We’ve Been Stumbled Upon By Stumbleupon.com

Like many bloggers, we like to look at the visitor statistics for our blog. In our case, that’s a combination of the stats which WordPress.com provides, and the wonderful free statistics we get from Statcounter.com.

Since we started RoutingByRumor late last year, we’ve become accustomed to the ebb and flow of traffic to our blog. Weekly traffic patterns are very predictable. Generally speaking, Saturday is the slowest day of the week, followed by Sunday, which is generally only marginally busier. Midweek tends to see the most traffic, and we’ve seen a pronounced drop in traffic during the summer months, particularly in August. It’s so predictable, that we can usually forecast to within a percent or two, what the traffic on any particular day will be. It sort of reminds us of how precisely electric utilities can predict electricity demand, based on day of the week, time of year, outside temperature, wind speed, cloud cover, etc.

We’ve read much into these patterns. We believe that most web surfing, or at least most blog reading, is probably done while at work. Sometimes you can prove this based on the DNS information associated with visitors IP addresses, such as RealBigCorporation.com (a hypothetical example). We see very predictable traffic patterns to each posting on our blog. Certain articles are perennial favorites, while other posts hardly ever muster any readers (a terrible shame, since we can attest to the fact that every single one of our posts are of excellent quality and worthy of your consideration). We never know ahead of time which of our articles will attract lots of traffic, and which ones will live their life in solitary confinement. Perhaps THIS article about Stumbleupon will be a big hit. Then again, maybe not. It’s difficult to predict. Sometimes, events in the news cause a particular article on our blog to explode in popularity for a few days.

If we’ve learned one thing, it’s that the popularity can be very fleeting. Another is that anything you post related to a scandal, public figures in the news, or some dirt being dished about someone, seems to attract many more visitors than any article you can post with any redeeming value. Sadly, the latest piece of trash about Brittany Spears will attract much more traffic than an announcement that you’ve found a cure for cancer, a solution to global warming and the key to world peace. It doesn’t say much about how discerning the average web surfer is, and it’s also probably why supermarket tabloids sell so well. Up until this past weekend, when Stumbleupon opened the floodgates of hell, the most traffic we ever saw at RoutingByRumor was in the days following our posting of this article. What a sad commentary on the human race.

While visitor statistics usually don’t tell us which search engine a visitor used to find us, it’s probably a good bet that it’s usually Google, the 10,000 pound gorilla of search engines. Thanks, Sergey! WordPress alerts Google and other search engines when new content os posted to a blog. It’s kind of scary how fast Google usually indexes our latest posting. Things usually appear to a limited extent in Google results immediately, with a fuller indexing within 24 to 48 hours.

Unless something pops up in the news that is in some way related to one of our articles, there aren’t many surprises. We see some unexplained transient spikes in traffic to certain articles, but that’s generally all. So, we had to do a double take this past weekend, when traffic to a single article on our blog shot up around 10,000 % or about 100 times more than what we normally see. Our first impression was that it was some sort of problem with the stats. It wasn’t. Good thing that WordPress doesn’t charge us for bandwidth usage !!!

What happened ? We had been “stumbled upon” by stumbleupon.com, which we had never heard of. More specifically, a stumbleupon.com member named Bizspotter stumbled this post of ours.

Apparently, Stumbleupon is part search engine, part social networking site, and part viral marketing tool. Wikipedia describes Stumbleupon this way… “StumbleUpon chooses which Web page to display based on the user’s ratings of previous pages, ratings by his/her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests“. Sounds like an interesting concept. Similar to how a site like Amazon suggests to you that people who bought this item also bought these other items, or iTunes telling you that people who bought this album also liked these other albums.

The fact of the matter is that it looks to us like Stumbleupon is the crack cocaine of traffic generators. Why do we say this ? Because despite the incredible amount of traffic it sent to our blog in a matter of hours (it was pretty much all over by the next day), it appears that none of those visitors were the least bit interested in reading the article they landed on, or anything else we’ve blogged about. We saw absolutely no increase in click-thrus. That is, once they landed at our site, unlike many visitors who find us via a search engine, these Stumbleupon visitors didn’t stick around, and they didn’t click on any links in the article. Unlike many of the “normal” visitors to RoutingByRumor, they also didn’t read any of our other articles.

