Lessons from the Chewbacca Incident

An analysis of the referrers and visitors from last weeks Chewbacca craze, set in beautiful interactive SVG graphs and wonderful CSS3 columns.

Chewie dropped it like it was hot the saturday before last and traffic spiked at one hundred times normal late last week, for a total of over 50.000 unique visits. Aside from worrying amounts of stat masturbation, I also took the opportunity to glean some insights into the referrers and visitors interested in everyone’s favorite furry.

Above is a look at how the traffic evolved in the week following publication. And what’s noteworthy here is that some sites taper off immediately, The Daily What for instance, as the news item is quickly pushed off their frontpage, while others, like Kottke, have a fairly long lifetime. In fact, Kottke is one of the few sites that carried more traffic on the second day than on the first. One of the others is Reddit, which never exploded, but instead has an exceptionally long lifetime.

More interesting is the fact that because ambient traffic levels are usually quite low – or, atrophied; tomato, tomato – a surge for a single post tells us a lot about the nature of the visitors and their referrers. Especially when it’s a post which can either be read as a whole for the narrative or skimmed for the punchline.

Here the top 30 referrers (by volume), with the average time spent on site on the left of each site in a dark shade of that site’s color and the average number of pages visited on the right, in a lighter shade1.

As one might expect, Reddit users go straight for the punchline and bail immediately. One might assume the the same behavior from Facebook users, but no, among the visitors that hang around, they rank third!

Likewise I would have expected MetaFilter readers to hang around and Boing Boing users to quickly move along; but in fact, the opposite is the case. So much for preconceptions. Another surprise, and a welcome one, is that the venerable John Gruber of Daring Fireball’s readership, the largest of them all, is considerably more patient than that of io9, a dedicated science fiction site.

Then there’re some of the more obvious ones, like Instapaper readers spending an understandably short amount of time on the site, though they explore above average (hopefully adding my sage words to their reading queues), and The Daily What, the readers of which are just looking for the daily punchline (TLDR!).


Colophon

I exported the top 25 referrers per day since the 17th from Google Analytics, imported the CSV into Numbers where I culled the unneeded data and indexed the visitor values against the busiest day (the 27th). In cases where a site had a mobile version, I collapsed all versions into one. Then I converted the CSV to JSON and wrote a whole heap of garbage code to squeeze it into something I could use. Should you want, the data is free to use.

The graphs are SVG, built using Protovis, a wonderful SVG library from Stanford.

‘Google Reader’ is actually representative for all Google traffic, but the vast majority, somewhere between 90 and 95 percent, is from Google Reader.

  1. A word of caution: While these stats appear here as in Google Analytics, there are likely a whole host of factors that can influence just how much they can actually be trusted, as can be seen my some of the freak stats, like Hacker News (the readers of which are exceptionally attentive!) or meneame.net (click everything in sight and get out quickly!). ↩

More Droidmaker

I know, I know, it’s starting to look more and more as if Binary Bonsai was reborn as a Star Wars and Droidmaker-reblog site after its hiatus, but if I merely updated the older entries with this information, it wouldn’t propagate, and dammit, when I have something to take credit for I’ll damn well use every excuse in the book to take it!

Then there happened to be an unusual series of events at the end of June, 2009, when a couple interesting Lucas stories were emerging. An old home movie from ILM in 1977. An older interview with young George Lucas from the BBC in 1972. My book gives some context to these items.

On June 30 I got a wild hare and generated a PDF of the entire book. I posted it on my blog and I made two public-ish announcements: I posted it on my Facebook page, and I emailed a note about it to a blogger in Europe who had just written something nice about Droidmaker a few days earlier. So I emailed “Binary Bonsai” – he posted it. And that was it.

The word spread globally in a few moments, and in 24 hours there were around 2,000 downloads of the book. A few weeks later there was another spike of interst, bringing the total downloads to about 13,000. In 14 days, more people have read my book than in the prior 4 years. And I finally feel like my work with this is done. #

Exciting for me, as I’ve been a fan of Droidmaker since it came out. I plowed through it in a few days, which is honestly rather rare for me. I hope to have the chance to meet Michael when we’re in California; a fitting encounter on a trip which is already taking us to see Pixar, Skywalker Ranch and a John Williams concert.

I honestly don’t know how all of this could get much better…

The Amazing Contemporizer

It’s not that I’m embarrassed by my younger self, but… I’d prefer it if my blog continually contained mostly things that feel contemporary to me. Thus, employing government-sanctioned reality distortion field technology, I once again got Brian to do the heavy lifting and build me The Amazing ContemporizerOther names suggested were ‘I was young, I needed the money’, ‘It’s not that I’m embarrassed, but…’ ‘Youthful Folly’ and ‘The Ice Floe’. while I kicked back, drank piña colada’s and cackled at my cat.

