The Shockwave Rider
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
In John Brunner’s 1975 novel, The Shockwave Rider, the hero Nick Haflinger was a computer cracker who at the end of the novel, set loose a (computer network) worm that made all the world’s information publicly available.
The author by the way is acknowledged as coining the term ‘worm’.
I believe that it is very important to have a fair degree of visibility with regard web sites statistics and the such like.
ABC electronic have done a great job for standardising web traffic and I hope one day soon that they will be able to do the same for Digital out of Home (they or Nielsen need to do something at least).
One of the reasons why I love FEEDJIT so much (look on blog main page on the right) is that it gives a degree of visibility to the traffic that a site is getting. If you play around with it yourself, you can see where my readers are coming from – when you see a google or an AOL or other search engine listed – you can click on it and see what ‘search terms’ were used to find / get to the site. All rather cool but importantly also very useful.
Combine FEEDJIT, with Google Analytics and the WordPress Blog statistical tools (all free tools by the way so money is no excuse for not doing this) and you can build up a complete picture of how much traffic a site is getting, where it is coming from and how it got there!
I would be very interested to see how much traffic the likes of aka.tv is getting these days?
Kevin Massy left aka.tv a while back to go to CNET and Barnaby Page left last week to go off and form an aka.tv competitor with the ScreenMedia / DDR magazine folks, which leaves only Paul Mallaghan based in London to do any form of reporting, research and writing.
The aka.tv subscriber list is an impressive 11,000 – not least because they insist on email registration before you can view any content.
I believe however that their main problem is that their (web site) page views have not increased proportionally to subscribers, which suggests quite a bit of churn.
I think people subscribe to aka.tv as a way of checking out the industry but then most of them do not maintain their interest. That of course happens if the stories on the web site are not plenty and immediate (something that could definitely be levelled at them over the last 6 months).
A large proportion of the aka.tv subscriber base is US focused and as you know my focus is EMEA – if you look at the FEEDJIT daily map then you can see a pattern that supports that.
My Google analytics shows visitors from 59 countries ranging from the UK to Kenya.
My top 20 countries by visitor is as follows: –
- United Kingdom
- United States
- Germany
- Canada
- India
- Switzerland
- Greece
- Spain
- Netherlands
- Australia
- France
- Israel
- Ireland
- Turkey
- Japan
- Italy
- Denmark
- Norway
- Belgium
- Finland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider
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