So, it appears to us that Stumbleupon serves up relevant traffic much the way that McDonald’s or Burger King serve up health food. A search engine like Google is very good at finding content on the Web that is of interest to someone doing a search. It appears that Stumbleupon does a very poor job of finding content that will interest a particular web surfer. Of course, the Stumbleupon paradigm is new to us. Perhaps there are others with more experience with products like Stumbleupon, who have a different opinion as to it’s value. Based on what we’ve seen, if we were paying for traffic to be referred to our blog, we wouldn’t pay a cent for the “junk” traffic Stumbleupon is sending our way. The sheer number of hits that stumbling a URL can generate are very impressive, but a closer look at the quality of that traffic is utterly disappointing indeed.

It makes you wonder why eBay thought that Stumbleupon was worth the $75 million they paid for it. Probably because anything on the Web these days with a social networking slant (facebook, myspace, youtube, linkedin, etc., etc., ad nauseum) is hot.  But then, eBay thought Skype was worth shelling out at least $2.6 billion for (mere pocket change). Hey, people once ridiculed William Henry Seward for spending two cents per acre for a piece of land called Alaska ! We guess that when you have as much money as eBay, dropping a billion here and a billion there isn’t a big deal.  Besides, have you noticed that most big business deals aren’t measured in terms of millions of dollars anymore, but rather in the billions of dollars.  I don’t think it’s inflation so much as it is proof that wealth is being concentrated more and more in a smaller and smaller percentage of society, certainly in the United States, and no doubt elsewhere.  It’s also a result of the shift in our economy, away from dominance by companies like IBM, AT&T and General Motors, to the new billionaires… The Microsofts, Googles, eBays and WordPresses of the world.  (Oops… how did WordPress slip in there ?)  If it doesn’t end in “.com”, it doesn’t really matter anymore.  But I digress.

Of course, we’re probably just a wee bit out of touch with the masses when it comes to appreciating some of the finer websites the Web has to offer. For instance, we can’t quite understand why anyone with even the slightest semblance of a life would find myspace.com the least bit interesting, but at least a few myspace users would probably disagree with us. Myspace claims to have blown by the 100 million user mark more than two years ago, and we’ve seen reports that more than 250,000 new myspace accounts are created daily. Gee whiz… it’s almost as popular as RoutingByRumor !

On the one hand, we were underwhelmed by Stumbleupon. On the other hand, we know when we’re outnumbered (IYCBEJE**). So, if you liked this article, Stumble It!

– Routing By Rumor

(** IYCBEJE – If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em)

Driving South At General Motors

Rick Wagoner photo located at http://info.detnews.com/dn/pix/2005/10/17/wagoner.jpg

We just came across a post at the blog “The Truth About Cars” (TTAC) that is spreading a rumor (could you imagine that… RUMOR mongering !) that Rick Wagoner, the CEO at General Motors, will be taking a much needed vacation within the next couple of days. A permanent vacation.

According to this profile at forbes.com, Mr. Wagoner’s compensation for FY 2007 was just shy of $5 million. And that’s despite shareholder value that is melting away faster than an ice cube on a hot August day. Not a bad gig if you can get it, in our opinion.

We have no idea whether the story posted at TTAC has any basis in fact. It will be interesting to see if Rick Wagoner gets to take his “vacation”… whether he resigns, is dismissed, or takes a different position within GM (he’s been there for the past 30 years). If the rumor is true, it shouldn’t surprise anyone, especially the motorheads here at Routing By Rumor. In the past, we have written about why we are one GM customer that will never buy another vehicle from this company. And since we are a die-hard proponent of that quaint notion of “Buy American”, and we were a loyal GM customer for nearly our entire driving career, you know that something is very wrong with this company. We feel that if they couldn’t hold on to us as a customer, they have little chance of holding on to anyone else.

