Oh my God! I’m having real flashbacks to Christmas 1982 (box number 6950, Mobile Rocket Transport) and 1983 (box number 6384, Police Station), thanks to the wonderful Brickfactory (spotted on Wing’s blog). I think my favourite Mobile Rocket Transport is long gone (although i see eBay have a few!), but I have the Police Station in the home attic somewhere…
I’ll take this occasion to say Happy Christmas to all my readers, and I wish you and yours all the best for the New Year.
I’ve just spent the past day retrieving incorrectly identified as spam e-mail messages (discovered over a hundred that shouldn’t have been in the junk folder)… Perhaps it was a mistake to choose the aggressive option in SpamPal. I’ve possibly overtrained Thunderbird as well, apparently that can be a problem. I’m now replying to ‘lost’ messages from February.
As well as spam, I think I’m going to start filtering messages on mailing lists that match any of the following criteria:
As you may or may not know, boards.ie was founded in 2000 as a company, having existed in a previous life as the gaming forums at quake.ie / ign.ie. We’ve come a long way since then (see my state of the nation post for past and present statistics), and we’re still growing steadily. We launched adverts.ie in April of this year, and we plan to launch our next subsite, social.ie, during Q1 of 2007.
As we approach the Christmas holidays, I’d like to say thanks to all our members, moderators and subscribers for their support over the year, and we wish you all the best over the holiday season!
No, I’m not planning to declare us an independent county, but rather I wanted to show some graphs of our growth since the inception of our first forum nearly nine years ago (and boards.ie Ltd. in 2000).
First off, some stats from Alexa, showing our growth in terms of our daily traffic rank (currently, we are ranked around number 8,500 out of the top 100,000 sites in the world, at number 19 out of all worldwide sites accessed in Ireland, and at number 3 in terms of Irish sites in Ireland), daily reach (95 per million users), and page views per user (9.6 on average).
Secondly, from Google Analytics, here are some statistics on page views, total visits, visits by source / returning or new / geographical location. We’re getting an average of 250k page views per day, 7.5M page views per month, and an average of 30k visits per day, with 925k visits per month. 67% are returning visitors, and therefore 33% of visitors are new. We also seem to have at least 57% of visits from Dublin, but the geographic data from ISPs may not be entirely accurate in Ireland. We can see the expected seasonal drops at the end of each year (we belive that this year’s drop is in part due to some of our hardware limitations).
Finally, some statistics I’ve gathered from our own forum database. As of two days ago, we had 87,139 user accounts, 575 forums, 476,626 threads and 5,597,227 posts. adverts.ie has 12,507 classified items with 2.5M views as well. More interestingly, here’s the overall growth in terms of users, forums, threads and posts. The users, threads and posts show a nice natural exponential growth; what’s funny is that we’ve unknowingly been creating forums at a near-linear rate since 2001.
DERI, NUI Galway will host the first Irish Drupal Meetup on the 13th January, 2007. The event will run from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM.
This should be an interesting meeting, aiming to allow interested parties to exchange ideas and experiences, and build up a local network of support. Topics will include multi-site management via Drupal 5, theme customisation, views, best practices, Semantic Web add-ons, image galleries, statistics monitoring, and whatever you want.
You can signup to the event here:
The new beta version of Blogger has at last introduced tagging, or labels as they choose to call it (wouldn’t want to confuse people with multiple terms, would we!), along with label-specific feeds. Apart from some advanced templating and widget functionality, they don’t seem to have added too much else, but with all those millions and millions of blogs it’s probably a good idea not to go mad.
MatthiasSamwald/DOLCE bio-zen patient-record proposal - ESW Wiki
Matthias Samwald posted a message on the sioc-dev mailing list yesterday about the bio-zen ontology framework. There is also a proposed bio-zen DOLCE use case for the W3C Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group. bio-zen includes SIOC as one of its base ontologies since it “is an excellent tool to describe scientific discourse in a practical, web-centric manner”. Two interesting properties they use (that are along the lines of argumentative discussion and IBIS) are “supported-by” and “in-conflict-with”, allowing bio-zen “to represent the basics of scientific discourse (e.g. one can make the statement that a certain posting / document / dataset is supported or in conflict with some other posting / document / dataset)”. The bio-zen “plus” ontology is here.
I’ve been playing around with the highest cooccurring tags (tags that people have used together on their blog posts the most) on Planet Journals, here are the top 20:
And now, here are a few visualisations… For tags that occur together at least 50 times, this is the network (77 tags cooccurring in 142 combinations):
Here is the same network but with the isolated subgraphs shown more clearly via three three-dimensional views:
Here are the tags that occur together at least ten times (621 tags cooccurring in 2082 combinations):
Finally, here’s a spinning view of the cooccurring tags (it doesn’t really mean anything but looks nice!):
(Edit: The total graph of cooccurring tags is too big to show meaningfully. There are 16221 tags cooccurring in 128137 combinations.)
It’s been seven months since my last tag cloud analysis from Planet Journals Ireland, and here are the top 20 Irish blog tags currently being used (with the number of occurences in brackets):
A big image of an Irish blogs tag cloud (for tags with more than five occurences) can be seen by clicking here.
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