LISNews

How do you access LISNews?

I just want to throw out there a brief survey Survey closed as of 2037 UTC on December 16th as we have gotten more responses than viewable at our unpaid access level. The survey’s purpose is to help ascertain how you reach LISNews most of the time. In light of the recent backslash issue, getting a feel as to whether people visit most through a feed reader or instead directly visiting the site makes a difference. When site software upgrades and/or changes happen knowing about such use patterns help with understanding how to serve the audience best.

Questions are not specific to only the use of feed readers and also encompass questions concerning the podcast.

December 16, 2008 by LISNews 8

Some Recent LISNews Statistics

It’s been ages since I posted anything about LISNews stats, so here’s a few random interesting numbers for the past few months.

This all covers September 2008 – November 2008

Total Sessions 1,010,894.00
Total Pageviews 5,702,286.00
Total Hits 11,499,192.00
Total Bytes Transferred 158.69 GB

Referrals: It’s a Google world. Twitter is still the #1 non search / feed reader site. Google is by far the biggest referral, then bloglines, userland, and stumbleupon. There’s a bunch of webmail clients, Microsoft and Yahoo searches round out the top 100 or so. There’s a seemingly infinite number of sites that linked to LISNews, but not many sent along many readers. The only site that matters is Google (100,000+ sessions), even at #1 Twitter account for only about 2000 of those 1 million sessions.

Browsers. About 30% IE, 25% “Mozilla Compatible”, 20% Firefox, 5% Safari, and everyone else was a small % of all hits.

The feeds are hit quite a bit, making up about 25% of all page views. The only posts that show up in the top 50 are a random few that ended up on the first page of search results for certain search results in Google. It’s a rather flat curve and nothing really jumps out as very interesting.

It’s been ages since I posted anything about LISNews stats, so here’s a few random interesting numbers for the past few months.

This all covers September 2008 – November 2008

Total Sessions 1,010,894.00
Total Pageviews 5,702,286.00
Total Hits 11,499,192.00
Total Bytes Transferred 158.69 GB

Referrals: It’s a Google world. Twitter is still the #1 non search / feed reader site. Google is by far the biggest referral, then bloglines, userland, and stumbleupon. There’s a bunch of webmail clients, Microsoft and Yahoo searches round out the top 100 or so. There’s a seemingly infinite number of sites that linked to LISNews, but not many sent along many readers. The only site that matters is Google (100,000+ sessions), even at #1 Twitter account for only about 2000 of those 1 million sessions.

Browsers. About 30% IE, 25% “Mozilla Compatible”, 20% Firefox, 5% Safari, and everyone else was a small % of all hits.

The feeds are hit quite a bit, making up about 25% of all page views. The only posts that show up in the top 50 are a random few that ended up on the first page of search results for certain search results in Google. It’s a rather flat curve and nothing really jumps out as very interesting.

Urchin says almost 50% of people came to LISNews through one of the feeds. If I did the math correctly, about 25% of the other half came from Google, and the vast majority of the others had no referrals. Overall 87% of all sessions had no referral. Which means, assuming these reports are correct, I could exclude us from all search engines and lose very little traffic.

December 4, 2008 by Google LISNews Yahoo 1

Happy 9th Birthday LISNews!!

LISNews started on this day in 1999. LISNews has been through 4 web servers, and 4 different content management systems. LISNews remains an interesting place to read and discuss issues thanks to all the many people who work to keep the site going.

Every year I do my best to thank everyone who works hard to make LISNews. People Like Stephen Michael Kellat who does the podcast. Everyone who has submitted stories over the years, Lee Hadden, Bob Cox, Charles Davis, Gary Price, Steven Fessenamiar.

All the LISNews authors who’ve come and gone like Steven M. Cohen, Rochelle Hartman, Ieleene and many others. The current authors like Birdie, Bibliofuture, Great Western Dragon and everyone else who posts stories I’d never find. More authors make this site better. More collaboration, more cooperation, and more involvement from more people can only help make LISNews stronger. They bring diversity, breadth, and depth. There must be a nice slogan there somewhere.

There are three people who really made this all possible. Without their help, LISNews would not exist as it does today. Joe Frazee for his Linux skills, Nabeal Ahmed for teaching me how to program, and Steve Galbraith for posting stories with me in the early days.