The Amazing Contemporizer is a plugin for WordPress which automatically sets posts older than X to private, causing a wave of privacy to flow over your older and perhaps less… refined, past as a blogger.

PS: Backup you blog before using. Seriously. No… Seriously!

A Copyright Infringement Claim, Flickr and Me

C-3PO, avert your eyes

The holidays bring the amazing wonder of a fixed feed (no more raw textile markup), non-invisible pages, working search, a lifestream and some polish on the theme here and there. Hell, the about page even has my e-mail address on it, so people can go ahead and contact me directly, instead of having to go through flickr.

Now, speaking of flickr, it has now been two weeks since my sizable Star Wars collection was removed from flickr.

Lucasfilm filed a copyright infringement case with Yahoo!, telling them that the Collection I had slowly amassed over a few years, actually belonged to them, which in turn caused flickr to—in broad strokes—CTRL-A the collection and press DEL. I wake up to a flickr-mail telling me what happened, and that if I want to, I can file a counter-claim.

Of course I don’t fault Lucasfilm for filing the claim, and I don’t blame flickr for accepting the claim. In fact, I don’t really have much reason to counter-claim anything; except while the images were certainly Star Wars-related, not all of them were under Lucasfilm copyright domain…

Hm.

So I write back, asking for all the images to be made available to me, so I can sort through them and point out which ones should be left alone. But, sorry. They’re gone. Deleted. Expelled and flushed.

Yes, the collection consisted mostly of images copyrighted to Lucasfilm and I have no qualms about that. I will miss having that collection, but that’s just the images, right? What about my metadata? Titles, descriptions, tags and comments? Hell, I can’t even be sure that there weren’t images entirely unrelated to Star Wars deleted from my account; because I have no way of verifying them.

I’m sure Yahoo! has a clause somewhere stating that any and everything on flickr, including my metadata, belongs solely to them and can be used or discarded at their discretion. And you know, there’s probably a whole host of legal reasons why that’s a good idea.

Despite that, I would expect flickr to have a slightly more refined system in place for dealing with copyright claims, than merely deleting everything that seems to be related to the claim.

In any case, the bottomline is that flickr has deleted several hundreds of images from my account and I didn’t get a chance to go through them for false positives, backup my metadata (there are quite a few people I have had contact to, and I would like to retain not only those connections, but also the talks we had about for instance, the design evolution of the X-Wing) or even index the collection for any eventual counter-case.

Not only that, but despite promising ‘a timely response’, two weeks later, I still can’t get anyone at flickr to tell me how this can possibly be their best response to copyright infringement cases. How many of these do they handle every week, and this is their solution?

Really?

What happens when someone manages to fake a copyright infringement claim? Your entire flickr account disappears in a plume of smoke. Deleted. Flushed. Expelled. Shot straight into the sun. Star Wars images? Yeah, who cares? Your child’s first steps? Hope you had a backup. Wedding photos? Gee shucks…

At first I was pissed. Just from principle. That my images were deleted without objection doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in flickr. But that this is actually their system for dealing with copyright infringement claims is just amateurish. I’ve heard from others who are in the same situation, some of whom have waited even longer without hearing from the ‘senior representative’ or the ‘copyright team’.

I’m done being pissed though. Now I’m simply disappointed that not only did it happen, but for a week and a half and despite asking almost every day, I can hardly get a sign of life from flickr. I’ve been a paying member of flickr for over four years, and a staunch advocate and proponent of flickr, so somewhere, you’d think my trust was worth something?

Thanks flickr. You’re the best.

Comments are open.

Related:
Jeremy has his own squabbles with flickr.

Update:
Jan 2nd, 2009: Still no word from Flickr, despite several attempts on my part to contact them.

A New Look

I’m not going to make a big splash here, but I’ve activated ahead of time, the design I’ve been working on, mostly because I grew bored with the previous one faster than I thought I would. As you can see, this one is quite low-key and set entirely in Helvetica Neue, with exception of the header logo of course, which I drew in Photoshop one sunny sunday a couple of weeks back.

I wanted a more ‘serious’, almost book-like feel for the site, to complement my writing—and to be honest, to lend it some seriousness I can’t manage to bring to the table on my own—and hopefully this design manages to do something along those lines.

It is however a work in progress, but as usual I don’t have the time just now to get everything up and running as I want it; yet another case of me being better at dreaming up ideas than coding them up. And as such, it’s got plenty of errors, and some of the recent entries have hardcoded widths for videos and what not (thanks Flash), don’t worry, life goes on.

I hope you like it.

