Tuesday, January 22, 2008

On Searching in Facebook




I'm not certain that Facebook is coping.

How often have you seen this image?

Friday, January 18, 2008

On Facebook Privacy (again)

Now it appears that the Information Commisioners Office (who?) are interested in Facebook's data protection policies.

Someone has complained that they couldn't delete their profile after terminating their account.
We knew that here On a Hill didn't we?

In the world of Facebook the word terminate does not exist, the word according to Facebook is "deactivate" and when you realise that life without Facebook is impossible, all your data is there ready for you to reactivate.

As we noted here if you wish to delete your information from the Facebook servers you must delete every entry by hand, item by item, message by message, wall entry by wall entry, group membership by group membership; which must be such a pain for real Facebook addicts.

I'm not sure you can see a "delete all" button anywhere in Facebook.

Of course one of the issues might just be that the data on Facebook pages is held .....

Tell me, where are the Facebook servers?

Blogged with Flock

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

uh oh

uh oh

I came across this picture on kottke.
Thought I'd post it here while trying out the blogging tools in flock

Blogged with Flock

Monday, January 14, 2008

On the Hair at the End of the Tail

It's been a month since I last posted so it's time to return to the blog with a review of last year.

According to Google Analytics between January 1st 2007 and January 1st 2008, On a Hill received 2,637 visits from 2,207 absolute unique visitors, who between them made 3,957 page views.

My guess is that in the scheme of things that's pretty pathetic, but the statistic makes me smile.
Whether any of my visitors learned anything from On a Hill remains a mystery.
I hope they did.
I on the other hand have gained and learnt much from maintaining this simple blog.

During the last year I made 93 posts and visitors made 24 comments.

The ten most visited pages in order of popularity are listed below.
  1. In search of gradatim ferociter
  2. Gradatim ferociter
  3. On deleting Facebook
  4. On Facebook, students and porn
  5. On UCAS, plagiarism and pyjamas
  6. Gradtim ferociter, the search goes on
  7. Problems with Facebook
  8. On Facebook Fridays
  9. Notes on Facebook
  10. On email addiction and statistics
As is ever the case the subject about which I and the world know least remains the most popular. It might be time for me to make another post about Blue Origin and it's enigmatic motto!

45% of my visitors used Firefox, 45% Internet Explorer, and 6% Safari, with the remaining few percent using Opera, Netscape, Camino, Blazer and the curiously named HTC-8100.

72% of my visitors used Windows as an operating system, 24% used Mac, 2% Linux, the rest used AIX, PalmOS, Playstation Portable, SunOS and iPhone.

Visitors came from 96 separate sources with 70% coming via Google, and much smaller percentages of visitors arriving directly from blogger, sitemeter, technorati, computing research at glamorgan, phdweblogs and similar sites.

Geographically America provided the most visitors, followed closely by Europe. Asia, Oceania and Africa followed a long way behind. The figures show that very few visitors came here from South America (I guess that's a language thing) and very very few from Africa which remains the dark continent on my map of visits. The stats show one visit from Aghanistan! Perhaps I should add one of those map widgets to the blog.

It's worth noting that the visitors from the smaller traffic sources (ie everyone except Google) stayed longer and visited more pages per visit.

I guess they really wanted to be here and didn't arrive by accident.

How did you get here?