Dosboy's Bits and Bytes

As I'm sure most bloggers do, I frequently check to see who has been visiting my blog and where they come from (ok, so really I just check where they come from cuz it's not like they sign in or anything).  At any rate, today I have a bunch of entries from Crystal Lake, Illinois.  CRYSTAL LAKE!!!  Now, I'm not saying I'm scared or anything, but if Jason Voorhees can take Manhattan, then end up on board a spaceship in the future, then return to the present and cut off Freddy's head, he can probably find his way to Thailand.  I'm just surprised he managed to figure out how to use the internet.  He never seemed all that bright.

I also get some visitor from mail.sols.org in Toronto.  Now, www.sols.org appears to be the Southern Ontario Library Service, and mail.sols.org is obviously their internet gateway.  So either there's someone that works there who is a frequent visitor or someone who uses their internet that is a frequent visitor.  Problem is that none of my friends are literate.  Ok, that's not true, but I don't know anyone that frequents and/or works at a library.  So, sols.org visitor, if you're reading this could you identify yourself via a comment or the Contact page?  I'd greatly appreciate it as my curiosity has been piqued for some time now and I like to know who's stalking me.

I own this domain. I bought it soon after the whole .mobi TLD bullshit occurred, which is really just an ICANN money grab, but whatever. It was the only way I could get a gutenberg domain. But I never did anything with it. And now it's coming up for renewal. Is it worth it to renew? The .mobi domains are pretty pricey - about $35/year. If only my last name was not shared with that printing press dude. And, for that matter, Project Gutenberg.

Anyway, should I renew and hold onto this crappy domain or just let it go?

Perusing Google Analytics and felt like sharing some interesting stats. Note that these are for the last 6 months of blog time.

Outlook Signature Location in Vista has 1017 unique views, only slightly less than the root site with 1319. This indicates to me that (a) Microsoft should have documented this better and (b) too many people are using Vista, likely against their will. Which leads to the next interesting stat...

I Fucking Hate Vista is my 12th most popular page with 143 unique views. What's interesting about this one though is some of the search terms people have used to find it. There's the obvious ones, such as "i hate vista" and "i fucking hate vista" (second and first most popular search terms respectively), but then there's the creative ones, such as "fuck vista in the ass" and "god i hate vista" as well as various combinations of the above with anywhere from 4 to 26 exclamation marks. This really leads me to question how much people hate other OSes, and whether or not a blog post entitled "I Fucking Hate OSX" or "I Fucking Hate XP" or "I Fucking Hate Linux" would garner as many hits. Let's test...

"fucking hate vista" (in quotes) returns 650 results
"fucking hate osx" returns 0 results (though after this post gets indexed it's gonna return 1!)
"fucking hate xp" returns 24 results
"fucking hate linux" returns 59 results

Microsoft, I hope you're (though am sure you're not) reading this. Not only do people actually despise your latest OS, but they take the time to write about their hatred and post it on the intarweb. Maybe, just maybe, you should take this as a sign.

Hmm... didn't intend this to turn into another Vista bashing post, but what the hell... it is what it is.

Due to some SEO that has been requested of me I did a little analytics poking into the Search Engine Wars. I've really never given any thought to MSN or Yahoo as far as my blog is concerned, believing that they are dinosaurs in the 21st century world of the Goog. But in my exploring I realized that MSN doesn't even know I exist, and Yahoo doesn't seem to care that I exist. For example, searching for dosboy.ca on MSN brings up some pages that reference this blog, but it has never actually indexed the blog itself. Searching for dosboy.ca on Yahoo brings up the blog and it has been indexed, however searching for outlook signature vista or outlook signature location vista never returns any reference to my blog, whereas on Google either of those search criterias puts me as this post as the first hit.

Upon checking Google Analytics in the last month I've had 769 hits from Google, with the next highest being 15 hits from Yahoo. Obviously Yahoo thinks less of me than Google does, but this is a massive discrepancy. And it begs the question which is the title of this post... who is not using Google? And why not? According to this comScore press release, Google holds 61.5% of the search market with Yahoo at 20.9% and Microsoft at 9.2%. I'm actually surprised that Google isn't higher. At any rate, when it comes to SEO, is it really worthwhile to target anyone other than Google? Google has the market cornered on relevance, and though there's about 40% of the population not using Google, is it really worth trying to drive them to your site to buy your product? After all, if they're not using Google do you really want them as customers?