Tax the Rich? iPerish the Thought! (and Geek Wednesday)

Let us now praise the ingenuity of the plutocratic oligarch. The marketing acumen of the reigning specimens of this phylum are well known, and you might say that imitators are coming out in "Roves".

Why tax the rich when you can raise sufficient funds to keep the government running by burdening the middle class? Our mayor here in New York has decided that a smooth choreography of city services can raise wampum as fast as you can plow a street and ticket the subsequently trapped vehicles. Another of our urban defenders of the ultra-wealthy is proposing a summonsing blitzkrieg on iPod owners who attempt to cross city streets.

These men are, like the lamps unto their feet in Washington, pioneering the use of manipulation and deceit in freeing the oppressed 1% of wage earners from the burden of taxation as they empty the wallets of the 99% who would only piss away their money on iTunes gift certificates, anyway. We salute you, noble stalwarts of fundraising innovation, defenders of the Corporate Person!

Geek Wednesday

My blog is worth $7,903.56.
How much is your blog worth?

Perhaps inspired by this entrepreneurial aristocracy, I have been wondering if I could sell my blog and make a little cash. It's been around two and a half years, which is fairly long in the tooth for a blog; has lots of original content that someone might like to own; and it's loaded with photography of the prettiest cat in Brooklyn.


So I found a site run by a Technorati geek who used their API to program a blog worth calculator. What drives it is as mysterious to me as a smudge on the forehead one day out of the year (I think that's today, anyway). But there it is: the monetary value of Daily rEv: nearly 8 grand. Damn, I could get a Mac Pro cheese grater tower with multiple hard drives in RAID array, 8GB of RAM, and a 30" display for that! But I'm not budging until the price goes over ten G's.

But it would appear that web properties are not as lucrative as they once might have been. The owner of a free music site is seeking to cash it out, but is finding prospective buyers rather thin.

However, there is still the occasional diamond in the rough of the web that can attract the wealthy like shit draws flies. One such property is the StumbleUpon Firefox extension, which one commentator observes could be appealing to Amazon. It really is an ingenious piece of design and geekery, and yet another reason to go with Firefox as your default web browser. Every time I go and click the "Stumble" button, I find two or three cool things within five minutes. Here's a sample tour:

An article about a boss who lets his employees set their hours, determine their salaries and choose their bosses. Oh, and he's making lots of money with a very happy staff.

A search applet that limits results to Creative Commons products that you can use for free.

Instructions on how to hack a CoinStar machine.

A place to find your Myers-Briggs type, if you care.

Or maybe you could just try and become a 'Net video icon. Pretty sad, though, when you think of it: a phenomenon that began as a portal for scientists to share information has turned into a TV-wannabee.

Hardware Update:

The rumor mill's ablaze with news of impending new notebooks and sub-notebooks from Apple. But the WWDC, where such announcements are often made, is a long way off.

Some Google geeks have done a study of hard drive failures, and come to some surprising conclusions. (Paper lasts longer than bytes).

If you're shopping for a laptop, C-Net has a comprehensive review you'll want to check out first.

Now for our feature of the week, something we've been promising for a while: How to read web stats.


If you have a blog, website, or even an online photo album that has a hit counter, you've stuck a toe or two into the waters of web metrics. If your site has its own host, then most likely you're given a metrics or analytics applet to inspect at your leisure, to gauge your site's traffic and its sources.

But what does it all mean? That's where the water gets fairly muddy, even for corporate types who think they know what they're looking at. Here's a rundown of the most common terms you'll find in the world of web metrics—their meaning, and their relative value.

Hits Don't Mean Shit: The most abused and distorted web statistic out there, a hit is a count of the number of elements or measurable items on a given web page, multiplied by the number of visitors hitting that page. For example, DR's home page has roughly 30 separate "hittable" elements: items that have to register in order for the page to complete its loading to your browser. These include graphics; javascript forms and applets; html elements; media files; and background items. So if 5 people visit this page today, my metrics program will tell me that I've had 30 X 5 = 150 hits! Wow, cool! I had 150 hits in a day! You'd be amazed at how this statistic is used in corporate settings to buttress the lamest arguments and the airiest project plans you could imagine.

For example, our currents stats here for February reveal that we've had just under 1,500 unique visitors (see below) to DR, and nearly 44,000 hits. Now if I'm really trying to sell this blog (hey, it could happen), which number do you think I'd be tempted to dangle in front of prospective buyers? Yep, 44,000 hits. Would it be accurate, or even ethical, to do so? Come on now, this is business, and I'm still unemployed!

