After reading on both Connected Internet and Techtites that Alexa had introduced some more statistics for me to look at (sorry, I like stats) I quickly rushed to check Alexa. While the stats for most of my sites seemed 'pretty normal' that soon changed when I checked the stats for The Rockstar Game.

As that shows, therockstargame.com users primarily come from Lithuania (34.6%), Portugal (26.9%), United States (15.4%). I know that's not the case, so I logged in to Google Analytics and checked the past week, and that gave me the following….

As you can see that paints a completely different picture.

Obviously the Alexa data is based upon users with the Alexa Toolbar installed but it suprises me that it can be so out. The 2% of visitors from Lithuania over the past week is a pretty solid figure over the past year… clearly Alexa is 'big in Lithuania'

I read on via TechCrunch and Vecosys today that Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, has announced they’ll be supporting OpenID in the near future.

Digg users will still be able to create a unique Digg ID, but they’ll be able to log in to Digg using their OpenID identity.

What Is An OpenID Identity?

"OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity"

An OpenID identity is a URL that you can use to identify yourself at compatible sites around the web. All OpenID does is provide you with a way to prove that you own this identity (URL) without sending your password, email address or anything you wouldn't want it to.

There are various OpenID providers including MyOpenID but the beauty is you can setup your own site/blog as your identity. For further reading I recommend Simon Willison’s post: How to turn your blog in to an OpenID

Further Reading: Do You Actually Use OpenID?

The name and title pages of IMDB have been redesigned and I don’t like them.

IMDB say it’s the first phase of an overall site design that “will take place in measured, incremental steps” - good move, it would be foolish to completely redesign a site of that size in one step.

Before…..

After…

What I like
New font will take a bit of getting used to, but that will be for the better
Colours are fine
Comments down i.e. message board snapshot looks much better
I think the pages for people look better

What I don’t like
Film ‘poster/box’
Too much white space
The big yellow buttons ‘View Photo Gallery’, ‘Add to My Movies’ etc.
Rating is top right, odd place.
Link colour too light, hard to distinguish (maybe underline?)
Photo Gallery too prominent
‘Recommended’ too big

Hmm… err.. yes. So I guess I don’t like it too much huh? I'm sure I'll grow to like it. Was a shock to the system!

You can change back to the old style by checking “Use former title & name page design” in ‘Site Preferences’ under Personalize in your account options.

I’ve been meaning to write this for over a month but always held it back. While I’ve been pretty much offline for the past couple of weeks it seems more and more and more and more people are starting to push Agloco.

When I first heard of Agloco I immediately thought ‘pyramid scheme’ – which was a little unfair. A pyramid scheme would involve initial 'investment'; Agloco is free (if your time is free, of course).

It reminds me of all those spammy "get paid to surf" programs that were knocking about in 1999. The companies themselves weren't spammers, and what they were trying to achieve in advertising was unique back then,  however I seem to remember a hell of a lot of "GET PAID TO SURF" spam emails and posts in forums. grr

I've already had blog spam regarding Agloco and a couple of emails.

I'm presuming Agloco will make money from selling advertising on the Viewbar, which is in limited beta testing at the moment,  so for people to make money from Agloco, the people they refer need to be using the Viewbar, and also "You have to surf yourself [with the viewbar] to get the benefit of your referrals' surfing." 

I'm pretty sure the majority of people that have signed up thinking they're going to make millions will stop using the Viewbar when they realise the people they have referred aren't using it: significantly lowering any earnings they thought they'd make using the earning calculator. (Will the viewbar work in Firefox btw?)

Don't even get me started on the shares thing.

I don't think it's a scam but I do think a lot of people that have subscribed are going to be disappointed by the amount of money they'll make from it. It'll be interesting to see how widely used this Viewbar will be once it's released and I wish Agloco and it's members the best of luck but I won't be joining you.

Further Reading: Agloco Rant, Scoble Interview with Agloco, First Impressions of Agloco (problogger), Agloco will not make money online ever

Coming back online to over 15,000 emails puzzled me, slightly.

"I get a lot of spam, but this seems awfully high"

I downloaded the first 500 or so emails and noticed all the emails have something in common: they're all bounces. This had had happened to me a few years ago with another of my domains.

I should have learned not to have a catch all account!!

Seems like my domain (therockstargame.com) has made it on to a spammers list and god knows how much spam has been sent with somethingrandom@therockstargame.com set as the 'FROM' email address. 15,000 emails bounced but I have no idea or way of finding out how many emails were sent.

I'm going to now search the emails on the server for "delivery-status" (most bounces will mention this in the email header), and then for words like "failure", "undeliverable", "undelivered", "returned mail".

Most of the emails bouncing back had the topic "Windows Vista Business ready to download" and a lot of email addresses that have been abandoned and left to collect spam are bouncing "inbox full" messages back.

–

Update: From 14,654 emails I got it down to 350, which isn't so bad. Only 11 of those emails were genuine, however. GRR