Those poor GM shareholders. Back in January, 1999, GM’s share price was sitting pretty at $90. When we checked it this morning, it was below $10 (view the current GM share price). That equals a loss of shareholder value of almost 89% from it’s all-time high. GM shares are also more than 76% off their 52-week high of $43.20. If you’re invested heavily in GM, chances are you can’t afford to buy one of the gas guzzling GM SUVs piling up in dealer’s lots, no matter how worthless they become. Thanks to $4.00 a gallon gasoline and an economy that is on life support, the only thing dropping faster than GM’s share price is it’s SUV and pickup sales.

This is probably just a cruel coincidence, but the TTAC blog runs ads on their site, and the ads that appeared on the article we cited above happened to be for a vehicle from KIA. How fitting.

So Rick, if it turns out you’re looking for work, and you have any writing experience, send us your resume. Blogging experience, a familiarity with WordPress, and some Internet savvy will all be helpful. Please include a cover letter with your salary requirements.

– Routing By Rumor

Amazon Web Services… Not Quite “Five Nines” Uptime !

…Not five nines,

…or four nines,

…not even three nines (99.9% uptime) !

If you tried to visit some of the Web’s most popular sites for a good part of the day yesterday, July 20, 2008, you were likely disappointed. Sites like WordPress (where this blog is hosted), Twitter, SmugMug and others, were impacted for hours yesterday because they depend on Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service), which went down. Apparently, even some Apple iPhone applications were impacted by the S3 outage. It was the second time in less than six months (the previous outage occured on February 15) that AWS (Amazon Web Services) has experienced a major failure.

Based on what we’ve learned so far about S3, our best guess is that yesterday’s outage was caused by a software bug, a human error of some sort, or as was the case in their February outage, some set of conditions that occured within their system that overwhelmed their ability to handle traffic (interestingly, the latest problem occured early on a Sunday morning… not exactly a time when you would expect a peak load on their system). We view a malicious attack on the service a less likely cause, and hardware or connectivity problems a very unlikely cause. S3 is a decentralized system designed to survive the loss of some of it’s components and still operate normally. In many widespread telecom or network failures suffered by providers and carriers in the past few years, the cause has often been determined to be software related or human error (like a construction crew cutting a fiber optic cable they didn’t know was buried there).

As an aside, here’s some articles about human error that has caused some major outages…

Optus cable culprit found

The Backhoe, The Internet’s Natural Enemy

Cut in Fiber Cable Disrupts Internet Traffic Nationwide

The Backhoe: A Real Cyberthreat

The S3 outages bring to mind another concern among people responsible for the operation of the Internet itself. One of the services that the Internet is built on is DNS (the Domain Name System). The DNS system is what allows your computer to find a website such as this one, from among the millions of computers and websites on the Internet. There is concern among some that even though DNS functionality is spread across many servers on the Internet, in a hierarchical system, that a widespread DNS failure could occur. This would cripple almost all Internet traffic. Worst of all, if there was a major DNS failure, you might not be able to get to this blog ! Heaven forbid.

S3 is a “cloud” storage service. Internet-based computing resources are collectively referred to as cloud computing (see this Businessweek article on cloud computing). In cloud computing, resources that were traditionally located, say, in a company’s data center (disk storage, application software, servers, etc.) are offered by service providers via the Internet. Cloud computing is a relatively new paradigm, and problems similar to what Amazon has experienced are sure to make CIOs and IT managers hesitant to rely on the cloud when they can provide computing resources locally and have greater control over them.

Almost by definition, services offered in the cloud must offer high availability. The uptime standard that is generally used in the telecommunications and computing industries for critical systems is “five nines“, or 99.999% availability. That translates (approximately) to less than five minutes downtime a year, and generally does not include scheduled service outages. In the United States, the public telephone network operated by the Bell System was consistently able to achieve five nines reliability (so Ma Bell wasn’t that bad to us after all, may she rest in peace). Clearly, Amazon’s S3 service has failed this benchmark. It doesn’t even appear that AWS has achieved two nines availability (less than about seven hours downtime per month) this month. That’s utterly dismal performance that is unacceptable for critical systems, and it does not bode well for Amazon’s future in the cloud, or for cloud computing in general.

