Big in the Philippines – Do you trust your blog statistics?

A few days ago, my Bible Blog experienced its busiest day, page view stats peaking dramatically and visitors from all over the world flocking to read my words of wisdom. That little voice that echoes in the mind of every blogger started to take over – look at that! Finally people appreciate my genius! Take that, all the people who laughed at me in high school!

Okay, I confess – that’s pride. It may also be SEO hubris, as a closer look at my statistics told me that the majority of visitors to my blog that day were from the Philippines; in fact, looking at the trends, it seems that the Philippines is currently the third largest source of traffic to my blog, after the UK and USA.

If I can take this at face value, it’s awesome. My blog is big in the Philippines. This is strangely cool – getting traffic from the UK or America is one thing, but the idea that a bunch of netizens in Manila are sitting at their computers reading my musings on the Bible and current affairs and Batman reminds me of just how global the internet is. We self-select and curate the content we read, and I guess that often reflects our own culture, but to get the most out of the net we need to embrace the fact that it’s almost as huge and encompassing and challenging as humanity itself. If my blog is big in the Philippines then I’m humbled that I’m getting traffic from a country and culture about which I know very little. That little peak on my stats page makes me want to learn more.

Maybe this shouldn’t come as a surprise. According to reports, the Philippines is “the Social Media capital of the world”, with a huge proportion of its internet-usiing population engaged with Twitter, Facebook, blogs and the like – apparently this is partly because of good affordability and accessibility. Add to that 90% of the population being Christian and why should I be surprised that a Bible blog attracts a bit of interest from Manila? It’s only my ignorance of the world that makes it appear strange.

Then again, I’m a cynic. I’m not sure I trust my blog statistics all that much. It’s the little things – referrals from link harvesters, ever more advanced spambots that only just fail the Turing Test. A report from Kaspersky Labs recently pointed out that the Philippines was the 7^th largest producer of internet spam, responsible for 2.8% of all those unsolicited messages that clog up our inboxes. Am I really big in the Philippines or am I just a victim of some marketing report, like my poor old Livejournal account? And doesn’t that also call into question my stats from the USA, which is actually the biggest producer of spam in the world?

(Incidentally, the meat version of spam became big in the Philippines after American GIs introduced it to the country during World War II. It’s amazing what you learn when you’re writing a post about blog statistics.)

I guess all of this just proves one thing – don’t blog for the statistics, blog because you love it. I hope that I do have readers from across the globe, but that’s pride sneaking in and that’s the moment I end up spending more time worrying about SEO than I do writing. That might be fine for a big business blog, but for me it’s a recipe for disaster and ultimately a distraction. The writing is the main thing.

Still, if you are reading this in Manila… Sweet dreams and have a good night 🙂

An Apology and an Announcement

I’d just like to apologise for not updating the blog recently. However, I have a good reason for this – look what I did on Saturday:

They say that getting married and moving house are two of the most stressful things you can ever do – my wife Helen and I have done both of those in the space of three weeks, and it’s fair to say that it would have been impossible without the love, support, time, effort and resources of our friends and families.

We had a lot of help, to the extent that the wedding was almost crowd sourced from among the people we know – flowers, catering, photography and logistics were all provided by friends who used their talents and professionalism to make our wedding day something very special.

And to Helen, I just want to say thank you for becoming my wife. I love you so much and I know we’ll be happy together in the years to come. I love you.

And to readers I haven’t just married, there will be forthcoming posts on my explorations of my new home town, further Geocaching adventures and musings on The Princess Bride. See you there!

Fear of a Facebook Planet

And so Facebook has been floated on NASDAQ, leading to lots of economic excitement and Mark Zuckerberg become rich beyond the dreams of Luthor. It’s probably the biggest tech story for a long time, mainly because Facebook has become so pervasive. It’s everywhere.

But I’m a sceptic, bordering on techno-dystopian (maybe a lot of us are and that’s why Blade Runner is getting a sequel). I love the internet, don’t get me wrong, but nowadays Facebook leaves me cold.

