Wednesday, 4 May 2005
UK elections: tactical voting using the Net
It's the UK general election tomorrow. Needless to say, I'll be voting - I think everyone should who can.
The party I'd most like to win hasn't a prayer overall, really. Although it is probably second rather than third in my constituency.
But it looks like tactical voting via vote swapping over the internet, which started in the U.S., may be taking off here, according to the 30 April 2005 issue of New Scientist (a good read, as always). The site they cite, tacticalvoter.net (which also has a blog), looks well organised and sensible. If the party I favour was third rather than second in my area, I'd definitely consider it.
Vote swapping via such "vote broking" sites is an exciting, innovative use of the Net, and I completely agree that it can only be a good thing for democracy (subject to a slight reservation about how you can trust the person you swap with to actually vote they way they've promised to: there seems to be no guarantee mechanism in place).
I'd be very interested to find out, after the event, to what extent vote swapping really makes a difference in this UK election.
Technorati Tags: politics, election, elections, UK general election, general election, tactical voting, vote swapping, democracy, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience, Consuming Experience
Sunday, 24 April 2005
Statcounter: key to cryptic referring URLs
I'm listing for reference the main mystery referrers (or referers) I get against "Referring URLs" on my page at Statcounter - the free Website traffic tracker which I use for monitoring and analysing the web stats for my blog, i.e. the statistics about visits and visitors to my blog:
lockedReferrer
The link is to http://my3.statcounter.com/blockedReferrer and when I click on it I get:
"Not Found
The requested URL /blockedReferrer was not found on this server."
Answer: The visitor's browser has been set to block the sending of info about where they've come from, e.g. they've used an anonymiser.
No referring link
Answer: the visitor has come to the blog direct (not via clicking a link), e.g. typing the URL in their address bar or via a bookmark/favorite or newsfeed link.
Weird referers that look like a path to a folder on a computer e.g. file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/somethingorother
Answer: the visitor previously saved the blog post (including the Statcounter tracking code) to their own computer, and they've just opened it on their computer to read.
Referring links that end "mystatcounter.com"
Answer: I'd linked to someone else's site or blog from one of my blog posts. A visitor to my blog clicks my link to visit the other blog. The other blog is also using Statcounter to track its stats so the "Referring URL" shows up on that blog's Statcounter page as my blog post, and the owner, in checking their statistics, has clicked that Referring URL link to see where their visitor came from, and landed back at my blog.
Referring links that point to another blog at Blogspot.com which contains no links whatsoever to my blog
Answer: the other blog is on Blogger, and publishing to Blogger's free Blogspot hosting service. Sadly for me they've not linked to my blog, they probably haven't even heard of it. But a visitor to their blog has clicked on the
button in that blog's standard Blogger navbar - and it happens to be my blog's turn to be the target of these random clicks. (It seems to go in fits and starts! Suddenly I'll get loads of these for an hour or two, then nothing for ages. They must be doing something to try to give every Blogger blog a fair crack at the random traffic).Referring URL is http://www.statcounter.com/counter/counter.js
Answer: this is a mystery. That link is to Statcounter's script which is incorporated when someone includes Statcounter code on their website or blog. There shouldn't be clickable links in the javascript so it shouldn't be possible to get that as a referer. Spammers, perhaps? [Edited 30 August 2005:] Mystery solved. Not spammers, but hackers trying to get your Statcounter user/password details. See this post.
Technorati Tags: Web tracking, web statistics, website statistics, hit counter, hit counters, traffic analysis, referer, referrer, referers, referrers, referring URLs, blog, blogs, blogging, Statcounter, Statcounter.com, Blogger, Blogger.com, Blogspot, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience, Consuming Experience
Tuesday, 19 April 2005
Organising your blog?
Have you ever wondered about how best to organise your blog?
For example, would readers prefer your list of popular posts to all be visible, or in a dropdown list only? Or, if you want to blog on lots of different things like techie/bloggy stuff and life/health generally, would readers welcome the variety or be put off - would it be better to split out the non-techie posts into a separate blog (the person who prompted this question will know who they are!)? How important are categories to readers and how do they like them displayed? Do people prefer comments to appear in a popup or peekaboo style? etc etc etc...
Well I'm volunteering to draw up a Web survey which we could then get others (and us too of course) to answer. As many people as possible, for more accurate results (I've tried out a free survey tool before so I've some experience of it now). The results page can't be made public in the free version (and I'm sure not forking out for a paid one!), but what I'll do is copy out and post the summary of the results.
So - if there are any questions you've always wanted to ask about how readers would like to see blogs organised and set out etc, just feed them to me by posting a comment, and I'll incorporate them into the survey. (If you're too shy to post publicly here then feel free to email me at the address in the sidebar of my blog - I promise I'll not tell anyone who wants to know what!).
But keep it clean, people, jokey questions will entertain me (and send 'em in if you must!), but they sure ain't gonna make it into the survey... and I reserve full editorial rights anyway!
To cater for those who don't visit here much I'll give it till noon GMT on Sat 30 April 2005 for people to suggest questions, then I'll put up the survey ASAP after that. (And leave it up for say a month before posting the results). (I won't have a huge amount of time to whip up a survey much before then anyway.)
If people think this is a bad idea I won't get many replies but I expect I'll probably post a survey anyway with just the stuff I'd like to know about, and see if any kind souls will answer as they did my first survey...!
Cheers
Improbulus.
Technorati Tags: blog, blogs, bloggers, blogging, organisation, survey, surveys, feedback, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience, Consuming Experience
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