Habari & Kalamari

Alright, listen up. Binary Bonsai has been powered by WordPress literally since its very first release. And as a consequence, I’ve been pretty involved with the WordPress community over time, especially these last few years with K2 (which is still in production I might add). But, while it has served me well for all of that time, to kick the carcase of the dead horse that is the girlfriend metaphor; we’ve grown apart. And today, I’m moving out of the apartment. So it’s goodbye WordPress and…

Hello Habari.

Mmm. Sweet, sensual, built Habari. Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t a pitch for you to do the same (though, please, take it for a spin; you never know). It’s simply me celebrating that I’ve finally gotten on with my online life, and getting even more involved with a project that has so far been both incredibly rewarding and ditto challenging.

And it wasn’t that WordPress and I were in a painful relationship; at least not in last year or so. It was more one of those courteous ones where we had both made peace with the fact that we weren’t meant for each other. That over time, we had grown apart. And… Alright, alright; enough of this blasted girlfriend metaphor; it’s creeping me out!

Seriously though, I’m really happy to finally move in with Habari. I’ve long had a keen interest in interface design and blogging tools, and my involvement with Habari has allowed me to follow up on both of those, and hopefully in the process creating a blogging tool that others will find exciting as well.

As a writer, if anyone would stoop so low as to call me that (thank you), what happens behind the scenes doesn’t really interest me. I do most of my writing in Textmate and then copy/paste it anyway. And after I’ve turned off comments, I don’t even see the whole admin section that often. But just because you only use the car to go down to the supermarket, why shouldn’t you be driving a black Countach?

I thought so too.

But please, have some patience with the design (which is new, and very much in progress), the archives and the feed (new permanent address, I’ll try and do some clever rewriting to get the old links to work). I’m working on getting all my ducks in a neat little row, and hopefully everything will settle down within a few days.

Well, except for the design.

I’m calling it Kalamari.

Aaaand We're Back. Again.

I’m sorry for this past week’s permission-problem-outage, but despite having vacation, it’s been everything but quiet around here. And before we get on to other business, let me just take one more opportunity to congratulate Rasmus and Anna-Vera on their wedding this weekend, it was fantastic!

R+AV

Now, down to business.

I think I’ll try and upgrade BB to WP 2.6 one of the next few days, just to have the chance to play around with it properly, before finally taking the leap up to the just release Habari 0.5. I don’t know if you’ve had the chance to play around with it yet, but I’m so very proud to have been a part of that project so far. The work we’ve done these last few months is really something. There’s also a new project site, which is quite an improvement already.

So that’s coming along strong. I can’t wait to get it up and running on BB; I’m really just waiting for Chris to do the textile plugin he promised me… (nudge nudge, eh eh?).

Now, I’ve got some drafts for various entries I didn’t get to post over the last week, but now that the weather in Copenhagen has turned from LA to Seattle, what else is there to do but honker down and get some writing done?

Well, there’s watching movies, reading books and cooking food, but… Well, I’ll get them written, alright? I get enough whine from my friends about the activity-level on here already, so I guess I need to pick it up a bit, eh?

In the meanwhile, Steve Lam has been working quietly behind the scenes, and just released a new release candidate (haha… We just like the sound of it) of K2 yesterday, all 2.6 ready and everything. Knock yourself out!

And in closing: Twitter killed the blog. It’s true.

10 reasons you should read this entry

When in the future, bound to the wheelchair by an injury sustained in the Chrome Wars, I look back at 2007, I will see Kane & Lynch: Dead Men.

It’s not that I consider my other endeavors insignificant. I’m very happy with K2, even if we didn’t ship a 1.0 as I’d hoped. And I’m already very proud of the little work I’ve been able to contribute to Habari so far. Furthermore, both Rikke and I were able to chalk off Paris and New York from the ‘must travel to before impending death’-list.

But Kane & Lynch definitively marks the end of me wanting to make computer games for a living, and me having made making computer games for a living. And dammit, I’ll wear that chip on my shoulder and parade it around town like nobody’s business. It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to!... Look what you made me do.

2007 will also go down as the year I spent an excessive amount of money on a whole range of (fantastic) new Star Wars books, it being after all the 30th anniversary and all. And yes, I’m still a sucker for that stuff; you wanna start a fight or something? You a trekkie? Huh? Huh?!

Furthermore, this will be the last year Binary Bonsai will be brandishing WordPress. I’m a-shippin’ out and a-joinin’ Habari. It was fun, smell you later.

The Future

2008 will be the year where I leave the quantity of content to Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr and the seemingly never ending onslaught of something-r, and instead turn my focus on quality for this here site.

Proper writing, or at least, more attentive writing. Which is to say, if you enjoy reading about Russ Meyer and thinking about whether or not Chris Foss planted the seed for the Star Destroyers, then gosh darnit, you’re in luck Lucy, cuz that just about sets the style.

And proper writing, unlike this whole piece and this segue in particular, is exactly what 2008 will be tagged, bagged and sold as.

