The Reiser Story Ends
For those who have been reading the blog for a year and remember The Reiser Story post (which I did after reading a Wired article), the end of the story has finally come, as Reiser led police to the grave of his murdered wife.
Misc
Stuff that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.
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WordPress Exploit Scanner plugin
For those who recall the whole “blog gets hacked” odyssey, and my subsequent request for a plugin that would do security scans, check this out:
This WordPress plugin searches the files on your site for a few known strings sometimes used by hackers, and lists them with code fragments taken from the files. It also makes a few checks of the database, looking at the active_plugins blog option, the comments table, and the posts table.
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Building the human algorithm
Some academics (including Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, author of the excellent Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means) have been doing analysis of human movements based on where people are making cell phone calls from.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Mobile phones expose human habits
The results showed that most people’s movements follow a precise mathematical relationship – known as a power law.
“That was the first surprise,” he told BBC News.
Is it really a surprise anymore when something happens to have a power-law distribution?
In any case, it does seem like we are inching ever closer to Asimov’s psychohistory. Given enough data, why wouldn’t we be able to build predictive algorithms for large-scale human populations and social trends?
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(Tuesday) Mailbag: forum posters, churn, betas
Mr Koster, I am wondering if you can help me with a bit of online Mythbusting? I have an interest in statistics with relation to gamers and beta testers. This quote: “Something like 90% of the people playing an MMO never post in the forums.” was recently made here and attributed to you and Rich Vogel here. (please read the thread to see why I am interested) So, I was wondering if you could confirm this? How did you collect this data? And if so, what other data can you share? Do you know of any other sources of this sort of data? And, yes. I would be very happy to see this email posted and commented on in your blog. Thank you for your time and effort.
Regards, Guy Russon
Well, as far as how that stat comes about (and it does vary game to game — don’t take 10% as gospel, becaus eyou are right it’s a “whisper stat” at this point), you simply measure your subscribers, measure your active forum posters, and derive a ratio. 🙂 In the case of forums where they require a game registration in order to register for the forum, this is pretty easy.
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Scary stats redux
Back at the end of 2006, I noted that thanks to stat-tracking stuff here on the blog, I could tell that I had written 340,000 words on the blog over the years. That’s just blog posts, not counting anything in the site proper, mind you.
Well, here we are a year and quarter later, and there’s 540,000 words there now.
So I really need everyone to go back and tag them all. 🙂