I think it might be the privacy thing… No, wait, it’s not. It’s the opposite. It’s the publicity thing. Facebook seems to want to know when we do anything – here’s your timeline, here’s what you’ve bought in Farmville, here’s your Words With Friends score, here’s a picture of you with a traffic cone on your head posted by someone you haven’t even thought about in years… It’s not content, it’s noise.

Now, I admit I’m guilty of that, mainly using my FB profile to tout my blog posts. I hope they’re not noise, but some may see it as such. Fair enough. I admit my hypocrisy.

But while that stuff may be noise to you and me, to marketing gnomes working long and hard in the data mines, it’s information. And now FB is going to make mondo amounts of money by hitting the stock market, it’s going to be under pressure from shareholders to keep making more money.

Now, it doesn’t make stuff, it’s reliant on one thing – our data. And when the pressure mounts to keep growing, to dive ever deeper into Scrooge McDuck-like piles of money, it’ll be our data for sale: our likes, dislikes, the people we’re friends with, the words we write in our status updates. People already look at stuff like that and think ‘ka-ching’, it’s going to get worse. In one sense this is the brave new world of the information society, get used to it, but FB may well be ground zero for this sort of thing…

(I wouldn’t be surprised if someone came up with the bright idea of it becoming a pay-to-use service. That’d be interesting. I suspect Google+ would become a lot more popular…)

(And that’s before we get onto the Twitter joke that’s being doing the rounds: the reason Facebook has gone public is because no-one can find the privacy settings.)

I dunno. I sound like someone telling hoodie wearing kids to get of his digital lawn. At least I haven’t got on to how Facebook’s about to mutate into Skynet.

But the world will still be turning tomorrow; some people will be richer and social networking may or may not change into something unrecognisable or unwelcome.

And the sun will still come up.

World Telecommunication and Information Society Day 2012

I’m not a scientist.

This probably comes as no surprise, given the contents of this blog, but I am interested in the history of science, how discoveries impacted the society around them and vice versa. That’s why I’m interested in today’s commemoration. World Telecommunication and Information Society Day is a UN sponsored celebration of the opportunities afforded by the internet and initiatives to bridge the digital divide. This year’s theme is ‘women and girls in ICT’.

When you’re talking about tuis subject, one woman immediately jumps out. a href=”http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace”>Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, not that they had a relationship; discovering that she had a talent for maths (and earning the nickname ‘the Enchantress of Numbers’, she was the first to recognise the true potential of Charles Babbage’s primitive computing ‘Engines’ going so far as to figure out a prototype computer program. It never got used, more because of the limitations of technology, and somewhere along the line Ada’s contribution to the birth of computing became an oft-forgotten historical footnote.

And that’s just one of the reasons to celebrate female pioneers in science, engineering and computing whose stories aren’t as well recorded as their male counterparts.

For instance, the majority of staff at Bletchley Park were WRENs, working on breaking Nazi codes and operating some of the earliest electronic computers, such as Colossus; some of their memories are recorded here.

Those WRENs fall within something of a tradition, because before computers were computers, computers were people, with the term referring to a fairly menial role manually crunching numbers for navigational charts, scientific data and the like. One of these ‘computers’ was Henrietta Swan Leavitt who, while routinely counting data for Harvard College Observatory, figured out the basis of measuring distances between astronomical objects, which in turn provided evidence for the expansion of the universe. Not bad for $10.50 a week, although sadly you won’t be surprised to hear that she received no recognition for this until after she died in 1921.

Beyond the information society, the list of unsung female heroes of science goes on; Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951 – her cells turned out to be remarkably resiliant and became known as the HeLa line, used to make breakthroughs in research into AIDS, cancer and polio, amoung others; Rosalind Franklin did much of the research that lead to our understanding of the structure of DNA, but her research being published later than that of Crick and Watson’s and her early death at the age of 37 meant that her work has often been overlooked.

