Blimey! Lower viewership!

Just looked at my Google Analytics stats.

It's shocking how much lower my weekly viewership is so far, ever
since I dropped the Facebook Notes syndicate.

Now, there could be many other confounding variables that are causing
this lower viewership rate (O Levels, no new post, etc.), so I'll wait
a bit longer. Need a couple of weeks to control for these variables
before I can make a fair comparison. But thus far, the results have
been eye-openingly surprising - a 30-50% drop.

Average = 112 visitors a week.
Visits a week for the first 3 weeks of Oct 2009: about 80.
Visits for the week of 25 - 30 Oct 2009: 56

*scratches chin*

Music Chart of the moment

Yes, it's another music chart!

Before I start, I must first disclose that I rarely buy music from
iTunes/Amazon nowadays. I've been trying to use Spotify, a legal music
streaming service, instead. Why? Well, I can listen to all the music I
want for £9.99/mth, and the music doesn't have to stay on my Hard Disk
(it can, if I choose to), and I can sync playlists over-the-air
between my Spotify app on my Mac, as well as my iPhone and anywhere
else I so choose to log in to Spotify. So, there, I don't own most of
the tracks listed below, unless I somehow feel that the track's going
to be a classic/one-hit wonder.

Music Chart for the moment...

1.
"Little Lion Man"
Mumford & Sons

2.
"Bad Romance"
Lady Gaga

3.
"You've Got The Love"
Florence + The Machine

4.
"Undisclosed Desires"
Muse

5.
"Empire State of Mind"
Jay-z feat. Alicia Keys

6.
"Forever Is Over"
The Saturdays

7.
"Heartbreaker"
MSTRKRFT feat. John Legend

8.
"You're Not Alone"
Tinchy Stryder

9.
"Ghosts 'n' Stuff"
Deadmau5 feat. Rob Swire

10.
"Flashback"
Calvin Harris

11.
"White Lies"
Mr Hudson

12.
"Closer"
Kings of Leon

13.
"Sweet Disposition"
The Temper Trap

14.
"Fight For This Love"
Cheryl Cole

15.
"Manos Al Aire"
Nelly Furtado

-----------------------------

Yes, I'm sticking to the rules this time around - Each artist/band is
entitled to only one position.

And yes, it seems like my music taste is subconsciously shifting
towards the electronic genre.

And yes, I kept one rule, but broke another - rappers on my chart
(Tinchy Stryder and Jay-Z). Somehow, I like both tracks.

By the way, what do you think of the album art collage? Nice touch? or just unnecessary? Comment, please!

The last syndicated post (to FB)

As of typing, it's 25 October 2009, slightly after 8pm GMT. (oh yeah, DST's over, which means I can speak in GMT time now.)

Starting 26 October 2009, there shall be no more syndication of my blog posts on Facebook.

Why?

Well, the main reason is that I want to try out something.

I want to check if people will visit my blog if I don't syndicate onto Facebook.

From my judgement, I think people are not visiting my blogspot blog because they can get the same "experience" on Facebook as they would want on my blog - they can read what I post, and they have a feedback system in the form of comments and likes (which replaces the tagboard).

There are pros and cons to having my blog posts syndicated to my Facebook profile page.

The Pros:

•I'm making my blog posts more accessible to my 300+ friends, since they log on to Facebook more often than my blog - In a sense, I'm benefitting from the 'cluster effect' of Facebook, as a social tool/destination on the web.

•People get to comment on specific posts and I get to see which post they are referring to - much better than a single tagboard for an entire blog.

•Because many people log on to Facebook regularly (perhaps on their smartphones, even), my notes are more accessible than my blog. Not only that, but people can catch up on my latest posts more regularly and not feel as if I've written a novel while they weren't visiting my blog. Well, what do you expect when I update my blog 200+ times a year? (Though thanks to Twitter, that rate has probably gone down by 20% or so. As of this post, I've published 186 posts for my blog in 2009)

The Cons:

•My blog posts don't look good after passing through layers of layout adjustments - firstly my Mail.app, then Blogger, and finally, Facebook. Each step of the process, the blog post changes form - font, type (bold, italic, etc.), colour, size, alignment, it loses the element that I intended the post to have, and that's very irritating if you actually spend time & effort doing up all the fonts.

•Your blog might suffer as a result of people only reading your posts on Facebook.

I want people to realise that I actually have a blog, and my "Facebook Notes" are just a 'carbon copy' of my blog. Initially, I set Facebook to syndicate my blog because I want people to see a new 'note' on my Facebook profile page, and after seeing that, I was hoping that people would NOT click through to my Facebook notes, but rather, go over to my blogger blog. Obviously, that was wishful thinking on my part - people don't memorise URLs to others' blogs. 

But now, I want to try out a little experiment. I want to find out if syndicating onto Facebook has any significant effect on the number of visitors/pageviews per day on my blog. As such, I am cutting off the syndication (possibly temporarily), and I want to see whether or not Google Analytics will log more visitors. If it does, then I can say that Facebook Notes does take away viewership from the original blog, if you're a small-time blogger like me. If it doesn't then maybe only a 8 people read my blog regularly, each visiting my blog twice daily (on average, I get 8 unique visitors per day and 16.59 pageviews a day.).

