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Wasted URLs: Free the Animals

Filed by Smog under 00128

What makes for a wasted URL? It depends on the person and the site, particularly what that person expects to see when they type the URL in and press return.

Consider, if you will, animal names. What do you think is on Dog or Cat.com? What would you want to see on Monkey.com? Would you want pictures and information on the animal? Would a company branding themselves or a product make the grade?

To explore these questions and more, Ape Con Myth surveyed 144 animal sites. Here’s what was found…

The State of .Com Animal URLs in 2012

PARKED

Parked domains are a common sight online and it is no different for the animals. Roughly a fifth of the sites in the sample group proved to be nothing more than a bunch of paid advertising links. If you’re lucky, there’s a picture. If you’re really lucky, it’s a picture of the animal, but don’t expect much. In addition to our friends below, other animals in this sad group include the Boar, Hamster, Hippopotamus, Hornet, Jackal, Koala, Mouse, Otter, Squid, and Wildebeest.


Crow.com	Moose.com	Pig.com	Snail.com

PARKED WITH PRETENSE

Next comes the parked ads and links that seem like they are almost trying. For Chicken, you’re promised oven baked chicken recipes. The beauty of the Swan is channeled for plastic surgery. Turkey is ready to book your hotel in Istanbul. And Donkey.com wants you to know it is “Your Site For Buying A Donkey”. Good luck navigating towards those goals however, as search results often lead to more search results. If you get nervous about your privacy searching for things on Google, see what your gut thinks when you click a link on Chimpanzee, Elk, Mosquito, Porcupine, Shrew, Spider and the ever-loved Stinkbug.


Chicken.com	Donkey.com	Swan.com	Turkey.com

“THE LEADING SITE”

Naturally someone was eventually going to smell a business plan in these animal droppings, which was the case with Name Administration Inc. of the Cayman Islands. They go big, touting themselves as “The Leading Cow/Hippo/Mink/Partridge/Snake Site on the Net”, despite not following through with the correct animal pictures nor making much sense of the searches. Nonetheless, they are there to help you find a saddle for your cow, video piano lessons for your partridge, car insurance for your hippo and all the beaver coats money can buy. Meanwhile, each page shows up completely blank with Ad Blocker Plus on.


Cow.com	Hippo.com	Mink.com	Partridge.com

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Leaving behind the parking lot, we enter the construction site. Websites don’t write themselves after all. It takes a lot of time and care to create a good site. To make Whale.com as large and majestic as its namesake, even more so. In the meantime? Blue. Blue since 2007! What’s the word on Wolf? The countdown says 272 days to go! Crab has only been waiting a year, but looks like it will be a conceptual improvement from its previous life as the home of Charm Net ISP out of Baltimore. You’ll also have to wait in anticipation for Anteater, Antelope, Llama and Reindeer as they too are coming soon…


Antelope.com	Crab.com	Whale.com	Wolf.com

But something, even a background color, is better than nothing, which is exactly what you get with Aardvark, Baboon, Butterfly, Gerbil and Rat.

Read the rest…

February 1, 2012 | Comments (0)

To and Fro, Internationally

Filed by The Geography Club under 00221

Ever thought about getting out of Dodge in a big way? Looking for ideas? At MigrationsMap.net, you’ll find a handy world map of information on where your fellow citizens have gone to and the origins of those who took their place…

The data comes from the Global Migrant Origin Database and gives a rough estimate of migrant populations circa 2000. There were an estimated 175M migrants worldwide as of 2000, up from 75M in 1960. But that’s only an increase from 2.5% to 2.9% of the total world population, which went from 3 billion-ish to 6 billion-ish in those same 40 years.

Anyway, here’s the list of lines that more than a million people have crossed, with the U.S. starting and finishing it off.

Pulling the full data set and counting up the complete totals for each country, the United States once again tops the list in positive net migration at 32.4M, with Mexico on the negative end of the spectrum at -9.7M.

But the impact of these numbers depend on the total population of each country. Considering only countries with populations over one million, the United States comes in 15th in terms of migrant population as a percent of total 2000 population. Meanwhile, Mexico falls just short of the list in regard to percent of population lost against the total population had no one left.

And finally, here’s the stats on all 24 countries with a population over 50M as of the 2000 censuses.

There’s a story behind every number on here. Hopefully once we get all the numeric data visualized, the next wave of visual representations will work to connect the data to those stories. We have so much data, but so little reference for it.

September 23, 2011 | Comments (0)

Mining, Oil and Gas Extraction – Round 2

Filed by The Economics Devision under 00015, 00019, 00189

Now we are going back through the sub-sectors to add in GDP and some starter Economic Census data…

(click to enlarge)

July 18, 2011 | Comments (0)

Google’s Six-Front War Visualized

Filed by Smog under 00083

Inspired by the launch of Google+, here’s a visualization of some of Google’s competition, as laid out in the TechCrunch piece, Google’s Six-Front War:

(click for larger version)

Of course, that leaves out video/photo hosting, blogging, desktop OS, music, TV, eBooks, driverless cars, philanthropy, other stuff we know about and whatever we don’t know about yet.

How is Google doing in all of these battles? For the more mature products in the top half, very well. In Search and Mobile, they are number one. Among browsers Chrome is in third place, moving in the right direction. It’s the bottom half where Google has their work cut out for them. Google+ is estimated to have brought in 10 million users in the first two weeks with a chance of doubling it by the weekend. Although that only amounts to 1-3% of Facebook’s crowd, it nonetheless puts Google+ at about 7th place in the Social sphere right out of the gate.

Let’s the games begin!

Update: How’s Google+ doing a month later? While this ranking puts it in 6th place with 32 million users, it would seem that the honeymoon is over, due largely in part to Google’s awkward stance in the “real names” vs. pseudonyms debate. After years of using Google products pretty much any way we want, suddenly there is a rule that has left an unknown number of deleted profiles in its wake. Meanwhile, Google is facing some serious challenges in the patent wars and falling behind in at least one stat related to their crown jewel, search. My, how quickly the weather can change…

July 14, 2011 | Comments (0)

The Self-Employed: Same As It Ever Was?

Filed by The Economics Devision under 00039

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the self-employed consist of “active proprietors or partners who devote a majority of their working hours to their unincorporated businesses.” Another thing the BEA says is that, despite the civilian labor force tripling during the same period, the number of self-employed persons in the United States has remained fairly constant over the last 80 years.

SelfEmployedVSLaborForce

The only thing that has changed is industry composition…

Where we once had farmers, we now have service providers. But does that explain why the self-employed went from 21% the size of the labor force down to 6%? Do we have fewer independent operators in the economy or are more of them turning to the corporate or LLC structure to protect themselves from the modern consumer?

[Self-Employment data via BEA NIPA Tables 6.7A-D; Civilian Labor Force figures from ERP B-35]

May 11, 2011 | Comments (0)

2007 U.S. GDP in Pie-Vision!

Filed by The Economics Devision under 00015

Five days a week (or more), millions of Americans leave their homes to go to “work”. What does it all add up to? Gross Domestic Product, the sum of all final goods and services.

Below, we have the United States’ $14.1 trillion GDP from 2007, which means you are also looking at the output from the largest economy on Earth that year.

(click image to explore – (it’s a large file, so give it a second))

What do you see? For those game to squeeze their mind grapes, please put any thoughts or questions in the comments to guide future research. This is only the beginning of digging into GDP…

May 3, 2011 | Comments (0)