Friday, December 30, 2005
So the cartoon went up late this week... usually we like to get the cartoon published first thing on Friday - often, because I stay up late anyway, I publish it Thursday night after midnight.
Anyway, it's Christmas, things are hectic, my girlfriend is over from Spain and I have a chest infection. Between all these things, I only just managed to get the cartoon done this minute.
Pilar, my girlfriend, didn't get it. Then I showed her all the previous Brian and Martin cartoons:
- Tall Tales
- Coat Hanger
- Music Depreciation
Then I showed her
this weeks cartoon again and she laughed. My scientific experiment proves that the Brian and Martin cartoons work much better after some exposure to the characters. If you are lucky enough to know the real Brian and Martin (yes they do exist) then they work extra well.
So, hopefully you will like this weeks cartoon... and if you're not sure about it, be sure and check out the other Brian and Martin cartoons, and if your STILL not sure about it... well, Happy New Year anyway :)
Saturday, December 24, 2005
So we got 'tagged' with a 'meme'. You wha? Indeed.
A
meme: A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.
GingerPixel tagged us, I guess pretty much like in chasing when you go 'tag - your it'. GingerPixel says either me or Bif can do it, and seeing as Bif is all '
bah-humbug' right now, I guess I'll do it.
- normally I hate these kinds of things, but hey, it's Christmas and it's only 4am so what else would I do ;)
So what do I have to do...?
The first player of this game starts with the topic "five weird habits of yourself," and people who get tagged need to write an entry about their five weird habits as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose the next five people to be tagged and link to their web journals. Don’t forget to leave a comment in their blog or journal that says "You are tagged" (assuming they take comments) and tell them to read yours.
Ok, five weird habits, this should be easy, but it's four in the morning and
I just won a poker game, so not sure where my brain is.
The reason is should be easy can be illustrated by the fact that one friend of mine cals me 'OCD boy' - and I think he wouldn't be the only one except my other friends are more polite.
So...
- When I do the lotto I do quickpick and DO NOT look at the numbers. I have this thing that random numbers I am unaware of have more chance of winning than five numbers I have in my head before the draw.
- When eating, in between bites, I often twirl the empty fork around in my hand (in a way somewhat similar to the way you twirl spaghetti onto your fork say)
- Apprently, while waiting for a meal, if you move my cutlery slightly when I'm not looking, without even noticing I will straighten the cutlery to be at right angles with the table (this one went a long way to earning me the 'OCD boy' title...).
- If my ear is itchy I put one finger in my ear and shake my arm around making me look like a dog scratching his ear. (I think I do this less and less these days, but I could be wrong.)
- I very often nervously jiggle one leg when sitting down. This is one I've been trying to stamp out for a long time, and I'm getting there, but you'll still see me doing it.
I have a funny feeling that these are FAR from the weirdest habits I have. But sometimes you need someone else to tell you what those are. Maybe that could be another meme...?
So, who to tag... let's see:
- Tom R, for sure
- Donncha O Caoimh - coz I went to school with him and have been meaning to drop him a line on the ol' blogoplanet
- Robert Scoble - coz I wonder does he bother with these things!
- Damien Mulley - coz I was reading his blog just now and he mentioned it
- Been wracking my brains, and you know what? To hell with it. Bif.
Heh heh heh. Thanks GingerPixel, that was fun. Happy Christmas everyone!!!!
Friday, December 23, 2005
Here is a picture my niece Isabel just drew now in the kitchen. Isabel is ten and lives in England, but she's staying with us for Christmas. Isabel also came to Spain with me last weekend. This is a picture of an Angel flying over a city that she drew for my mother. I love the little sheep in the field too.
Isabel didn't have any colours so she said it would have to be in black and white, but to be honest I love the simplicity of black and white. Plus I really admire the way she didn't feel the need to clutter up the whole page. I know it took me a lot longer to realise that less is more!
Hope you like it! Happy Christmas!
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Well, it's the day before Christmas Eve and I love Christmas so I'm pretty excited.
