fplanque: IT world

By now you must have seen quite a few of those BlogRush widgets in blog sidebars... Heck, there's even one on this blog.

I've put it up almost when it launched despite my skepticism about why the blog world would need yet another badgy widgety thing... but it was a good opportunity for me to test easy integration of widgets in b2evolution.

Then, after all the abuse going on with it, I've been meaning to take it down for quite a while but didn't get to it until today...

Imagine my surprise when I checked my stats "just to make sure" and discovered BlogRush was actually accounting for 29% of my referrals since the beginning of the week! Holly cow!

I guess I'll let it live a little longer then... Looks like they have solved the abuse problems!

If you want to give it a try for yourself, there's a 2 minute signup process to register your blog, then you just have to copy/paste some javascript. In b2evolution 2.0, use a Free HTML widget to paste the javascript into your sidebar...

Fom blogworldexpo.com:

• Over 12 million American adults currently maintain a blog.
• More than 147 million Americans use the Internet.
• Over 57 million Americns read blogs.
• 1.7 million American adults list making money as one of the reasons they blog.
• 89% of companies surveyed say they think blogs will be more important in the next five years.
• 9% of internet users say they have created blogs .
• 6% of the entire US adult population has created a blog .
• Technorati is currently tracking over 70 million blogs .
• over 120 thousand blogs are created every day .
• There are over 1.4 million new blog posts every day .
• 22 of the 100 most popular websites in the world are blogs .
• 120,000 new blogs are created every day .
• 37% of blog readers began reading blogs in 2005 or 2006 .
• 51% of blog readers shop online .
• Blog readers average 23 hours online each week .

Unique IPs / 5 minute intervals

My post on iPod car integration got slashdotted last night. That really caught me off guard!

It is pretty incredible how fast the hordes of new visitors arrived. I only noticed about 1 hour later that the server had gotten insanely slow. It didn't crash though (Thanks Debian ). So I made a static page of the post and (mod_rewrite) redirected to it. That brought the server back to normal speed.

Top referers

Of course slashdot is now my top referrer of the week... by far (as shown by b2evolution).

Ironically, I actually submitted the post to digg.com, but it was slashdot who picked it up! Sure digg shows on the pie chart, but it's actually less than 1% referrers.

There would be two possible explanations:

• Either the digg community was less interested in this subject than slashdot
• or... on shlashdot, all you need is ONE editor to like your post and you're in for 10 000 visitors. On digg, you need quite a few people to like your post before it makes it to the home page...

I think I just got lucky on slashdot. Thank you Timothy! It's been a thrilling experience!