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Monthly Report, May-June 2006June 1st, 2006 |
I missed doing a report last month — I don’t remember why. I hope that means you all pined for the monthly dose of goofy search terms!
It looks like the torrid growth of the site has slowed down somewhat. Phew, I was getting worried there for a bit. Here’s a bit of a graph showing how it’s going:
This is enough to land the site at around 60,000 in Alexa and to give it a Technorati rank of 4245 today, though I have seen it as high as 3709.
The giant traffic spikes you see on the graph are all attributable to Slashdotting and BoingBoinging. (I put in a two week moving average in the graph for real tracking purposes). The largish bump is from the posting of the Lessons.
Some aggregate stats: 1.3m hits in April and 1.2m in May; 126,000 visits in April and 138,000 in May; around 4450 average visits a day in May. Bandwidth was almost 17gig in April, and around 15.5 gig in May. It’s actually a bit of relief to see these slightly lower than the peak month of March, which had insane traffic loads.
Google AdSense earnings are still pathetic. I think I only need another $90 before they will cut me a check.
The top countries: US, the ever-popular “unknown,” Australia, Canada, the EU, Great Britain, China, Japan, Germany, and Singapore. Clearly, I hve not yet penetrated the MMORPG consciousness of South Korea, which is somewhere down around 18th, with only around 3400 hits.
The ongoing campaign to have people listen to the music linked on the site is finally seeing traction! In May 438 people listened to an MP3 file, and 2842 saw the little Flash player. In April it was 322 people on the music, and 385 on the Flash player.
Most popular pages on the site this past month:
- Small Worlds still holding at #1.
- The Online World Timeline up from #2.
- Contact/Email page surging onto the charts! More and more mail is coming in this way, and remember — webmaster is the default, if you want to write to me and maybe get answered, make sure you click the right checkbox.
- About Raph still needs updated, which may be why it has slipped from #2.
- Laws of Online World Design are down from #4 because of the contact form appearing
- How to Manage a Large-Scale Online Gaming Community also slips a spot
- A Story About a Tree up from #9
- Online World Design Patterns slips to #8
- Declaring the Rights of Players slips to #9
- Moore’s Wall holds at #10
That means that March’s #6, Running Massively Multiplayer Games, and March’s #11, What Does It Take to Make a Successful Persistent Online World didn’t make it back on.
The stuff nobody read this past month: the ChinaJoy talk and this little bit on virtual sociopaths.
A snapshot in time of the overall most popular posts, so that we can all gawk at what happens when an Internet meme happens to spawn:
| 1) | 34085 | What are the lessons of MMORPGs today? |
| 2) | 9382 | The Healing Game |
| 3) | 8392 | Do levels suck? |
| 4) | 7746 | OGLE |
| 5) | 7572 | Where does popularity come from, or the Wisdom of Crowds revisited |
| 6) | 6708 | Do levels suck? Part II |
| 7) | 6150 | Leaving SOE |
| 5332 | A guild trademarks its name |
| 9) | 5120 | The next next gen |
| 10) | 4837 | Are single-player games doomed? |
But that’s all time. The popular posts this month, in case you missed any, were these:
- Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit — see, more Prokofy means more readers!
- The journey is the reward is a f—–g lie
- Exceptionalism
- Metaverse Roadmap roundup
- Not again…
- The new book: A Grammar of Gameplay, and I still haven’t started actually writing the damn thing…
- A bit of an absence which goes to show I am running out of interesting things to blog about!
- Enter your VWPIN
- Yellow Mustangs, crossgender avatars, and Victoria’s Secret, hopefully based on the title
- SDForum: Joi Ito’s keynote
There’s a lot more folks reading via feeds these days. The peak is 641 in a day, and 150 of those come in via BlogLines. Weekends are much much lower than weekdays, which leads me to suspect that people spend their workday browsing the Internet. I am shocked, shocked, I tell you. The peak day is usually Wednesday, but sometimes it’s Thursday.
What was the most contentious post? That’s easy. Again, hello there, Prokofy Neva!
- Thoughts on the Metaverse Summit
- The journey is the reward is a f—–g lie
- Horses and the user-governed world
- Exceptionalism
- Private clubs or public parks
- Not again…
- First sale
- The new book: A Grammar of Gameplay
- From the Mailbag: Breaking In
- Metadatamania
- Enter your VWPIN
Internet Explorer continues to gain ground against Firefox. This month, the stats stand at IE with 49% and Firefox at 37.9%. This despite the fact that things do not draw right on IE; all you IE users, each post title is supposed to have an icon next to it, didja know that?
Looks like Nodwick’s dominance as a referrer has faded. Instead, I am getting stumbled upon a lot.
- StumbleUpon
- BlogLines
- Scott Jennings’ Broken Toys
- GamaSutra, presumably the Blogged In column Jim Rossignol writes
- Donews, which appears to be in China and linked to the article on what the Web and games have to teach each other
- Damion Schubert’s Zen of Design
- PocketWatch Games
- Brian Green aka Psychochild
- Jay Is Games
- the SWG Forums
This month will be the last time we see search engine terms from the blog’s search engine, because I retired it in favor of just using Google, so that the whole site could be searched. As a bonus, it’s already doubled my ad click rate. 