I'm happy with this weeks cartoon, I think it's got a lot of character. This brings the number of Christmas cartoons we have to a grand total of four. Two from last year and two this year.
1.
Santa Clause cartoon - very popular.2.
Mary and the wise men's gifts cartoon - published in
Zoinks magazine3. The recent
First Noel cartoon - subject of some controversy (see comments, it all worked out fine :)
4. Todays
Red Red Wine cartoon featuring Rudolph - I like it, I hope you do too!
So there you go, check them all out - especially if your feeling Christmassy today and are stuck in work!
I hope you have a great Christmas and an excellent New Year.
Oh, and if you want to buy me a Christmas present
this will do
fine. If you need convincing as to why I would want one, perhaps you should
watch this quicktime movie. Of course that means I also need
one of these.
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
I love this one. Again, biro and foolscap. While I really like the fact that
Rhino Boy is balancing on a tea-cup in the first one, this one more prominently features the Runty Bird, which I really like. The Runty Bird would appear to be Rhino Boys ally in the first sketch but is now being chased for it's teeth. That's how things go.
There were genuinely some bizarre psycho-babble reasonings behind the characters and their actions, but I don't properly remember, or particularly care to. Plus Bif would pour scorn on them.
he's very negative lately.
Here is the first original Rhino Boy sketch I did. Done with a nice biro on foolscap paper. It appears to be one of my alter egos having killed the other one. Which might lead you to wonder if it was just alcohol I was consuming in college. No comment.
As promised, today I am introducing you to Rhino-Boy. I've touched on the origins of Rhino Boy already, when I did a
pretty awful sketch for Illustration Friday... actually I just went and had a look and it's not as bad as I remember.
Anyway, point is I had this dream about being a Rhino/Person hybrid with this werid affliction that I would begin to float uncontrollably when stressed or freaked out.
So Rhino Boy was born. The Rhino Boy character was never as fleshed out as Stick-Man, on the left you see a digital manipulation of a photo of me. Note the mohawk...
The original sketches I did of Rhino Boy were slightly different in that he wore a Rhino Mask rather than actualy being a Rhino. Later I did more sketches where he was a hybrid again. I like both ideas. I'll show you the original sketches later.
It's very liberating to get a mohawk by the way. And looking at it again now I'm almost tempted. One downside is that complete strangers want to touch your head . Although, then again, that's probably after they have a few drinks and I don't frequent pubs much anymore.
Anyone else with a shaved head/mohawk find people touch your head a lot?
Click on the image for a larger version by the way.
A Compilation Of Funny Cats
I really don't know why I followed the link to this, but I'm glad I did. Maybe it's the lateness of the hour but I cried laughing.
I am posting it here, partly because it's funny, but mostly so I remember to tell my sister Jane about it... she'll love it. She's cat crazy. So is Bif's mum actually, so maybe she'll like it too.
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Wow.
Last years Christmas Cartoon is pretty popular right now. This month so far it's been viewed 2948 times. Well, it is a good one.
It made my top ten back in August, and it made Eoin's top ten too (see the comments on that page!)
You could use the 'Email to a friend' feature to send it as an ecard to someone -
Click here to go straight to the form to send to someone. An email will be sent to your friend with your message and a link to the post with the cartoon in it.
It would be nice if it sent the cartoon in the email, but I know there are certain issues around html mail etc, so Blogger were probably playing it safe.
Of course I posted the pictures in the wrong order. They were meant to be a sequence of getting up on a hung over morning, so I posted the last one first by accident, they should be in this order:
One,
two,
three.
Stupid of me really. Anyway, as well as Stick-Man I invented another alter ego during my college years called Rhino-Boy. More on him soon.
Ah yes. I definitely remember days like this. I'm sure over Christmas many of you will suffer many of them. Well I did my time, and here's the proof, but much to Bif's constant disappointment I won't be having any morning afer's this Christmas.
Recent conversation with Bif, at a party:
Bif: "You should start drinking again."
