The few recent days of unbroken blue skies with a warming sun made me feel spring was arriving; now the evenings are lighter too. That said, when night draws in it's time to tuck up....

Good to know in these days of ever-present security threats and state-sponsored paranoia it's still possible to walk up to that slimeball Mandelson and give him what for, then saunter off. Channel4 News has the video. Just to reiterate, as Mandelson seemed hard of hearing, that this was carried out by a supporter of Plane Stupid. Great quote:

"The only thing green about Peter Mandelson is the slime coursing through his veins. That he is trying to make political capital out of climate change ... is an insult to my generation. He is unelected and only represents business interests."
Leila Deen, Mandelson slimer

Reminded me of that scene in Ghostbusters....

2 original comments:

Leila Deen is also unelected and only represents villagers who want to preserve their privileged existence. How many of them would truly believe in climate change if they didn’t life next to an airport? I hope she is properly charged with assault.
Comment by Justin Canham — 7 March, 2009 @ 7:19 pm

Thanks for the comment Justin. Obviously I’d prefer it if the areas around which Mandelson holds considerable sway were aired in a way that saw the media properly examine their merits or otherwise rather than it taking direct action to propel this one issue into the spotlight.
In answer to your points I don’t think Leila Deen was was claiming to speak on behalf of us all; this is rather different to our elected representatives who claim a mandate based on a manifesto they feel they are under no obligation to stick to once elected.
As to “belief in climate change” it is my understanding that it is generally held by the majority of scientists with an expertise in this field that anthropogenic climate change is a reality. You may disagree but on balance I would rather listen to this broadly independent community of experts.
I would suggest you review this chart from the World Resources Institute that gives a detailed breakdown of all greenhouse gas emissions. It makes interesting viewing and reveals the extent of the problem we collectively face.
Personally speaking, and although this is an uninformed perspective, I cannot imagine, in a closed system such as the biosphere of which we are a part, how producing billions of tons of gases that otherwise would not be present in that system can possibly not have a marked affect.
Returning to the points you made in your comment I’m not sure where you have got the idea that Leila Deen “represents villagers”. There is a profile of her here on the Guardian’s site and you may wish to read Plane Stupid’s own website in order to factcheck this assumption.
Flying itself is the preserve of the privileged. The vast majority of the population of this planet cannot afford to fly and certainly would not be permitted to fly internationally as would undoubtedly be unable to obtain the required documentation.
Comment by Mark — 10 March, 2009 @ 1:03 pm

One of the challenges I face in my job is the paucity of decent data to support my theories of how people behave out there on the web. I like to be able to challenge my assumptions and this can only be done with the right tools and a decent set of results. Recently I did pick up a good dataset that proved a long held suspicion:

Links from popular sites do not deliver a sustained increase in visitor numbers

I overhear people talking about links 'driving traffic' to client's websites all the time so have often wondered what a link is worth in terms of additional visitors. Given that a principle of my current work is that attracting attention from popular sites is a way to become part of a 'network neighbourhood' I've wanted to put this to the test. I spotted this comment ages ago on a fairly high profile UK political blog that said:

"... we all know that such linkage doesn't do that much for traffic (Guardian, BBC and Telegraph all worth a spike of an extra c.200-300 visitors, if that)."

A link from a high profile domain is good for your natural search rankings as Google likes it when a high authority site links to you. Is it good for your visitor numbers though? Here's another post that highlights what actually happens:

"After sitting dormant for 9 months, suddenly someone found the site. And not just someone but a very popular code blog called Ajaxian. In one day the site’s visitors leapt from 0 to 400. The next day the site was picked up by a reddit user. At the end of the day, we had about 35,000 visitors."

This is an extreme case. reddit is all about aggregating content that people will then go on to visit directly; a post here that is voted up will attract high volumes of visits. The point is that after the bump from these referrers traffic settled back down to a low-level. This is all pretty obvious stuff, if your site is not a regularly updated content destination then people, having found it via a link, are probably not going to come back day after day. What about a fairly standard case where a link comes to you from a post on a highly popular site? Are you going to receive thousands of visitors from a site that has tens of thousands of visitors a day? In a word: no. Below is the bump taken from the Google Analytics of a recent project I worked on that received coverage from several very popular sites.

So, unless you experience slashdotting, not only will a link from a popular site not provide a sustained increase in visits it will also not deliver many additional visitors. Referrals are but a distant echo of the attention the post that linked to you received. You have absolutely no way of telling how many people read that post as although you may have a vague idea of the daily visits to the referring site you cannot know how many people actually viewed that post. Once that post has dropped off the front page and disappeared into the mass of content that forms a popular site so the attention disappears. This could be called the content 'decay rate' of a given site and will vary depending on the rapidity with which new content is added. I think most people dedicate most of their attention to certain familiar sites when they're online. If they read a post on a favourite blog they read it in situ and rarely follow a link out.

Check out the site statistics for a few of the very popular Gawker blogs: Gizmodo: average 1.1 pageviews a visit Jalopnik: average 1.6 pageviews a visit io9: average 1.5 pageviews a visit People's attention is extremely limited, even on popular sites. Short of anonymised browsing data becoming available to really figure out what's happening I'd take promises of attracting attention from referrals very lightly.

Update: I've been doing a little more reading and found this post from December 2006 entitled Sharecropping the longtail which makes the following point:

"... web traffic appears to be growing more concentrated in a few sites, not less... what's being concentrated... is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products..."

The popularity of social networking sites has meant that increasing numbers of pageviews are concentrated on these domains (though these views are scattered across several million profile pages). I think this bears out what I'm driving at in my post above.

Update: the traffic patterns discussed in this post are indicative of what I'm talking about.

I read over on AppleInsider that the iPhone has a 66% share of mobile web use. It made me remember a meeting I had a while back where a group of us we told about the kind of mobile web work we could offer to clients. I was completely confused as having recently accquired an iPhone I realised I made no distinction whatsover between fixed and mobile web use. One of the most significant achievements of the touchscreen and user interface implementation of the iPhone was that it made navigating webpages on a small screen a pleasure. I find it hard to believe that prior to the iPhone anyone was doing anything on the web via a mobile device, except for marketing types trying to sell 'mobile web' projects to gullible clients. I'm not saying it isn't necessary to create an version of your site optimised for devices with small displays, more that the need to talk about the 'mobile web' as something distinct seems unnecessary as technology has advanced. If you have a site with complex navigation then stripping it back to an optimised version for the small screen is probably a natural part of your design process. In the case of some sites I actually prefer this version. Take Amazon's standard product page layout and then look at the version I see on my iPhone:

Click to see a full-size screenshot

I love how clean this version is. The main product details are followed by the two main actions I'd want to complete when I've searched for a product: either buy it or save it to my wishlist to remember it for later. Following this you have editorial reviews, which presumably carry more weight than the customer reviews, which follow. Finally you see suggestions for other related products. Perfect. It hurts my head a lot less than the deluge of choices the standard page gives me.