Anyway, blog engine searches… “mmo,” boring. “Theory of fun,” boring. “Player rights,” boring. “SWG,” boring.
- galactica. I don’t even know what to say to this one.
- business beyond the box. A metaphorical box? The literal retail box? Schrodinger’s box? Who let the cats out? (meow, meow, meow meow meow meow).
- Mario. But not Luigi, who is really developing a complex.
- offempare. And onempare.
- ludeme leading into lude me which perhaps should immediately become a blog title of its own.
- heterarchy which I really don’t think I have ever used as a word in my entire life.
- poema avó. Is that Portuguese? Or Italian?
- game code. Here’s some: void main() { while true do { … } }. You will need to fill in the rest yourself.
- what I’ve learned is that writing this post gets really tiring.
- Phat exercise:How young adults enjoy and sustain physical activity, which sounds like a marketing campaign put together by a culturally tone-deaf school board
- gold dust buyers address in germany. Hmm, if you want to get rid of gold dust…
- skulls/funny looking. Have you tried the one here?
- arcade fire. Indeed, it was a tragedy. Baby Pac-Man was trapped on the second floor, but didn’t have any arms to climb down…
- rest of the world. You have to search for this?
- understand polish. But is it Polish or polish?
- polish quality. Hmm, probably the latter, then.
- arrousal. Well, they have the grrr part down.
- The DaVinci Code hardcover. Try here.
- Die gleiche Geschlechtverbindung, which I assume one of you German readers will translate for me.
The ones from outside included
- gaia online and entropia universe, which goes to show mentioning games that people are playing and therefore searching for drives traffic. I suspect we may hgave discovered the secret to all those spam blogs mining Google Adwords.
- jake shimabukuro because ukuleles are cool again.
- cooking games, which proves that it’s not just me, there is an audience for this
- oblivion female lower body, which is odd to search for, because it’s easy to find. Stand in front of a character, female of course, and then look below the waist. That would be it right there. Honestly, the things people can’t find on their own.
- deal or nodal games, which is a really interesting dichotomy. On the one hand, you have games with decks of cards, and on the other you have games played on graphs. Hmm.
- google tarth. Have we discovered Google’s next business model?
- juegos asimetricos — did my term stick?
- pontificating. OK, so that one is a valid search term for this site, I admit it.
- criss angel step by step lessons on levitation small objects clips, because I believe we can fly.
- raph drug rehab. Never been, I’m high on life, baby!!!
- hot new haircuts 2006. Meanwhile, mine hasn’t changed since college, when I cut off my ponytail.
- mu server game working error causes conclusion. I thought Mu Online was still running.
- britney spyer cd. You mean, her paparazzi have a recording contract?
- practical nakeds. I suppose there are impractical kinds too.
- playmate february 2006 because we just can’t forget her.
- catherine mcphee oops. Soul Patrol!
- coordinate based movement system game mud. Yes, there are. It’s not hard to implekent either; just add x and y to every object and character and mobile data structure, insert a max x and y into the room data structure, and add commands to navigate. You can make it functional in about ten minutes. Of course, if you want more complex spaces within the coordinate system, you’ll need to allow for collision and maybe the Z axis.
- tess perko. Tess, Craig, something you’re not telling us?
- post by users on websites that can be accessed by anybody that tell cheat on how to get xp in cov. Does anyone ever get results with searches this specific?
- life lessons learned. Let me know if you find them.
- second life 2006 brothels. Because last year’s brothels are just SO over.
- free downloadable music for baritone ukulele, because ukuleles are cool again.
- how old is when she was rescued by bruce wellis in the begining of the movie. You have to narrow it down more for us, yippee kai-ay!
- celerygoblin. See, now that’s a cool monster type. It dies when you dip it in peanut butter or ranch dressing, and it costs more mana to fight it than not.
- what factors helped cortez and pizarro in thier conquest of two great indians empires. Guns, germs, and steel. There’s a book about it, actually.
- secret solutions to rid geese from my pool. The celerygoblin. He hates geese. There’s also guns, germs, and steel. When all else fails, ukuleles are cool again.
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Inspired by both Raph Koster’smonthly reports and Google’s Zeitgeist, I decided to drop in some information for last month’s common search terms that led people here to Nerfbat. As I think Google’s word, “Zeitgeist,” is awesome, I am shamelessly stealing it for my own use until such a
, which seemed to spring out of nowhere, he said the next time he gathered his statistics that article was the one with the most hits, and that drove up his overall traffic, and that drove up his kachinging ads on that web page.”More Prokofy means more readers,” he said. Really, I should be paid for this…and of course that’s exactly what some would like to do, buy me, pay for me, and get paid themselves. The Harvard guy, of course, was primarily interested in the intellectual discourse around his
[...] Comments [...]
[...] Inspired by both Raph Koster’s monthly reports and Google’s Zeitgeist, I decided to drop in some information for last month’s common search terms that led people here to Nerfbat. As I think Google’s word, “Zeitgeist,” is awesome, I am shamelessly stealing it for my own use until such a time that I come up with a better word myself. [...]