Me: "Eh? Why?"
Bif: "Coz giving up hasn't done anything for you."
Yes and of course Bif was the life and soul of that little soirée...
Nah... I'll stick with my Barry's Tea thank you. :)
So in case you're not getting the picture, I drank a lot when I was in college. Who didn't right? Anyway, before I had the above haircut I still drank quite a bit. It was on a morning that I awoke as depicted above (albeit with more hair) when I stumbled into my next door neighbour and friend (and
collaborator) Emmet who was equally hung over.
Emmet had an excellent idea. "Let's shave your head" he said. It really was an excellent idea so I agreed. We hacked off the hair on one side of my head with an almost blunt scissors when Emmet had the even beter idea of not shaving my head completely, but giving me a Mohawk.
So he hacked off the hair on the other side of my head, leaving a wobbly mohawk on the top of my head. Then we got out the shaving foam and razor and Stick-Man was truly born.
These sketches are fairly accurate depictions of my college years.
These Stick-Man animations are based on little comic strips I did at the time which were considerably more humourous then these sketches, which are pretty depressing! I might scan some of those strips too when I have the time.
Now that you know
where Stick-Mans haircut came from, this is the first of three drawings of Stick-Man I am going to share with you. I did them in college, so I suppose 7/8 years ago or something. Or is it more. I dunnoe.
Anyway, when you have seen all three you may be inclined to agree with
Bif's assesment that my talent withered when I sobered up. Or at least that there is a link between the difference in styles of then and now and my drinking habits!
This is a picture of me taken last weekend. Lots of hair. So why do I often depict myself as
Stick-Man with a mohawk?
Well, I dreamed up my Stick-Man alter ego back when I was in college. see below for a pic of me from the time. The nostalgia trip continues... more Stick-Man images coming soon. Stick-Man features in an animation myself and Bif will be launching in the New Year so this is a little history lesson in anticipation of that! :D
The girl in the picture's name was Audrey, she did make up on
a short film I acted in at the time.
Peter Maybury is a really good designer who I was lucky enough to have as a lecturer or whatever in college.
I found my assignment that I handed in for a brief he set about the stages involved in doing a design project or answering a brief.
As you can see I took it very seriously. I'm sure he gave me an A.
I'm still supposed to be tidying up and I'm still just moving old crap around and reminiscing.
I found a load of art I did in college. It seems, contrary to what I had remembered, that some of it is quite good.
Some of it I've been looking at and thinking 'I don't do anything that good anymore'. I think part of it is the medium. Getting my hands dirty with paint occasionally instead of sitting at the soul sucking computer all the time might help.
Here's one I really like, click to enlarge:
In fairness,
with good cause.
This
gapingvoid cartoon sums up my concerns, but it could be edited to read "Partied every night till his brain was fried never wrote that
childrens book that he promised frank he'd write... then just died..."
The second
"Best of Blogs Awards" are now taking nominations. I'm never quite sure where our blogs would fit in when it comes to these kinds of categories....
I guess the cartoons would go in
Most Humorous Blog or maybe
Best Poetry, Photo, or Art Blog would be more appropriate?
My blog *might* also fit in
Best Poetry, Photo, or Art Blog and Bif's blog... I dunnoe what about
Snarkiest Blog?
You can't nominate your own blog, so I nominated
podleaders.com/ for Best Podcast Blog and
Twenty Major for Snarkiest Blog.
Main problem with the awards is that the prizes aren't very interesting. Still be nice to win though... or at least be nominated... (hint, hint) :D
Wouldn't you LOVE a HUGE BifSniff poster on your wall? Well, you can use
Rasterbator to create your own!
Rasterbator takes images and enables you to print them out HUGE by allowing you to print them out over loads of sheets you can stick back together like a jigsaw.
