Web Stats for this week, so far

[tanouryjr]

If anyone cares, we had one of the best weeks yet at www.larrytanoury.com this week.

• 2,673 Unique Visitors
  
  3,901 Total Visitors
  
  Many different media outlets, including the Times Union, Post Standard, Rochester Democrat and all of the local ones.
  
  Clipper's Corner gave the 2nd most refferals.
  
  The top repeat visitor was none other than the Oneida County Office Building...which viewed several times today between 4:30 and 5:00pm.
  
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I just can't figure out why the numbers aren't even close when it comes to the videos. Maybe people don't want to watch them, can't find them or just don't care. Hmmm. We'll have to work on that one. I plan on doing some paid ads soon so that may help.

I'll probably be offline for the rest of the weekend (little sister is getting married Saturday) so I hope you all have a great weekend.

[dgriffin]

Dial-up users probably aren't going to be watching videos. You may have a lot of dial-up folks for a variety of reasons... watching their pennies, casual interest in the internet, etc. Maybe an older crowd, although many of us on Clipper are not youngsters.

[tanouryjr]

That's a good point, Dave. I try to use YouTube because of their highly compressed videos and thought they would be easily viewable with a slow connection. But if not, I'm probably better of using flash player for higher quality. Let me know if any of you have dial-up, and whether the videos play well. Thanks.

[gearofzanzibar]

With all due respect, videos of a politician giving a speech are a dime a dozen. I respect what you're trying to do, but I think there are times that a more intimate presentation would be more effective, particularly when discussing general policy questions. One thing you could do with your existing approach is to actually show the relevant portions of documents you're referring to.

BTW, can I ask what kind of camera you're using?

[stoney]

How are you able to tell who visited if they didn't sign-in, Larry?

[gearofzanzibar]

Jul 25, 2008 11:43:39 GMT -5 @stoney said:

How are you able to tell who visited if they didn't sign-in, Larry?

Not to hijack, but even a basic stat tracker will compile that information. The more sophisticated programs can use graphic bugs and authentication calls to help ID individual computers. Even a free service like Sitemeter provides user stats that can be mined to identify individual machines by using quirks of their browser configurations.

[tanouryjr]

Stoney, it's one of the services offered by my hosting company. It can give me all kinds of stats in real time. There is no signing in as it's an actual self sustained website. If that makes sense (I'm no internet pro, lol).

Gear, you make some good points and I thought about that too. I actually have a JVC-HD Prosumer camera, but 99% of the video on there is terrible quality because it comes from the VHS tapes that the couty uses to broadcast the meeting on public access. When the tapes are submitted to the Board I transfer them over to DVD so that I have a copy and could import them into Final Cut.

I just started getting all this video equipment and hope to start actually taping some one-on-one talks (kinda like the old FDR fireside chats). Maybe that will be more interesting. You're right though, most people don't want to listen to a politician give a speech. I'm just trying to find a way to get people more interested in what is really going on in government. Trying to find a way to make it hit home for some people so that they realize how important it is to be informed about what goes on up there. Any other suggestions would be great.

[frankcor]

I'm odd. I actually like to listen to political speeches.

[tanouryjr]

I'm odd too then, Frank. I love listening to political speeches, especially the old ones. They make fun of me at the County because I'm always using old quotes from past speeches.

[frankcor]

You've got to find a way to paraphrase Regan's speech in Berlin. Maybe "Mr. Picente, tear down this partisan wall?"

[dgriffin]

One of my favorite Reagan quotes is, "Facts are stubborn things."

Another is, "Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them."

More at:

www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/ronald_reagan.html

[stoney]

Really? Wow. Nothing is private anymore, is it.

(I'd better stop checking out those other, "weird" sites I go to.... )

[Swimmy]

The Internet never really was "private". In fact, in its early days, everything was transmitted in plain text. Passwords, bank account numbers, etc. It was not until the 70s when encryption became a threat to national security that ideas such as e-commerce and online banking came about. The NSA's grip over encryption and encryption strength dictated much of the early developments of the Internet during the 80s and early 90s. The Diffie-Hellman and RSA encryption algorithms revolutionized data security so much so that the Clinton Administration tried to push its cipher-chip that allowed for strong encryption to placate to the masses, but left a backdoor for the fbi and nsa to use should a matter of national security arise. Phil Zimmerman was actually being investigated and threatened with federal criminal prosecution for writing PGP (Pretty good privacy). Around the mid-1990s, the NSA and the government changed gears and eased their vice-grip on data encryption to allow RSA encryption technology to be electronically exported. Some believe that the government finally conceded defeat. I, like many other encryption nuts, believe that the brainpower at NSA headquarters found a way to easily break the hottest encryption algorithms and no longer needed to try and stop RSA and the like.

I think it was a Swede or a Norwegian who invented anonymous money, but was prevented from implementing it do to national security reasons that every country in the world cited for resisting that invention.

Being able to readily identify users online was part of the original design of the Internet. There was a protocol called Finger. It could tell you if a user was online, for how long, which terminal the user was connected to, IP address, and how much e-mail the user had. From a Unix command prompt, all you had to type was "finger <userid>" and all that information would come up. During the Internet's early days, this proved to be an invaluable tool. And it was nice to be able to tell easily if your friends were online. But as with any new tool, there are the few who abused this protocol and were able to break into the user's computer and do whatever they wanted. So, the finger protocol has been disabled on most Internet-connected systems, as are most other protocols.

[dgriffin]

I try to keep in mind what I could see as network manager for the school system I worked for and use the Internet accordingly. What I could see was absolutely everything you did online, had I the time or desire. It's the reason why I had set up a separate administration net that firewalled a lot of info.

[stoney]

Swimmy, thanks for the info.