So do check out my blog if you've never been there before - http://ronfiles.blogspot.com

Note: if you're reading my blog via RSS (which I doubt, but then again, I won't know since I don't track RSS feed viewers), it still works. I'm just removing the RSS feed link from my Facebook Profile page settings.

Urgh. Mucus. SuperF.

Been ill.

Slightly.

Well, maybe 'slightly' is an underplaying adverb. Been getting
blockages in my left nose, thanks to a mixture of blood and mucus. And
the Lemsip seems to help with the mucus in the short-term, but worsens
the nose-bleeds, because one of its side-effects is thrombocytopenia,
which basically means platelets deficiency, or in my case, slow blood
clot formation and hence, increased nose bleed duration and volume.
Bio students, I hope you learnt something, and if you're having your
'O's I hope that served as a reminder to go and revise. (Hope that
warning didn't come too late.)

By the way, no, I didn't learn that word (Thrombocytopenia). It was on
the patient information leaflet that came in the box with the Lemsip
sachets.

Anyway, let's put that gross mucus talk aside.

Went to the cinema yesterday to watch the Pixar movie "Up" in 3D. I
must say, the new "Real 3D" glasses - the ones that use Circular
Polarizing glasses rather than tinted glasses - really adds drama to
the animated movie. The added dimension of depth isn't just used to
give the short bursts of 'surprise the audience' scenes like those in
Jaws 3D anymore. Rather, you see this Z-axis being used throughout the
movie. And even though you might get a headache at the beginning and
discomfort on your nose (especially if you wear spectacles), the added
dimension makes the story more engrossing. Sometimes, you feel as if
you're watching a puppet show, only that the scenes change instantly
and there's no strings.

The only downside is that I can still see a bit of ghosting effect and
a bit of interpolation in certain scenes, which is quite hard to
accept considering how much more the tickets cost (well, for the Odeon
that I was at, anyway). Still, it could've been worse, right?

Overall, this technology has that 'wow' factor that impressed me.

In other news, I just bought a new book (gasp! a book?!) recently -
it's the sequel to Freakonomics, Superfreakonomics. I was so engrossed
with the first, I decided to actually buy the sequel. Yes, there's
some controversy about the content in the book - if you read online,
there's a debate about the way the book talks about Global warming.
And if you read the first book, you might be dropping your lips (at
first in surprise, then) in dismay when they theorised that the Roe vs
Wade ruling which led to the legalisation of abortion in the USA
caused the decline in the rate of crime in the US in the '90s, in
spite of analysts' more pessimistic predictions of escalating crime
rates. Not going into too much detail (don't want to spoil the book)
but if you want to read the theories in depth, head down to the
nearest library that has this book, or buy it, or buy the audiobook
online. It tries to mix Psychology (a social science that tries to
explain human behaviour) with Economics (another social science of how
markets, economic agents and economies interact). It's analytical, but
it doesn't have the terminology and complex maths. (Though some people
argue that the book often "cherry-picks" statistics to distort the
truth and support their theories/disprove certain common beliefs
amongst people.)

K. just a short post. Need to use the bathroom, and then sleep.

See Statistics? Scrutinise the source.

If you see a set of statistics coming from a researcher, be it in an
advertisement, newspaper, or even in a Social Studies/History Source-
Based Question, always question its source.

In SS classes, we are 'trained' to look at the provenance of a source
to see where it came from, and from there, interpret certain things -
what the sample size was, who was included in the sample, what this
data is supposed to represent, and how was the data collected. The
same should apply in real life - when you see that shampoo ad claiming
"7 out of 10 people experienced stronger hair", investigate how the
research was done. If the footnote says "in a trial of 117 people", I
would still be suspect. Why?

1. Because 117 people could include 100 employees, who, having
received financial incentive from the company in the form of a job and
a salary, have an obligatory pressure to say "it's brilliant". Or
superficially, if they love the company and their products, however
bad/good they may actually be, and that is why they choose to work for
the company and take free samples, then the sample is biased.

2. Because out of 117 people, the company picked and interviewed 90
people who had strong hair to begin with, and the shampoo didn't do
much to help. Or, the opposite could be true - they started from a low
base (i.e.: very weak hair), and increased the strength, even though
the hair was still breaking, albeit at a "60% lower rate of breakage".

3. Because the shampoo works best with certain types of hair (e.g.:
for blondes, or for oily hair), and out of 117 people, 80 people could
have the advantageous trait.

4. Because out of 200 people who initially tested the product, 83
people didn't like the product / didn't report back, so the company
just worked with what they had.

5. Because the company included, with the free sample of shampoo, some
extra hair tonic and vouchers to a special hair treatment place to
"examine the progress of the improvement in your hair".

See how a single footnote might seem to disclose the validity of a
statistic, but actually has so many flaws?

By the way, the above scenario was completely made-up. But I hope it
keeps your eyes open and wary of the claptrap that many researchers,
scientists, and advertisers put out.