I tried it out with the
'No More Heroes, Please' cartoon and Rasterbator does all the work for you and you download a pdf file to print out and assemble your poster. I didn't print out the poster (yet) because ink is so expensive and I'm broke and I made it 49 A4 sheets big in colour. :D
Looking through the
IrishBlogs.info aggregator I came across the blog of what appears to be
an avid 2000ad fan. He got a
Christmas card from Brendan McCarthy who is (was?) an artist for
2000ad.
As I've mentioned before
I used to read 2000ad. I really loved that comic. Bought it every week with my pocket money, running to the shops barefoot blah blah blah. Seriously though, there were some great stories and artwork in 2000ad - maybe there still is, it's still going as far as I know.
Anyway it was a funny coincidence that I stumbled across this blog today because only hours before I was looking over my 2000ad comic collection from about 10(ish) years ago and wondering if I should sell them. More on that soon, I must look through them, count them, get the prog numbers, find out how much I could get for them and decide if I can bear parting with them.
I also came across a sketch by
Brendan McCarthy done at a signing, a great one by
Glen Fabry, a couple of nice ones by Colin McNeill, a really lovely one by
Rian Hughes and some others too.
Yes, I've been having a trip down memory lane, otherwise known as the annual Christmas tidy up the house because the family are coming home for Christmas.
Before any family members get too excited I should remind you that the "annual Christmas tidy up the house because the family are coming home for Christmas" session usually turns into the "look at some old stuff and get nostialgiac before giving up on tidying and scanning sketches you found instead" session:
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
The
IrishBlogs logo we put together is now in use! Check it out at
Irishblogs.info. It looks well I think. And check out that cute favicon :)
Oh and also, if you haven't already sign up with IrishBlogs, in particular the
aggregator. Why? Because it's a very handy way to keep an eye on the Irish blog world and the more blogs it aggregates the more handy it is!
I don't have time much anymore to regularly scour for new blogs, but using IrishBlogs.info I can get an overview, and through this and other aggregators I discover blogs that go in my feed reader... and I imagine I'm not the only one. So it's worth being in there.
Add your blog using their simple form - in the name field put the name of your Blog as you want it to appear on the IrishBlogs.info site.
Monday, December 12, 2005
Lovely animated short by Antoine Antin called 'le Papillon'.
Just stumbled across it today and thought I would share it with you. Beautiful Japanese style, simple little story, very pleasurable to watch!
Requires Quicktime - about 28megs in size.
Robert left a comment to say he liked
the idea, but didn't like the title given him on the card. However, it turned out he didn't like the title because he read it as "Influential Blogger" and he thought it wasn't irreverant enough.
The title actually reads "Influential BoggLer", which is where the irreverance comes into play... thing is though several people have read the card that way.
In a way I like that - it's quite subtle and not everyone gets it immediately. My theory at the moment is that those who play Boggle see it faster.
It might also be to do with that email that was floating around a while back:
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Amzanig.
Anyway, Bif sent me another idea, and it is irreverant to say the LEAST... I'm off to Spain for a few days this week, so I probably won't get it done before I go, but I'm very curious to see what Robert's reaction to it might be!
Friday, December 09, 2005
Who is Iain Laurie? Well you might ask, I certainly had no idea until I popped over to the
Clamnuts Comics blog where Bob Byrne interviews him, so thanks (I think) to Bob Byrne for introducing me to this sicko.
I just showed
this weeks cartoon to my sister and she said "That's just weird..."
Yes it is. We have actually put off doing this cartoon for quite some time now, and have toned it down considerably since it's first incarnation!
I talked Bif into doing it finally, and I was convinced it was a perfectly acceptable cartoon. But to be honest, when I finished drawing it I had a fresh look at it and I felt oddly disturbed.
It was almost as if there was something lurking just under the surface of the cartoon that I wasn't aware of...
Maybe it's just my knowledge of the cartoons shady background, all the dodgy iterations we had to discard, but it feels like something is off-kilter...
If you want to know how this cartoon idea first came to be, read the
comments on the Guns and Roses cartoon...
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
BifSniff is listed on and aggregated by
IrishBlogs.info, which is one of
Michele's pet projects. I got an email from Michele where he pointed to an
ongoing discussion about the current logo for IrishBlogs.info.
