freeg131: Philip Gamble

This weekend I bought two items off eBay for a total of £1.

First I paid the sum of £0.99 for two Pennbury domain names, pennbury.co.uk and pennbury.com. Pennbury, near Leicester, is one of the Governments shortlisted locations which may be developed into an eco-town - one in a list of 15 which will be narrowed down to 10 in 6 months.

Once the domains have been transferred I will probably develop a small information site in the style of cassioburypark.info providing details about the proposed development. If the project goes ahead under the same name there will be a town with 12,000 - 15,000 residents, so I imagine the domains would have some potential.

The £0.01 I paid was for a set of headphones for my fake ipod. Like the other item, the seller here is obviously making a loss. Despite this the seller is still selling many identical items - an attempt just to boost the amount of feedback received, a hope of future businesses or just general foolishness? I wonder…

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I was recently asked by one of my computing teachers if I knew somewhere were you could see how popular a particular website was. I recommended Alexa, easily manipulated, but probably the most widely known about site providing estimates of traffic stats.

Obviously the different traffic estimation sites use different techniques to calculate traffic data for websites, so some variation in their results should be expected.

Here is a quick look at the popularity of what is, under normal circumstances, my most popular site - GameMaker Blog.

Alexa - #438,208, however the week average is higher at 332,014.

Compete.com estimates the number of unique visitors to a domain per month. For April their figure for GameMaker Blog is 658. This figure is far too low. Even if we are just counting visitors to the blog itself, the figure should be closer to 3,000 and that is excluding the much larger number of people who see the site through the GameMaker Affiliation Service.

Quantcast is a site I found relatively recently a couple of months ago. Unlike the other sites Quantcast provides much more detailed information about visitors to particular websites, based on the number of monthly US unique visitors. They give GameMaker Blog, at the time of writing, a rank of 622,506.

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China’s response to the earthquake in the Sichuan province over the past few days has shown that the country has changed. Previously the Chinese government has heavily censored disaster reports, however Chinese state media does appear to be showing a true picture of the problems, and the pictures have been seen around the world. The Chinese have been immediate in their response, dispatching the army to lead rescue efforts a huge contrast from the recent Burma Cyclone.

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Following a link from Mr Needlestone’s blog I came across the blog of Drew Buddie, head of ICT at the Royal Masonic school. The latest post contained some facts about children’s usage of technology in the UK that are certainly believable but I actually found quite scary.

• 93% of all children have their own PC

I do, but it is about 8 years old and doesn’t have Internet access.

• 8 is the average age for a child to have their first mobile phone

Not sure why, but I find this a bit sad. I am now 18 and have never had a mobile phone. Go me!

• 1.4 million children own their own webspace

Not surprising at all. Especially with the rise of social networking sites in recent years.

• 2.7 billion searches are carried out on Google every month - so are children now asking Google instead of their parents?

Yes, for sure. There are lots of things I either Google purely out of curiosity, I tend to use Google as my first port of call when looking for any kind of information. But much of the material we would have simply not found in the past or would have had to ask our parents for even though they are unlikely to be specialists on solutions to take multiple deprivation in MEDCs…

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ITV’s headcases really is quite funny - a good alternative whilst Dead Ringer’s isn’t on.

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Excitement yesterday afternoon as four police cars surrounded the front of our house!

Yes the pictures are poor quality as they are photos taken with a bad digital camera from the frames of a video.

Fortunately they hadn’t come for me… not this time anyway.

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The “People You May Know” feature in facebook appears great at first glance - it enables people to easily see potential friends based on the friendships of their existing friends. However it also leads to some pretty strange results - mostly being people at school who I have spoken to for years, or perhaps even ever, adding me to their friends list because it just so happens that I am ‘friends’ with 5 or so of their ‘friends’.

Obviously if you then add people you found via “People You May Know”, or if people add you via “People You May Know” the results you then see are even less relevant as facebook lists friends of people that you don’t know very well.

I suppose there is always the decline button when someone adds you as a friend, but I am yet to use it.

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It appears that Jennifer Maguire, the second candidate to be fired on last night’s The Apprentice, has developed Luke McDonald’s ability to fit her fist in her mouth.

Well nearly. No one can master fist-in-mouth as much as Luke.

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Walking home from school this lunch time along the Grand Union canal with Jon I was disappointed to find that I wasn’t able to provide proof of the existence of a mini-railway which used to run along the bank of the canal parallel to Beggars Bush Lane. I remember seeing the mini railway, similar to the one in Cassiobury Park, when I was younger and went on bike rides with my dad.

All that I saw of it today was would could have been an engine shed and a sign saying “No Locomotives past this point”. Great. Now Jon probably thinks I made it up….

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• Super Aguri went bust - is this the last we will see of Anthony Davidson
• Watford Observer reports on pupils grilling politicians
  “I think these pupils were right to grill these politicians - they should all be grilled and preferably served up with barbecue sauce.”
• I was contacted by a game cheats website ( http://cheatbuzz.com/blog/ ) who wanted to do a link exchange with GameMaker Blog, although I think I will decline since their traffic rank is far worse than mine.
  

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