March, 21, 2005 archives

the wealthy blogger is new blog about money-management issues by my coworker mike hillyer, and non-coworker jeremy c. wright. a couple of canadians talking aboot money, eh.

on a similar note, i ran across liquid ledger today, which looks like nice money management software for mac os x. the current version doesn’t do any portfolio tracking, but it is promised for the next major version.

i got suckered into agreed to pick up some slack at this year’s mysql user conference, and will be giving a talk on “embedded mysql.”

the conference should be a lot of fun this year — from what i’ve heard, the number of signups has been huge, and we’re still four weeks away. one of the tutorials, advanced mysql performance optimization, is already sold out. being back in the bay area is definitely a good thing for this sort of conference.

wait, did someone just say four weeks away? i guess i need to figure out what this embedded mysql stuff is all about.

i’ll also be doing what is called guru best practices: php with andi gutmans.

some people have been interested in the growth of the data that blogs collects. here’s some numbers. this is from a snapshot of the database from sunday morning, so it isn’t to-the-minute.

of the 6,602,676 entries in the blo.gs database snapshot i used, rss/atom feeds were known for 2,512,959 of them. that doesn’t mean more didn’t have rss/atom feeds, just that blo.gs didn’t know about them.

of the blogs that were updated in the last 30 days of the snapshot data, 71% had known rss/atom feeds.

this is the number of blogs added to the database each month. i wasn’t tracking this before september 2003, so the earlier number is all the blogs prior to that.

the big jump in january is from getting a feed that includes the livejournal data from pubsub.com.

here’s the count of blogs last updated in each given month:

and based on the ip address, here’s the top hosts:

needless to say, the entries for the spammer are gone now. blogdrive.com shows up multiple times because they use multiple ip addresses.

here is where i would insert all sorts of caveats about how these numbers are derived if i cared to hold people’s hands when dealing with numbers like this. these are free numbers, and you’re getting what you paid for them.

i know i was (and am) a jerk for saying “i don’t have a price in mind, so don’t ask.”

so i’m not surprised when people ask anyway.

but i was telling the truth.

at least as much truth as that statement can be.

i am tempted, when people ask, to give a number that i believe to be absurd.

after all, maybe somebody will not find it so absurd.

(and in case you don’t think you would, it would rhyme with cotillion.)