In the discussion he invites anyone to have a go at the logo. So I thought I would.
If it happens to be liked, I'd be happy to donate it to the project, or maybe it will just give someone an idea to bounce off.
More or less in line with
what myself and Bif believe,
Hugh McLeod says today:
I like Adriana's idea that all long-term personal value comes from one's network. So the priority should be building that; and the bill-paying mechanisms will follow in time. If I didn't believe that, I'd go back to tending bar.
Of course, we need to start working on our 'bill-paying mechanisms' as soon as possible, but it's nice to see that our general view is being backed up by other respected individuals like Hugh McLeod and Seth Godin.
Hopefully it means we're not completely nuts. Either that or we'll have good company in the loony bin.
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
If you've been reading this blog, you'll know that myself and Bif are trying to come up with ideas that
Robert Scoble might consider using for his next business card. If we come up with something good enough
he just might use it!
You know the
start of the story behind this one... I went for coffee with some friends of mine, and when I said I was going to a blogging dinner my friend Erinbell said "Oh wow, I love boggle."
I like this idea because besides being funny it also serves to remind that there are still SO many people out there that have no clue what we are talking about when we say 'blog' or 'RSS' or
even 'mp3' (as discovered by Seth Godin).
We blogging types can slip into jargon so easily, forgetting not everybody is sitting at their computer 23 hours a day :P
Anyway, I hope you like it.
If you have no clue what I'm on about you might like to check out some of these links:
And never fear Robert, if you don't like this one, I'm sure we'll have some more ideas shortly!
Ah yes, sometimes conversations with Bif can be highly entertaining. Especially for those who happen to be listening in...
To give you some background,
myself and Bif are supposed to be coming up with ideas for what we would do for Robert Scoble's business card. I'm quite excited about it. Bif is... well, Bif is Bif.
So I met Bif at a party thet
Brian and Martin threw, and the following exchange occurred. Don't listen to Bif when he tries to tell you it's out of context...
Bif made his interjection right before the punchline, so you don't get to hear my killer idea for now. But rest assured there will be more on this soon!
ps the first Pleasant Exchange was published on my other blog...
Monday, December 05, 2005
While checking my RSS 'vanity feeds', I came across another great compliment to BifSniff.com -
somebody who really liked our shirts, and in particular the Family Butcherer design.
While this was exciting enough in itself, I wondered who the blog owner, Lukasz Gadowski, was and I began reading some of the posts, only to discover this excerpt:
First, since I'm founder and CEO of spreadshirt, a German based E-commerce start up with operations in Europe and the US, some chunk of this blog will be about my entrepreneurial adventures specific to spreadshirt as well as entrepreneruship in general.
So, two things... 1) I got a greater kick out of compliment, after all this guy must see a LOT of shirts(!) and 2) the blog promises to be very interesting... if he can overcome the challenges before him!
There was no entry in my blog for some time.
Reason is, that being a CEO of a fast growing interent start up takes a lot of time. Often I'm simply to busy or exhausted for writing.
also, it's sometimes hard to write what you would like to, since you do not like the competition to know what is going on in your mind.
If anyone can help him out with advice or tips, he has asked for feedback,
leave a comment here for him. I pointed him in the direction of
Naked Conversations for starters.
The
US spreadshirt CEO has also just started a blog, and they may merge the two blogs together at a later date... see the
press release about US CEO, Mark E Seremet, here.
It will be really interesting to see how these blogs progress. I was pleased to be able to leave a comment on Gadowski's blog, praising the quality of customer service at Spreadshirt. Any of my recent queries to them have been met with every effort to resolve any issues I have - even those caused by my own stupidity!
I'd be really interested in following the companies progress through these blogs - perhaps they will provide insights into how they manage such customer support quality where so many fail!
Saturday, December 03, 2005
I'm getting great blogging mileage out of the
Cork Geek dinner...