I love film. I work with games, but honestly, I can’t deny that my love is with film. And sure enough, the ‘I could do that better blindfolded!’-bravado is abound, but the actual product? It has yet to be manifested.

I’ve pseudo-dabbled in creative writing, and even half seriously discussed with Rikke the option of moving to New York for a stint, leading a bohemian life as a writer, living off of the wonderful New York deli’s and churning out socially subversive, but mostly un-produced scripts (that last part is a lie; it would be pulp sci-fi; you know that).

So this is the year where I, creatively, bend down to check whether I have a pair or not. And if I do, great, who knows what it might lead to? If I don’t? Well, shit.

So that’s it for 2008; you can go home now.

PS: This entry by the way, is the last entry to brandish comments. The spammers are too clever, they’ve won. But they can’t cross the bridge, if there is no bridge, so… Boom.

Catch me on twitter if you need me.

WP2.1 and the Tip of the RSS Iceberg

Figured out why my RSS feed isn’t displaying the full post anymore. Apparently Wordpress now truncates posts that use the <more> tag in RSS feeds. Funny, it never did that before. I am, now, quite pissed. #

Amen brother. Amen.

I would have written a rant about this, but I just could not be bothered. But anything Christopher says, I agree with 100%. Why would you change core functionality in a point update? It doesn’t make any sense at all. Especially since it actually removes the choice between excerpts and full-length feeds…

I’ve always proudly served full-length feeds, since I firmly believe that excerpted feeds are lame. And now, with this new functionality, I no longer have the choice.

Adding injury to injury, the new ‘excerpt’ doesn’t even indicate to the reader of the feed that they are only seeing the tip of the iceberg!...

First forced rel=nofollow. Then snap. Now this?

Seriously.

Invader60 Commands Obedience

Dear reader, meet Invader60; Invader60 meet one of the people who will be using you. Great, now that we have that out of the way, allow me to explain to you what exactly is going on.

Invader60 is the 60% mark of Invader. You will no doubt have noticed that it is considerably slimmer than earlier versions of Invader, or indeed any layout previously seen on Binary Bonsai, which is actually quite contrary to what I had originally planned (which was a layout which would be considerably wider than anything before it).

The implementation is filled to the brim with bugs at the moment, but I’ll be hammering most of them out today; I just wanted to make sure I actually managed to publish this today instead of letting it slide.

There are quite a few ideas behind the way this new layout is structured, some are evident some aren’t quite as evident yet. Most importantly is the use of AJAX and fancy schmancy effects, all of which I’ll also want to talk more about as soon as it’s all working as it’s supposed to.

Order of business: Fix the currently slightly broken functionality, then order the content properly, then fix the styling.

Now if you’ll excuse me.

PS: Oh yeah, in the midst of all of this, I forgot to tell you that this is another Bachelor Weekend! :)

I know Design-Foo!

Design-Foo!

Weee, I won Chris’s 2004 weblog awards! Ph34r my design-foo! I would like to thank Rikke, and her ever-lasting patience with me and this damned blog :)

Great stuff, thank you everyone! Though it feels awkward coming out on top of all these great bloggers and their sites. Might I suggest a new, broader scoped award some time in spring? Where we really get the word out to everyone we can, line up all the coolest sites out there and see what’s what. I am honored and happy that Freya has been met with such a warm welcome. But I must admit to feeling unworthy :)

Regardless, bring on the design-foo belt!

Segregation and iPod

Well, as promised when I launched Freya, I have finally gotten down to segregating comments from ping- and trackbacks. Something I might add, that I believe WordPress should do by default. The Livesearch Entry is a good example of how a list of pings will look like. Either way, I’ll probably post some code soon for those of you interested in something like that. I’m about to send off the latest version of the Latest Comments plugin that Brian wrote, after doing some 1.3 compatibilitization (so a word!) to it, and once Brian gets the time, he’ll put it up on his site for everyone to download.

In other news, I sent in my iPod for repairs today. I’ve also got the box for my Powerbook down at the office, just need to backup the harddrive and it’ll go in too. I hope the wait won’t be too long.

Either way, I think I have most of the things I need to run the world without it, but in case I disappear from the surface of the Earth; well now you know who to lynch.

Kitten's Spaminator

When I, in preparation for Freya, upgraded to WordPress 1.3, I didn’t have any spammer countermeasures in place for a few days. Which was of course just plain foolish! So the other day, after having heard reports of people getting hit with large amounts of casino and poker spam, I decided to install Kitten’s Spaminator (as well as a few other minor countermeasures), and I’m here to tell you it is teh g00dn3zz, as we say.

Today it’s been stopping a minor wave of spam dead in its tracks. Now I’m not entirely sure what it’s doing, but it’s doing it well.