Interestingly, Amazon’s S3 SLA (Service Level Agreement) states that users are not entitled to a service credit unless their uptime drops below three nines (99.9%) in any month, and even if they fail to achieve two nines (99% uptime) in a month, they will only give users a 25% credit. They must not have a lot of confidence in their ability to provide four nines availability (less than one hour a year of downtime), which Amazon states is one of the design requirements that S3 was built to provide. And if they don’t meet their service levels, will they give their customers a refund? No. It appears all they will offer is a credit to be applied to future service. Not good.

But don’t expect disgruntled S3 customers who have been impacted by Amazon’s Simple Storage System outages to issue press releases critical of Amazon. Paragraph 4.2.4 of their customer agreement specifically prohibits that unless you get their permission first. Incredible.

With an SLA like Amazon’s, and especially because of their outages in the past few months, we might be inclined to use a service such as S3 only to store backup files. We don’t feel that the service is reliable enough to be used to support a live website or other mission critical systems. And even if Amazon had a 100% uptime record, there’s always this to worry about when deciding if you want to depend on services in the cloud (and to think that you were worried about the Y2K problem!).

Perhaps cloud computing is an idea whose time has not yet come.

– Routing By Rumor

Of Blogs And Bugs

This is one bug we can’t blame on Microsoft.

While writing our last post to this blog, the cute little fellow pictured above came scurrying across the floor, and stopped right in front of us. I’d swear he was looking at our computer screen. Maybe he was thinking of starting his own bug blog.

He sat there long enough for us to scoop him up and sequester him in an empty jar, so we could get our camera and take his mug shot. He’s about an inch and a half or two inches long, and best we can determine, he once had 28 legs, but apparently lost several of them. Think buying shoes for your kids is expensive? Count your blessings that they only have two feet each. It looks like he has antennae fore and aft, although his head is to the right in the above photo.

Given the human need to endear every creature with a name, we have named him “WordPress”. We’ll admit that we are only guessing that he’s a he. If it’s actually Ms. WordPress, our apologies for the gender error. Actually, we’re not even sure if all insects have a gender… Aren’t some both sexes?

Since we don’t have any entomologists on staff here at Routing By Rumor, we are going to enlist the help of our readers. If you know what this cute fellow is, please leave a comment.

All those insect rights people out there will be happy to know that no bugs were harmed in the creation of this article. WordPress was released into the great outdoors after his photo shoot. You should have seen how quickly he moved once we put him on the ground. He was gone in a flash. We suspect, however, that he is going to try and get back into the Routing By Rumor network operations center, so if we spot him again, we’ll post a followup to this story.

– Routing By Rumor

When We Speak, Wall Street Listens.

One of the great things about hosting a blog at WordPress.com is the various tools and statistics they provide (thanks, Matt). You can see how much traffic your posts attract, how your visitors are finding your blog, what search terms people are using to find you (but sadly, not which search engine they used), and what hyperlinks in your posts they click on.

We were quite surprised this morning, when we noticed that nasdaq.com was sending traffic our way because of this article we posted yesterday about the U.S. economy. We had mentioned that New York and New Jersey utilities, including Consolidated Edison, had recently gotten steep rate increases approved by regulators, some as much as 25% and 50%.

Within a few hours, visitors to Nasdaq who looked up Consolidated Edison (NYSE: ED), were seeing a link to our blog in the “Comments From The Blogs” section on nasdaq.com. This is yet another example of how blogging has really gained legitimacy, and how mainstream media and even Wall Street have taken notice of what is being discussed by bloggers. To be sure, it is a bit of a trip, realizing that almost anyone with a computer and Internet access can have their voice heard by the world. To us, that’s perhaps the greatest thing about this experiment they call the Internet. It transcends borders (although some regimes try to surpress it), it makes the world a very small place, and it gives you access to views and opinions you would otherwise never hear. How great is that?

Now that Routing By Rumor is (almost) a household name, we want to let the New York Stock Exchange know that we are available, should Dick Grasso’s old job still be open. However, in light of the firestorm that his $140 million retirement package caused, we want to go on record as saying that we will not accept a deferred compensation package of more than $75 million. We think that even Eliot Spitzer, the former New York State Attorney General turned New York Governor (and no friend of Dick Grasso’s), who’s career crashed and burned in a sex scandal, would approve of that.

– Routing By Rumor