When I arrived at the Dinner I introduced myself to a few people and explained what I do here on BifSniff.com.
People seemed pretty interested and we were chatting about it for a few minutes, I explained the process and how it's all blog based and so on and so forth until I finished up with "and, you know, we'll figure out how to make money at some later date..."
Clare admitted she had been wondering about that, and commented that it was still very much a hobby. Which it is.
I went on to explain that we do it because it's fun, and we really enjoy it.
Yes, we hope someday to make money from BifSniff, and our thinking is that if enough people like what we do at BifSniff we'll be able to
ask you how we can make money.
After all, if you like what we do here then you're the perfect person to run ideas past... maybe we could ask you what you think of
us doing a children's book (scared probably!!!), or some other mad idea we come up with.
For now, the amazingly positive feedback we receive from visitors to the site keeps us going. If we get similar feedback on future ideas we'll be laughing!
And it looks like we're not the only ones, according to Seth Godin.There's an awful lot of talk about monetising blogs, but it's not
all about the money...
...However the film rights for the Brian and Martin movie are available... :D
Friday, December 02, 2005
As Bif has
mentioned,
Robert Scoble said some kind words about us today and sent quite a few folks over to check us out... including Hugh McLeod who left a comment on
my post about Robert Scoble's business card.
Hugh leaving the comment made me realise I should probably have mentioned my admiration for Robert's current card which Hugh designed. But I was too caught up in my own excitement.
Which led me to wonder, if I talk about how great I think it is now, will it just seem insincere and, well, ass kissy.
Would I be thinking that much about it if he wasn't considered an influential blogger? Am I worried he'll think I am looking for a link from him if I say nice things about his work?
Am I trying to get a link from him by saying nice things about his work?
All of which quite nicely leads me around to
Hugh McLeods latest cartoon!
OH MY GOD! Exciting times at the offices of BifSniff.com!!!! (ok, we don't have offices but it sounded good...)
A HUGE HUGE thank you to
John Breslin and
Boards.ie for putting us on their homepage!
We are pretty much gobsmacked right now,
Boards.ie is such a giant among Irish sites, that for them to have done this is a huge validation for us...
I would continue posting about this but writing 18 pages of gushing excited garbled nonsense just isn't going to help anyone!!!
p.s. It feels kinda like winning an Oscar... :D
I'm really happy with
this weeks cartoon. When Bif sent me the idea I laughed out loud, and now that I have finished illustrating it, I keep looking at it and sniggering to myself. Now, it could be sleep deprivation, coz I seriously need sleep, but I think this one is really funny.
If you've been visiting us for a while, then you might recognise some of the characters in this weeks cartoon.
FantasticMan and Evilor the Destructive have been featured before.
I for one am really happy to see them back, I think they have great potential for character development...
Hey, maybe we'll make millions from the film rights... :P
Thursday, December 01, 2005
You might have gathered from recent posts that I attended
the geek dinner in Cork last night.
Robert Scoble handed me
his business card and, as I admired it, we were chatting about
Hugh McLeod (who designed it) and his work.
We had already been discussing Bifsniff cartoons and I had shown Robert some of our work, and he said "You'll have to do my next business card..."
I, of course, immediately said I would LOVE to...
It was possibly a throwaway remark - but I'm going to hold him to it goddammit!! :P
Feel free to donate ideas for this challenging project!!!
I appreciate the compliment inherent in the remark if nothing else, thanks Robert.
Joey Manley of ModernTales.com left
a comment on Bif's blog the other day, in which he said "99% of everything is crap".
I found it to be a funny observation, but let's face it, it's mostly true!
I was again reminded of it at the
Geek Dinner last night in conversation with
Robert Scoble. Robert was answering some questions I had for him about his
book blogging experience.
Robert co-authored a book on Blogging with
Shel Israel which they wrote online. Each chapter was put online as it was written and they gathered interesting feedback and anecdotes which influenced the writing of the book as they went.