A True Geek Thinks Unique: The most valuable, accurate, and reliable stat in a web metrics or analytics report is "Unique Visitors" (also known as "unique clickers" in email analytics programs). As mentioned above, DR currently has 1,500 unique visitors this month, which projects to around 2,400 by EOM (which for us is great!). That's the number of individuals who have visited the site's home page. It can't tell you who has read the content, clicked the links or ads (that's covered by other programs that are owned by the respective sites and ad brokers), or what value they've gotten from seeing your stuff. But at least it tells you how many different people have actually seen your work.

A Room with A Page View: Page views are another animal altogether. This stat tells you the number of total visits to all pages on your site for the given period. A single visitor might open a dozen different pages on your site, and be responsible for 12 page views, not to mention a couple hundred hits—all by himself! Right now, DR has over 17,000 page views for the current month, which reveals that many visitors are looking around a bit.

But page views are less meaningful to a blog than to a large site with many components (though curiously, ad brokers always ask for page view stats). When I look at the stats for DR, I pay attention to unique visitors first, page views after that, and then I look at the Referrals section, which tells me where traffic is coming from, which search engines people are using to find us, and what browsers they're using to access our content. Another good place to look is under "top referrals" or "top pages"—here you can find out what avenues folks are approaching your site by. For example, roughly 60% of our readers visit us via the atom or RSS route: in other words, they're using newsfeed-type RSS readers to check us out. Those are most likely our most consistent set of visitors, since that's how feeds are used: it's an application or page that you open on a daily basis to check out your favorite content sources.

There are other stats in a typical metrics report that will clamor for your attention, but they are less important. Total pages (the number of pages on your site that are hit, and how often); total visitors (includes repeat visitors, so that you can guess roughly how often your unique visitors are returning during a given period); error pages (reveals how many pages or page elements failed to load—404—on your site); and tracking stats (shows IP addresses for top visitors).

One thing you want to do with your web stats is to filter out false positives: for example, I tell my metrics program to ignore all hits from my IP address and the preview and publish pages in Blogger. This way, I'm not getting big numbers that don't mean anything except that I've visited myself a lot! Also, most metrics applications have built-in filters for robots and crawlers: either the kind that come from search engines like Google and Yahoo as they trawl the web, or ubiquitous spammers and spyware robots familiar to all of us from our daily inboxes.

As with any science, the principle to guide yourself by is an integration of the statistical with the experiential: let your nose tell you what the numbers mean, rather than allowing the stats to lead you by the nose. For a blog like this one, I could easily live with only knowing what the figures are for unique visitors: the rest of the knowledge I get on how we're doing comes from the comments, the trackbacks and links we receive around the web, and the activity that our pages (and now our ads) generally attract.

A web property is like a book, a piece of music, or any other creative product: it can't be all things to all people. You try to fill a niche, develop a unique voice, and appeal to enough people to have some influence on your subject. For us here, it's not about showing goofy videos or cool pictures: it's about offering perspective on corporate government, fundamentalist ideology, and how these two have become so insidiously intertwined in our era of fear-and-smear, deniability, and warfare-based groupthink; and then revealing at least a glimpse of how each unique visitor to this planetary web can free him and her self from the trap of corporate fundamentalism.

We'll be back at it tomorrow, unless I get an offer I can't refuse...

Geek Wednesday: Stumbling Upon Something "Klassy"

I will occasionally go over the website stats, particularly near the end of a month, just to see the volume of traffic that the site's been drawing lately. I also like to look at the "top referrals"--the places where most of our readers are coming from. Usually, search engines and Alterman's blog (when I have a note posted there) rank the highest. But this month was different: several hundred Daily Rev readers had arrived via a site maintained by a young lady from the East who goes by the cyber-name Klassy.

Well, aside from the fact that her avatar is attractive (which just as easily means she could be a 90 year old man, for all I know), and that she had elided the name of Tolstoy's revolutionary heroine (Anna Karenina), nothing exceptional came out of a look at the first page. So I had a look around her site, going through at least 20 pages of links, graphics, poems, movies, and music files. I was very impressed by the intelligence, variety, organization, and overall content of these pages, so I was very glad that this site had somewhere (I couldn't find that) posted a link here. I further discovered that Klassy's site is based on a Mozilla Firefox extension, one of those add-ons from the open-source browser's Tools section, that is a Web 2.0 entity unto itself: a piece of software that allows you to create a profile based on interests and preferences that you pre-set, and surf the web in a "Stumble-Upon" fashion (that's the name of the extension) to randomly reveal highly-rated sites consistent with your interest categories. In the process, you are joining a MySpace-type social network, complete with friends and various levels of interactive potential.

