I wonder how this companies sales have done over the past year...I would expect they have gone up a bit.

http://www.scangauge.com

I'm going on a long car trip in June, maybe I'll pick one up. I'm not sure if I could save that much gas on a long highway trip but it might come in handy afterwards.

...and their famous waggle dance.

Scientists abuzz over more efficient Web servers

Tovey said his collaboration with Seeley demonstrated that the communication [bee waggle] provides a “beautiful” feedback loop to prevent one flower patch from being abandoned while another is depleted. For a superior patch, more bees will shake it on the dance floor and recruit workers to join them. As the nectar level drops from all the hubbub, the bees take longer to fill up, delaying their repeat performances back at the hive. The drop-off in dance routines gives scouts returning from alternative sources a better chance to create their own dance fever and transfer worker allegiances. With the shifting allocations, the system continually equalizes itself and offers a steady stream of nectar.

The emulated the load balancing of the "bee waggle" to divert traffic where it is most needed.

very interesting read.

Click on the image above to see Google traffic through a day.

We here at the palatial headquarters of techRivet.com would like to thank all the visitors to the site.  Here is a nice graph that shows said growth.

I have some organic traffic. I have some links from friends and associated bloggers. I've joined online blogging communities like Bloggst, MyBlogLog and others. I participate in other blogs comments. But all that results in about 25% of my traffic. (or less).

Stumble upon provides the rest.

This is fascinating and relates back to my earlier post on Virtual Schrödinger's Law.

This traffic generating engine that is Stumble Upon represents a shift in the way traffic is garnered on the internet. You used to have to cultivate relationships, you used to have to suck up to power users. Now you don't.

Create a piece of content that is compelling enough, interesting enough, well written enough and get it submitted into Stumble Upon's database of URLs and let the horses run wild.

Democracy of Crowds

It's the democracy of crowds. I don't want to use "Wisdon of Crowds" because I have had both "wise" articles and foolish ones explode into a link spike from stumble upon.

The key then of course becomes to continue to generate quality content and feed the mouth of stumble upon.

So this guy sends out an email to the top Digg users attempting to buy their votes...They in general think he's scum and/or stupid and don't want to do it.  They blog about it and post his email right on their blog...

Hello,

I need a favor. I run a website bringpopcorn.com.

Would you get my website to the Digg first page, and if successful I’ll pay $500.

The site is of interest to most Digg users anyhow, it’s just people only listen to top Digg users.

If interested please email back.

Alex

 

Only this guy includes his own URL within the body of the email.  Which then gets posted on the blogs of the top Digg users (which themselves are somewhat heavily trafficked). 

Is this guy as dumb as he appears?

how to get free advertising by trying to buy votes on digg/

That's how Scott Karp sums it up.  But I take it one step further, I wonder if I can get some residual lift by surfing along on bringpopcorn.com's success.

Brilliant I say Brilliant!

Compete.com has a fascinating chart explaining about the total amount of time we all spend at certain websites. There are a few very interesting facts in the dataset.  For one thing pogo.com, neopets.com and adultfriendfinder.com all slid into the top 20.  I don't know who I would have expected to slide in there, but I'm not sure I would have anticipated them.

Their chart didn't show everything I wanted, I wanted to delve a bit deeper.  So I went out to alexa and got the reach numbers for each of the sites to sift the time data.

Here are the sites re-ordered by time-spent / reach.

Look-it Pogo.com. Wow! Very interesting that. They are a gaming site so that indicates the long length of time their users stay.  Playing game after game.

The other striking point is the dismal showing of live.com.  Last place in the re-ordering.