Misc

Stuff that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.

  • In Japan!

    Hours Categories Misc
    Comments 13 Comments

    I am here. Random notes:

    Man, it takes a really long time to get from the plane to the hotel. Like, three hours. 45 minutes was probably the immigration line!

    There was a magical bus to the hotel, so I didn’t have to learn the train system. Yet.

    There was a girl on said bus who laughed the whole way. I don’t know why.

    I ran into Tyler from Indiana University in the immigration line. So, no creepy stalker, but I did have a stranger recognize me. That felt odd.

    Then I shared the bus with another CEDEC speaker. This is starting to feel like a very small world.

    I saw many many DS Lites on the way.

    So they warned me there was no ground on the plug. What do you do with laptop plugs that have a ground prong? hink the hotel has an adapter? Sigh. I have 6 hours of computing left.  (Update: the hotel is sending an adapter up, yay!)

  • Off to Japan!

    Hours Categories Misc
    Comments 8 Comments

    I am heading off to Japan in the morning, to speak at CEDEC. The blog may get slightly quieter for a bit as a result.
    It is my first time there. 🙂 If you’re in Japan, and want to show me around, and aren’t a creepy stalker… let me know.

  • Monday Mailbag: a neat graph, producers, UO, UO…

    Hours Categories Mailbag
    Comments 6 Comments

    Gene Endrody of MaidMarian.com pointed out this cool Alexa graph that shows how much seasonal trends matter for virtual worlds:

    Alexa traffic graph

    I did an Alexa compare of traffic for the last six months for MaidMarian.com, ToonTown.com and Habbo.com. Habbo’s traffic is from the US site only – compared with MaidMarian.com’s worldwide, so it’s not a fair comparison per se. What I found very interesting was how close the three correlate. You can see the boost that summer holidays provide, however the ebb and flow of web traffic is really obvious. I would be really cool if we had a Dow Jones Industrial Average for web traffic to compare against.

    Yeah, I think any of the operators who have been running more than one world have noticed this. There’s definite seasonal trends to virtual world usage. We need some worlds popular in the Southern Hemisphere to even out the curves! 🙂

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