It would be cool if… Well, I was going to say if the next Steve Jobs was a woman, but a) it’s still soon to be talking about the next Steve Jobs, and b) it’s best to concentrate on being the first you than the next anyone else. And yet there’s something in this – in the UK, men are almost six times more likely to be employed in SET occupations than women. As a UKRC research report states, “The under-representation of women in SET is increasingly seen as an issue affecting economic growth and productivity… Research suggests that diverse teams that include men and women are important to innovation and economic development.”

Novelist Neal Stephenson has written an article on ‘Innovation Starvation‘, about how we seem to have lost a sense of technological optimism and the resulting inspiration that leads us to carry out epic scientific and engineering projects. There are probably many reasons for this, but one seems fairly obvious – about half the population has become marginalised from contributing to a solution. The first programmer may have been a woman, but the general perception of computing is still that of a male-dominated industry, and that sort of perception has ramifications.

One of the potential solutions to this innovation starvation Stephenson has been involved in is a rediscovery of science fiction as a vehicle for big, inspirational ideas rather than an exploration of tech’s darker side. And maybe that will tie in to the growing visibility of women in SF fandom (another field of which there’s a false perception of it being over-whelmingly male). That puts an onus on many sci-fi writers, particularly those in more populist media like comics – write better female characters!

That’s not quite as simplistic as it sounds – we help form our society through the stories and narratives we tell, and, well, you can write education strategies till they’re coming out your ears, but I’m still willing to bet that more people have heard of Watson and Crick that Rosalind Franklin; more people have heard of Charles Babbage than Ada Lovelace. Maybe the importance of days like this is simply in that we tell a wider range of stories and that they’re told well, inspirational and aspirational.

After all, Ada’s dad was a poet…

10 Print “Happy Birthday ZX Spectrum”

My first computer was a ZX Spectrum. It was a 48K model, I think, with rubber keys. You had to plug a tape recorder into it to load games from cassettes. This took minutes, accompanied by a screeching noise and a screen border that flashed primary colours. I’m remembering this now and it seems like prehistory, but back in the day this was the moment that computers really started to enter UK homes.

I eventually upgraded to the 128K model, with a built in cassette player. I think this may have been when I learned the only bit of code that I know, other than WordPress HTML tags (which don’t count):

10 Print “Hello!”
20 Goto 10
Run

This made ‘Hello!’ scroll up the screen forever, or at least until you stopped it. There are kids reading this thinking that this is the most pointless use of processing power ever encountered, but trust me, back when I was young this was awesome. It meant that the computer did what you told it to do. I swear, when the time comes to prevent the Technopocalypse, that bit of BASIC is really gonna come in handy.

And the games! Horace Goes Skiing (little blue man skis down a slope, but first he has to get across a busy road without getting run over!), Manic Miner (Miner Willy has to collect gems without getting killed by bizarre monsters!), Jet Set Willy (Miner Willy gets rich, throws a party, but then has to tidy up his mansion before he goes to bed!), Horace and the Spiders (Horace and some spiders!)… They were primitive and buggy (I’m not sure it was actually possible to finish Jet Set Willy) but they were addictive. Angry Birds makes them look like finger-daubed cave paintings, sure, but you’ve got to remember that this was all shiny and new and we loved it.

The next generation of games was my favourite, especially the stuff put out by Codemasters and the Oliver Twins. I pulled a few all-nighters trying to complete the Dizzy games – you can play Treasure Island Dizzy here. The Play button on my cassette deck fell off, and I had to load games by sticking a pencil into the mechanism. You can’t do that nowadays…

Times moved on, PCs became more advanced, the internet took over and games now look like movies. But the Speccy is worth remembering, as a herald of today’s networked world, and as gateway into technology and gaming and programming. On St. George’s Day, don’t forget to say happy birthday to a bit of technology of which Britain can be proud.

PS. I’m now going to be singing “Just Another Manic Miner” all day…