Top 5 posts for May 2008
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It's that time of the month again -- no, not that time of month -- it's best-of-the-month post time thingy! Aren't you excited to find out what people found the most intriguing, exciting, entertaining, confusing, or just plain stupid in the month of May?
No?
Well screw you!
I don't like you anymore, and to be honest I've been meaning to have this conversation with you for a while now. Yeah, I saw you roll your eyes, and that's the last time you're getting away with it too. I'm watching you now. RIGHT NOW. I saw you naked yesterday, and I laughed for an hour about it, then I blogged about it too. Those guys that do Penny Arcade, they drew a strip all about it, it was great, too bad you missed it, holed up in your office rolling your eyes and stuff. Maybe next time, if you're super good, I'll invite you to the next insult-your-readers-and-then-blog-about-them-naked event.
Maybe.
So a couple of weeks ago I decided to code up my own weblog analyzer software because there are a few key features missing from most of the online stats packages you can get, and boy was I surprised by how inaccurate Google Analytics, Statcounter, and probably every other Javascript-based remote analytics package is. This isn't a small but acceptable disprecency here, but a massive hole in the Earth from one side clean through to the other.
Hey, did you know that if there actually was a hole in the Earth like that, that it'd take something like 10+ hours to free fall from one side to the core? Not kidding here, that's a long fall, and the amusing thing is that once you pass the core, the gravity would reverse and you'd be sucked back towards the core, bouncing back and forth until finally you were just free-floating in the chocolaty center.
Cool.
Anyway, I'm giving two counts here based on how many views the page actually got according to my software, with Google's lame numbers included for comparison. Two lists as usual, top views for May's content, and top views for non-May content as well. Enjoy, you eye-rolling bane of my existence and happiness.
Top New Posts
Movies, TV shows recently released (124 views, 101G)
Other blogs have posts with recently released DVDs for TV series and movies, tagged with a "referer" code that gives a commission to the site anytime someone following those lists buys something on Amazon.com. It doesn't cost the buyer anything more, but kicks back a small percentage to the
Journalism may be a relic in history (66 views, 7G)
A little something I wrote for my Newsvine column (mostly political stuff over there) that I thought might be of interest to you guys over here. If you're not big on politics, blogging, citizen journalism, or real journalism, then I'm going to find out where you live and make you regret ever crossing me. So...you know...read it.
New TV shows and movies released on DVD (66 views, 52G)
Surprise! It's another one of those DVD whoring posts, a new one release every Tuesday (apparently Amazon does all their new releases on Tuesday or something.) Maybe in the future I won't include those in these "Top 5" posts, what say you readers? Should I take that post, shine it up real nice and pretty, turn it sideways, and stick it straight up my candy ass?
GTA-IV does 500 million firstweek (57 views, 38G)
Take2/Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto IV last month and made half a billion dollars in the process. Subtract about $100 million for production costs, another who knows how many for advertising, maybe another $50m, and whatever cut went for manufacturing costs, and they still made enough money to buy about 63.8 gallons of gas.
Abrams gives bad vibes towards Trek sequel (52 views, 15G)
A story that Wil found inspired me to write about my arch nemesis, J. J. "I eat babies" Abrams. He wrote a little something, I wrote a little something, but mostly it's just geek-gasms. Still good enough for my fifth most read story of May.
Top Posts Overall
Hollywoodtuna accusing Egotastic of poaching content (1414 views, 114G)
Ryan Phillippe is a vikiing (1306 views, 149)
Streaming and download links: Heroes, Chuck, Bionicwoman.. (768 views, 934G)
Plot news for Shyamalans "The Happening" (744 views, 653G)
Damn those disturbingly hot 15-year-olds (614 views, 558G)
"Damn those.." is about Miley Cyrus, and sadly a lot of those views are from what I can tell are people coming from Google either looking for naked pictures of Cyrus, or 15-year-olds in general. Yikes.
Anyway, as you can see the "xxxG" numbers from Google are wildly off in certain instances (both undercounting and in one case actually overcounting) yet hold close in others. This is why I don't rank these by Google Analytics anymore, I figure as many as 2/3rds of this blog's readers aren't being counted by Javascript trackers.
To express to you how stunning that is, Google says this blog only got about 5,844 views in May, while my stats package says it's closer to 17,295. Without going into depth, I've done manual auditing on my software and I know for a fact it's within 99% accurate. Robot crawlers, search engines, and duplicate views are removed (although in this post I'm listing absolute views, not unique views.)
It's just stunning.
GTA-IV does 500 million firstweek (57 views, 38G)
Take2/Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto IV last month and made half a billion dollars in the process. Subtract about $100 million for production costs, another who knows how many for advertising, maybe another $50m, and whatever cut went for manufacturing costs, and they still made enough money to buy about 63.8 gallons of gas.
Abrams gives bad vibes towards Trek sequel (52 views, 15G)
A story that Wil found inspired me to write about my arch nemesis, J. J. "I eat babies" Abrams. He wrote a little something, I wrote a little something, but mostly it's just geek-gasms. Still good enough for my fifth most read story of May.
Top Posts Overall
Hollywoodtuna accusing Egotastic of poaching content (1414 views, 114G)
Ryan Phillippe is a vikiing (1306 views, 149)
Streaming and download links: Heroes, Chuck, Bionicwoman.. (768 views, 934G)
Plot news for Shyamalans "The Happening" (744 views, 653G)
Damn those disturbingly hot 15-year-olds (614 views, 558G)
"Damn those.." is about Miley Cyrus, and sadly a lot of those views are from what I can tell are people coming from Google either looking for naked pictures of Cyrus, or 15-year-olds in general. Yikes.
Anyway, as you can see the "xxxG" numbers from Google are wildly off in certain instances (both undercounting and in one case actually overcounting) yet hold close in others. This is why I don't rank these by Google Analytics anymore, I figure as many as 2/3rds of this blog's readers aren't being counted by Javascript trackers.
To express to you how stunning that is, Google says this blog only got about 5,844 views in May, while my stats package says it's closer to 17,295. Without going into depth, I've done manual auditing on my software and I know for a fact it's within 99% accurate. Robot crawlers, search engines, and duplicate views are removed (although in this post I'm listing absolute views, not unique views.)
It's just stunning.
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