything to it.

The Big Bad Blog has been doing “well”, I suppose, this summer. July was our first month with over 10,000 pageviews which did not feature the help of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, and the average number of daily views in August has been nearly triple that same number in March.

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we take the philosophy that these things do not matter — we write for us, dear reader, not for you. However, those who know the individual behind the intrepid blogger are likely unsurprised that he obsessively checks out the site stats. And, it turns out, when one obsessively checks such stats, one wishes for the counts to increase.

Thursday evening, we switched over to the new WordPress. You will see that on the right side of the following graph, just before the dramatic fall:

So what happened? Did the blog go down due to a bad upgrade? Did it need to be re-indexed by Google, causing search results to dry out? Was the brilliant SEO ruined?

The answers: No, no, and ha!

When I switch over to Google, and take a look at their analytics, I see the following:

The same thing is measured, but now the results over the weekend stay at that same high level (and at about triple the level from March), having only a slight drop-off, rather than a dramatic one.

So no, the site did not suddenly break or become harder to find (or — heaven forbid! — become less popular). Something changed in the way WordPress’s native stats application counts visits.

The numbers provided by Google Analytics have, historically, been considerably lower than those provided by WordPress. Google does a much better job of breaking down the numbers, but I have been hesitant to switch over for one simple reason: for the first six months of the Big Bad Blog, we did not use Google Analytics.

Because the numbers offered by the two differed strongly, I felt I could not change. How could I figure out if a new blog post was as popular as the Marshmallow March? The only way is to compare numbers that have been gathered in the same fashion.

The popularity of a website, of a blog post, of a search term, is relative. If I count in one way, and you count in a different way, we cannot compare our numbers. That your number is bigger means little if you counted some things twice and I counted everything once.

Now WordPress has done themselves in. From August 13, 2010 onwards, their own statistics are being provided on a different basis. They are now much closer to those being provided by Google — which would lead us to believing that they are more accurate. Unfortunately, their newfound accuracy makes them less useful — they have changed their apples to oranges, and I now cannot use their stats to compare the old with the new.

Website statistics are only useful when used for comparison — beyond that they are merely navel gazing — and comparing two things requires consistency, not accuracy. I do not care if my results are all exaggerated by 30% (or underestimated by 30%), so long as they are consistently so. Then I know if more people are reading, or less, or the same.

As a result we are moving to Google for our measurements, as they seem to have been using the same measure since we first signed up to their site. And while that might reduce July to a 5,000 view month, at least I know that when August comes in at over 6,000 pageviews I’ve had a 20% improvement.

Whatever that means.

We begin today with some colour science for gentlemen.

Men: If you want to be sexy, dress in red. It works for Santa and chimpanzees. It will work for you.

(Empty LA by Matt Logue.)

The UK print media often seems hysterical to us at the Big Bad Blog — and it’s good to see that we are not alone. A group of film-makers successfully hoaxed British papers by making a fake movie about urban fox hunting.

The floods in Pakistan are absolutely devastating (and you are encouraged to donate towards the relief effort), but it could be worse. There could be floating land mines in the floodwaters.

One of the big news stories in the tech world this past week are the plans that the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have to shut down the data transfer services on Blackberries in their country.

In short, it would be a Blackberry ban — after all, what good is the device if it only makes calls?

The United Arab Emirates argue that the phone does not comply with their laws, because the data coming in cannot be monitored (and thereby appropriately censored). Various news sites around the web site “security concerns”, but never seem to have a quote from an authority or industry expert to back that up, giving us pause to make the same claim here.

That said, if the authorities are experiencing difficulty in monitoring phone traffic, it could conceivably cause consternation for their security agencies.

Not alone

Back in 2007, India was contemplating a similar ban — thoughts that seem to be heating up again, now that there are others in their corner. At issue then is the central issue that is present now: the Indian government wanted a back door to the system that would allow them to monitor traffic.

The problem was that Blackberry does not have such a back door, and was not willing to create one. Research In Motion’s official statement on the matter is that such a thing does not exist and will not exist:

The BlackBerry security architecture for enterprise customers is based on a symmetric key system whereby the customer creates their own key and only the customer ever possesses a copy of their encryption key. RIM does not possess a ‘master key’, nor does any ‘back door’ exist in the system that would allow RIM or any third party to gain unauthorized access to the key or corporate data.

Is this free advertising?

Research In Motion has had a tough time of it recently. Google Android has recently become the top selling smartphone platform in the United States, ousting Blackberry from the top of the list for the first time. It’s next closest rival — the iPhone — is not far behind despite severe competitive limitations (it is only available in two models, and on one network).

In the battle of Application Stores, Blackberry is a distant third, well behind the second-place Android store, which itself it light years behind Apple’s App Store for the iPhone.

And when it comes for the battle for hearts and minds, RIM’s device is even further behind — people are genuinely excited about new Android phones, or the iPhone 4. When was the last time you heard someone daydreaming about owning a Blackberry?

In the midst of all these developments, a ban in Saudia Arabia and the United Arab Emirates might look like one more blow, but looking closer, one has to wonder if that is really the case.

Why only Blackberry? Why not the iPhone, too? Why not my phone?

Why, indeed. When the concern of the authorities is that they cannot monitor incoming and outgoing data well enough to know what it is, one has little choice but to wonder how secure your data transfers truly are through other devices.

When a government says “iPhone? Go ahead, use e-mail!”, and “Blackberry? No e-mail — we cannot identify the content, so it is not allowed”, can any conclusion other than the government is reading my e-mail be reached?

This applies domestically, too, for those who are not in Saudi Arabia or the UAE. While the government might not be reading your e-mail, we cannot say the same about hackers. These bans demonstrate the relative ease of breaking into systems that we think are safeguarding our privacy.

Research in Motion should be trumpeting this “defeat” as a measure of how secure their devices truly are. While they are slumping in the consumer market, this event could be enough to maintain their huge advantage in the business market for years.

Sources
Al Jazeera
Apple Insider
The Australian
BBC News
International Business Times
The New York Times
PC Magazine

Photo credit: Newsbiscuit, The Blackberry Burqa

Dear headbangers, the British Medical Journal provides the following advice for the prevention of injury whilst headbanging:
- decrease your range of head and neck motion whilst ‘banging
- head bang to slower tempo songs
- replace heavy metal with adult-oriented rock
- only head bang to every second beat
- use protective gear.

You’re welcome.

If you’ve ever wanted to live in the Amityville Horror house, now’s your chance. All you need is a spare $1.15 million.

Just in case you were under the impression that you need to be polite and professional to get ahead in the workplace, you don’t. As Google and Viacom executives demonstrate.