Given the subject matter of the book, I asked if because the tech community have embraced blogs did that make it easier for him to garner an interested audience around the Naked Conversations blog, and whether it would be more difficult for other industries to achieve something similar.
Robert said something like:
"
It's easy to generate an audience if you have something good. It's hard to do something good."
My curiousity about blogging a book all stemmed from the fact that myself and Bif have been chatting about doing a kids book in 2006.
It will have to be excellent.
Well, I told you it was on the way, and now it has arrived. We have offically done our first ever guest strip.
We can now be seen on the
CowPunch site with a BifSniff cartoon we did especially for Porter in honour of his moving.
As I mentioned in the previous post, the cartoon features Brian and Martin... it's worth looking at
the other Brian and Martin cartoons before reading the CowPunch one. It gives a better sense of the characters and, I think, makes it more funny...
Hope you like it! Many, many thanks to Porter for featuring us on his wonderful CowPunch site.
Had an interesting chat about this at the
Geek dinner tonight...
I noticed recently that a huge portion of our visitors were in the 0-30 seconds 'visit length' section of our stats. Almost 80% of people seem to find us and they seem to leave as soon as they arrive!
This got me thinking, and was one of the reasons I redesigned the homepage, to try to encourage people to do more on the site. We have long term plans to develop more interactive features and so on for BifSniff, but finding the time is difficult.
I then took some consolation in the
stats for Boing Boing which shows a somewhat similar trend.
However, it must be possible to improve on this. At the
Geek Dinner this evening I asked
Robert Scoble whether he found being a big name in blogging, and having a very focussed blog resulted in longer visits. He pointed out that he doesn't currently have access to those kinds of stats being on
wordpress.com.
Oh, he's missing the joys of being a stats junkie... :P
So I asked
Tom R what he finds as he has a well respected and highly focussed blog also. He confirmed that 0-30sec visits are a high proportion on his blog also.
Then something Tom said about feeds clicked with me, and I wondered what impact RSS subscriptions have on stats with regard to visit length.
The 'top pages' section of our stats has the atom feeds very near the top of the list, and
Mark who was sitting next to me felt that this would indeed impact on visit lengths.
People subscribed to RSS feeds will have their feed readers poll the feed - which only takes a moment, and then they have the content and can read it at their leisure. They no longer need to spend 10/15 minutes on your site reading your post.
A quick grab of your feed and they're gone again.
So I feel a little bit better now about our huge portion of short visit lengths. Perhaps subscribers to our feeds are inflating the figure somewhat.
Anyone care to comment/confirm/disagree?
I mentioned I would be attending the Geek Dinner with Robert Scoble, and I'm just back from that now.
Congratulations to
Tom R for organising a great night, it was great to put faces to blogs and have some geeky chats as well as some almost normal chats.
I spent most of the night annoying
Maryam Ghaemmaghami Scoble, which was good fun. I think the problem started when we disagreed about the film Taxi Driver and things just went from bad to worse from there :P
Clare Dillon was a witness to the terrible attacks I suffered from Maryam - Clare I might have to call on you to testify in court!
Robert Scoble shared some interesting insights into his
recent book writing experience, and I had an interesting conversation with Robert, Tom and
Mark about visit lengths and RSS feeds - but I'll post a quick note on that separately.
I didn't get a chance to meet everybody I wanted to, only said hello/goodbye to
John Breslin and
Damien Mulley for example, didn't get to meet
Ed Byrne or
Piaras Kelly at all - in fact looking at the
list of names on the Wiki now I'm realising I really should have wandered round the tables more!!!
At the end of the evening I met
Sven Latham of
Blogwise, who came over especially for the blogging dinner I think, and hopefully I'll meet up with him for coffee before he heads back to the UK.
I won't go through the rest of the list, it would take too long - suffice to say it was great to meet everybody!
A very enjoyable night, I hope we get/make the opportunity to do it again soon. I have a nice little pile of business cards to go through now, visit blogs and get in touch with people, like
Uldis Bojars who is working on semantic web stuff with John Breslin.