I was curious enough to create an account for myself; I found that the most impressive thing about StumbleUpon is the quality of the sites that it selects and delivers for you, based on your profile. I would therefore encourage you to try it as well (this can be done in Windows, Linux or on the Mac, but only from the Firefox browser).

I also discovered one slightly disturbing feature. Klassy's site was protected by an "R / X" rating, and I had to click my acknowledgment of that, along with the fact that I am an adult. But I didn't find any pornographic or objectionable content in my tour of Klassy's site. A couple of bare-breasted women, but no violence, gore, or other content that I might find offensive. In fact, I'd feel perfectly comfortable, based on what I saw, in letting my 12 year old daughter explore Klassy.

But that's a mark of the degree of repressiveness in this culture of ours. A person creates a website that reveals the female body in no more graphic a fashion than would a painting of Titian or Caravaggio, and adds that her favorite author is Anais Nin, and she has suddenly crossed a line into the forbidden. Someday, perhaps, we will build a culture where a President paints nudes and CEO's write poetry. Until then, it is clear that the people who control our lives (or at least try to) are themselves trapped in such a hell of restriction and self-abasement that they are scarcely recognizable as human at all.

In any event, thank you, Klassy. And now, with that discussion as the segue, on to part two of Terry McKenna's discussion of the Orwellian tenor of our corporate government.

If you want to see corporate speech at its most Orwellian, just go to the websites of our largest corporations (especially ones that aren’t needed to sell merchandise - so don’t go to Walmart’s or General Motor’s sites). I picked Exxon. To begin with, they are an energy company, so are part of the problem when it comes to matters like global warming and Middle East policy. They also yield tremendous behind-the-scenes power – they and their peers constitute a significant part of Bush’s shadow government. And they feature a goodly dose of corporate Newspeak.

Truth be told, Exxon is the chief culprit in the effort to debunk global warming. They also have a hard time accepting their responsibility for the pollution they cause. For example, after 17 years, they continue with a courtroom war to fight punitive damages from the Exxon Valdez disaster. But to look at their website is to behold a world of corporate warm fuzzies.

I bet a middle school student looking at their site would believe that Exxon is a good steward of the environment and a friend of science. But they are nothing of the sort (to get an idea of the truth of the matter, check out this video from the Keith Olbermann Countdown program). Again, they have spent abundant dollars on debunking the hard science of global warming. It’s been fairly easy to do. Just find a scientist who knows nothing about the issue, or one who has no ethics, and fund a bunch of papers that highlight the most ambiguous data. Voila, junk science.*

Of course, Exxon is just looking for influence, for real power, let’s go to the politicians.

The means of modern communication are just as useful for politicians as they are in commerce. The Republicans have been on the forefront in bringing modern wordsmithery to political communications. They have stronger ties to corporations and thus more experience with the way corporations misuse speech to sell their wares. With the Republicans still in control of the White House, let’s go to that website to see how much it looks like a corporate site.



In this case, I selected a snapshot of the home page, then clicked policy links on the left and copied five headers. White papers have been replaced by hallmark cards. And is any of it true?

No Child Left Behind is a sham and a failure. As the Times reported yesterday, the poor and minority students that the act was designed to help are pretty much as bad off as ever. Peace in the Middle East? Not while George Bush lets Israel do whatever it wants (they may want peace but who knows). Health care – strengthening? How? For whom? Energy Security? Fiscal Discipline? Nothing of the sort.

Ok – so the means are exposed. In future blogs, we’ll discuss the policies that have been twisted in favor of corporate and moneyed interests and against the people. Stay tuned.

--T. McKenna
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*A footnote on global warming. For all of you who don’t read science magazines, here is the central point. The earth’s temperature has risen and fallen over the long period of the earth’s existence. It was once believed that these rises and falls were more or less random – if so, then the current cycle of warming, though potentially harmful to some, would be a benign process. But we now know different. The bulk of the rises and falls appear to be the result of the earth’s response to changes in atmospheric chemistry (and the feedback loops that exist to exchange gases between the earth's crust, the seas, and the air). For example, free oxygen did not exist in the atmosphere until the earth was 2 billion years old. And nearly 2 billion years later, the earth became unstable, and cold. If conditions had not changed, our planet would have become a stable and dead frozen zone, much like mars or the moon.

Similar changes have continued over the long march of geologic time – but each is different. The current increase in atmospheric CO2 is not random or benign. And it is man made.

To get the details, try Reading The Rocks by Marcia Bjornerud for the full story. She is a geologist and university professor.