There are far too many people involved with LISNews for me to be able to thank everyone, and that’s the beauty of it all. I’ve always strived to make LISNews an open site that allows as many people to participate as possible. I think collaboration is the key to success in most ventures, and LISNews is no exception. I’ve never really thought of LISNews as “my site,” because it’s truly a group effort, I just keep the thing running. At this point I’ve either been proven right on that idea, or the site is empty. Everyone who has had special “author powers” deserves a big pat on the back for the time and effort they put in to post stories. The authors are really the most important part of the site, since they are the people who post the stories that keep us all coming back. Someday, I hope, I’ll be able to pay them for their hard work.

LISNews started as a small, hand made, static HTML site with a few pages, and just a few stories. I simply wanted to see if I could make a web site, any web site. I eventually figured out how to get PHPSlash installed and running, and that code kept us going for a few years. Several years ago back I said farewell to that dear old friend, and untold hours of development, and moved to the “real” Slashcode. Slashcode allowed more interaction and participation. With journals, moderation, the zoo, and many other features. Slashcode was nice, but it was also a huge PITA, so a couples years back I moved to Drupal, and never regretted it for a second. LISNews now provides what seems like a never ending array of goodies to help kill some time at work, or home, or wherever you happen to be.

So that’s where we’ve been, where we are now, what about where we’re going?
Honestly, I don’t know. The future of LISNews is still not clear to me at this point, and it’s not from lack of ideas, but rather, too many ideas, and no time to move on them. That’s not to say the long term future has ever been clear to me, but it may actually be less clear now than ever before. Lately I’ve had even more ideas, and even less time. I just don’t know what direction to move in now. At this point I can’t imagine life with out it, but I’m not entirely sure what to do with it, what to change, or what to leave unchanged.

I’ve really enjoyed watching the site grow over the years, watching the hits increase, and the comments and participation come alive has been wonderful. It’s been fun watching the journals. The journals are being used much more than I had thought/hoped they would have been, and a few have actually generated some discussion, so I know they’re being read. It’s been even more fun watching the moderation

I just hope the site will remain interesting for people. I don’t want LISNews to stagnate, but at the same time I don’t want to move too quickly and try things that are not of any interest to people. The site continues to be interesting to me, and I hope we can continue to make it interesting to others as well. New features will, I hope, add to our usefulness.

With a growing family and LISHost I have less time to devote to LISNews, so many ideas, so little time, this is why I am always looking for more authors. Many days it’s all me, and I don’t like that. I don’t think of this is my site, and you all shouldn’t be stuck reading just what I post. The variety, depth and breadth of stories we get from having more people participate really makes things more interesting.

Please consider helping out if you have time. Share a story, write a story, volunteer as an author, moderate or simply leave a comment. Aloha, and always, I value your feedback.

November 3, 2008 by LISNews 4

LISNews Is Going To BlogWorldExpo: Anything You’d Like To Hear About?

The LISNews Podcast (LISTen) team is gathering ideas and concepts to inquire about with BlogWorldExpo exhibitors. This PDF (Or the Website) has the exhibitors listed with brief descriptions of what they do as well as their websites. Full questions need not be posed, just areas to explore.

If there is anything you’d like to hear about in a future LISTen podcast, please let us know.

You have about a week to get your questions in, we would need to hear back from you and others via e-mail by late night on September 17th.

The 2008 BlogWorld & New Media Expo will take place September 20-21 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. In addition to the only industry-wide exhibition, BlogWorld features the largest blogging conference in the world including more than 50 seminars, panel discussions and keynotes from iconic personalities on the leading-edge of online technology and internet-savvy business.

Stephen also wrote something in the matter.

September 12, 2008 by Internet LISNews 0

Does LISNews Need A Rule Book For Commentors?

I’d like to read some more comments about comments. Should we have some kind of comment control @ Your LISNews? Recent posts at Lifehacker and The Consumerist (especially This One) make me wonder is there is something we can do @ LISNews to foster an environment open to dialog.

This could be as simple as filtering out words commonly considered to be obscene (something easy to do in Drupal, they call it a “Badwords filter”), or as drastic as instituting some kind of comments policy and then enforcing it by deleting comments. This would require some kind of “comments posse” that will run around deleting comments that don’t fit into some kind of rule book we’d need to write, or something like that.

