Agylen

As promised, here’s a couple new features for Google: Evil or Not?. First, by popular request, gone are the percent values on the vote labels, substituted by textual labels like: “Real good”, “Almost good”, “Not too bad”, “Almost evil”, and “Real evil”. Not a big deal, since besides the labels the rating system works just like before. The trend graph is also still showing non-negative percent values, but that’s just because the graphing library I’m using does not correctly plot negative values.

More interesting is the option of voting for the removal of items that are not pertinent, giving users a certain amount of editorial review. After a certain number of removal requests has been received, the item disappears from the page. I hope that users will be able to keep the site clean by themselves and not find clever ways to abuse it, but I’ll try to keep an eye on it.

Last but not the least: The page for yesterday will be shown if there aren’t yet any items for the current day, instead of showing an empty list. This fix has actually been online since a few days ago.

Google’s stance on the DOJ request to turn over its search records was really appreciated by people, as yesterday’s 16% evilness rating (with 1084 votes so far) shows. I really think we need similar pages for Microsoft and Yahoo! I’m sure we’d have seen a pretty significant difference.

I have some changes for Google: Evil or Not? that I plan to publish this week-end, if I can make it, but adding new targets to track is going to take more time.

In the meantime, if you actively want to contribute to the war on terror with your searches, head over to Philipp’s Patriot Search engine. I would myself, but before I do, I want assurance that they won’t turn any of this dat over to Karl Rove ;).

Looks like Google: Evil or Not? arose a bit of a buzz in the blogosphere. Thanks to everyone who linked to it (and Philipp in primis), we gathered more than 5000 votes. Keep them votes coming!

I also got some interesting suggestions towards a better implementation of the concept. Some people complained that the “0% - 100% evil” scale is confusing and I actually agree. I’m thinking of substituting the numerical values with something like “Totally good”, “Almost good”, “Indifferent”, “Almost evil”, “Totally evil”. What do you think?

TDavid asked for some editorial control on the relevance of the aggregated items. This would certainly make the website more interesting, but would require that I dedicate some time to manually filtering posts. While not much, I’m not sure I can sustain this activity in the long run. You see, Google: Evil or Not? is just a fun application that I hacked together in a couple of evenings during my year-end vacations, mostly to learn programming with Ruby on Rails. I am grateful for all the suggestions and critiques I received, but people shouldn’t expect to much out of it, unless I can find some way to monetize the traffic, a thing that I don’t foresee yet, at least in the near future.

One option might be giving user the option to filter out irrelevant items by voting them out. If a certain threshold is exceeded, the item goes automatically in the trash bin. Shouldn’t be too hard to implement. I’ll have to think about it.

Shortly after Google Analytics was opened to the public, they had lots of scalability problems and almost immediately blocked the creation of new accounts and limited the number of available profiles per user to one.

But logging in today, I saw the following announcement:

As part of our efforts in expanding system capacity, your account now has the ability to utilize additional profiles. The total number of profiles enabled is: 5.

So I immediately created another profile for The Open Source Zone, and installed the necessary Javascript snippet in all pages. Unfortunately, it looks like there’s still some problem:

Tracking Unknown (Last checked: 0000-00-00 12:00 AM PST.)
The Google Analytics tracking code has not been detected on your website’s home page. For Analytics to function, you or your web administrator must add the code to each page of your website.

I’m pretty sure the tracking code is correct. I’m also sure, by looking at the webserver logs, that no kind of Google bot requests my homepage every time I ask it to check the status. Moreover, the “last checked” date seems highly suspect.

Has anybody else been able to successfully add a new profile to Analytics, or is this yet another of Google’s missteps with Analytics?

Update: A few hours later, Analytics reports that my tracking code is OK and data is being collected. I guess you just need to be patient.

Contrary to the expectations of many, Google Calendar was not announced yesterday at When 2.0 conference. Speculations regarding the motives of the non-annoucement are running wild ;).

Google has announced that Firefox referral buttons are finally available for international publishers, while before today only US based publishers could apply.

If someone clicks on one of those buttons and downloads Firefox for Windows for the first time, the publisher gets $1. A nice way to spread Firefox and get publishers a little revenue.

Jia Yun points out, in the comments to my post here, that you can click on the View Reports link on your Google Analytics page even if the status message still says “Your first reports will be ready within twelve hours.” and behold! The reports are already there! Has anybody else noticed this?

Update: Even though my reports are visible, it looks like Google stopped collecting any data after about 14PM PST yesterday (see graph below). This is about sixteen hours ago. I can understand a delay (the FAQ mentions a typical 6 hours delay), but sixteen hours?

Is there anyone out there who has been able to get any reports out of Google Analytics? I signed up yesterday morning and after about 28 hours it’s still saying: “Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now. Your first reports will be ready within twelve hours.”

I was looking forward to getting rid of StatCounter, MyBlogLog and PHP-Stats. They served me well until now, but if I can get everything from a single source and it’s free too, why not?

Having to wait is particularly frustrating now that, due to a certain video, my visitors have just tripled overnight.