Personally, I don’t know if we need to take any drastic steps, but you might be able to convince me to put a Badwords filter in place. I’ve read just about every comment left on LISNews for the past 9 years, so nothing bothers me any more. BUT, if a vocal minority of potty mouthed folks are scaring people away from LISNews, then maybe we should put some kind of controls in place. This might help bring new voices into our conversations. If new people decide that LISNews is worth their time, it can only make things better.

I’d like to read some more comments about comments. Should we have some kind of comment control @ Your LISNews? Recent posts at Lifehacker and The Consumerist (especially This One) make me wonder is there is something we can do @ LISNews to foster an environment open to dialog.

This could be as simple as filtering out words commonly considered to be obscene (something easy to do in Drupal, they call it a “Badwords filter”), or as drastic as instituting some kind of comments policy and then enforcing it by deleting comments. This would require some kind of “comments posse” that will run around deleting comments that don’t fit into some kind of rule book we’d need to write, or something like that.

Personally, I don’t know if we need to take any drastic steps, but you might be able to convince me to put a Badwords filter in place. I’ve read just about every comment left on LISNews for the past 9 years, so nothing bothers me any more. BUT, if a vocal minority of potty mouthed folks are scaring people away from LISNews, then maybe we should put some kind of controls in place. This might help bring new voices into our conversations. If new people decide that LISNews is worth their time, it can only make things better.

I don’t know the best way to handle this, until now I’ve been 100% hands off, but I’d like to hear from you if you think something should be done (or not). Would putting rules and controls in place be a good idea, and why? Would be make LISNews a better place? Would it just be a big ugly can of censorship worms?

September 5, 2008 by Books Censorship LISNews 67

Talk To LISNews: How Are You Using Web 2.0?

Last Week we asked “Why Do You Stick With Twitter?”

This week we’re assembling audio answers from as many people as possible to another new question:

“How Are You Using Web 2.0?”

The deadline for answering either by leaving a voice mail or sending an MP3 file is 0700 UTC on August 24th. Talk To LISNews remains an audio project so while text-based replies are appreciated they are not likely to be read on-air.

To leave an answer to be included in the podcast, there are a few ways you can go.
If you are in the US, you can call 646-495-9201, enter extension 61340, and leave your answer.

If you are outside the US, or just want to use your computer, you can upload an MP3 file using the upload tool located on the podcast page https://lisnews.org/podcast/.

Be sure to tell us who you are and where you’re calling from. You need not provide us with your entire bio, just something simple is fine if you’d like to remain private: “Hi, this is Blake calling from western New York and I I’m using Web 2.0…”

August 12, 2008 by Internet LISNews 0

Is Anyone Else Having Trouble With LISNews Captchas?

Just about all the forms on LISNews currently use a simple text Captcha for obvious reasons. Yesterday I received a report of Captcha trouble that I just can’t replicate.

Is anyone else unable to make it past the Captcha challenges here on LISNews?

(If you can’t make it past the Captcha on this post, or the contact form to tell me about the problems(yes, irony, I know), you can email me directly btcarver and the domain is lisnews.com.)

August 12, 2008 by LISNews 9

Why Do You Stick With Twitter?: Talk To LISNews

Last Week we asked “Tell Us: Why did you choose librarianship?”

This week we’re assembling audio answers from as many people as possible to a new question: “Why do you stick with Twitter?” Replies are needed by 0700 UTC on Sunday, August 10, 2008. (What is this in my local time?) Stephen will stitch them all together and release a podcast at some point in the next week or so.

To leave an answer to be included in the podcast, there are a few ways you can go.
If you are in the US, you can call 646-495-9201, enter extension 61340, and leave your answer.

If you are outside the US, or just want to use your computer, you can upload an MP3 file using the upload tool located on the podcast page https://lisnews.org/podcast/.

Be sure to tell us who you are and where you’re calling from. You need not provide us with your entire bio, just something simple is fine if you’d like to remain private: “Hi, this is Blake calling from western New York and I stick with Twitter because…”

August 9, 2008 by Libraries LISNews 0

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