Thursday, August 28, 2008

On the "Event Processing Thinking" Blog - after the first year

One of the ways to obtain events is through "calendar events", this is useful for time-out management, periodic triggering etc. Today I saw in my calendar a reminder: this is the one year anniversary of the "event processing thinking" Blog - you should write something about it. Actually, yesterday I got a note from one of the analyst firms that research the impact of Web 2.0 on companies and was asked to participate in this study on my Blogger hat... This is not the first time that people approach me based on reading my Blog for various purposes, and actually I can say that I have under-estimated the power of Blogs and the amount of visibility it gets. This is probably the most visible communication vehicle exists today (how many people are reading papers?)

Looking at the Blogland I also realized that the visibility can be a double-edged sword, since people can easily expose their own ignorance, so I am trying to write only on stuff that I think
I know something about...

One thing that is interesting is the statistics (who reads the Blog) - it seems that the previous time I've written about statistics has been one of the most read postings (see below).

Looking at the Google Analytics statistics it seems that since the start of measurement (I've installed Google Analytics 2 weeks after the Blog start) more than 10,000 distinct persons (10,139 to be exact) have read this Blog. I don't have any illusion that there are 10,000 people who are interested in event processing, and some got due to the wonders of the almighty Google (e.g. looked for a picture of unicorn), so a better metrics is to see that 1/3 of the readers returned more that once, and 1432 readers returned more than 50 times - which is the more reasonable number the amount of people interested in the content. It seems that the amount of people who read all or at least 2/3 of the Blog postings is around 800, and this seem to be the size of effective readership.

What else can I learn from the statistics? The most popular postings are:

(1). Agnon, the dog, playing and downplaying is still, and by far the most popular one, in this posting is one of the postings where I claim that "event processing" is a discipline that stands on its own fits, and not a footnote to database technology or business rule technology.

(2). Revisiting the Blog **2 again which, like this posting, is talking about statistics around this Blog, I wonder why this posting is so popular (or people wanted to look at the map of Arkansas to plan their next holiday.

(3). On infant, professor and unicorn despite the fact that this posting is much younger, it had a lot of traction, some because people are looking for pictures of unicorns, and some because always disputes bring more rating... However, rating is not all, and when I think that I've said all that I need to say about particular topic, I move on.

As far as the geographical distribution of readers: there have been readers from 124 countries.
In terms of amount of entries - the big ones are:
(1). USA, (2). UK, (3). Israel, (4). Japan, (5). Germany, (6). Canada, (7). France and (8).India. As far as the amount of individual readers - the big ones are:
(1). USA, (2). UK, (3). Germany, (4). India, (5). Australia, (6). Israel, (7). France and (8). Holland. So it seems that in Japan I have relatively small (less than 100) but loyal set of readers - I am still looking for some opportunity to travel to Japan - never been there (actually I have never been in India either).
In the USA there are now readers from all 50 states (+ DC) and the leading are: California, Massachusetts and New York. Putting Arkansas map helped - and now Arkansas in the 16th place in the USA in visits.

The three big cities in terms of visits are still : (1). London, (2). New York City, (3). Bangalore.

I'll not survey the negative and positive reviews about this Blog - and let every reader judge. that is the essence of the entire Web 2.o business! -- well, that's all for today; Will return soon with a more professional posting.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi opher
This is Elhabib. Probably your most loyal reader here in Japan. I am glad we have been noticed. Thanks to Almighty Google as you mentioned.
Congratulations on the first anniversary of the blog. We find it informative and very entertaining. We are not yet to be active in the discussion since we come here to learn. The hard work you are doing is encouraging all of us. The moment we felt dumped was when you posted your intention to go back to your lab because the time for CEP has not come.
By the way, we are also “amused” reading you exchanges with Tim Bass. Tim may not be right in his claims that CEP is all about analytics but he had the point when he mentioned that doing business in Asia is different than the west. There is an extra mile to go here. Despite the fact that the emerging CEP technology has been adopted in all continents including my content Africa, we are yet to hear about a public use case here in Japan where we desperately try to make money out of the CEP thing. We have a conservative community here that is very loyal to their old ways of doing business. The mission we are embarking on now is education as Tim pointed out. Our new website CEP JP (http://cep-jp.org/contents/CEPJP) is the first step in that direction. Being a member of EPTS, that is part of our responsibility. You will notice that we have translated the CEP glossary into Japanese and plan to do more.
OK, don’t want to be too long. I look forward to talking to you at the EPTS meeting in September.
We are hoping to see you in your business hat here in Japan soon. Alternatively, make Japan the destination for your summer vacation next year. You will get back with pictures for the blog enough for the next five years.
Best regards
Elhabib
CAC Japan
abdelftah@cac.co.jp

Opher Etzion said...

Hi Elhabib. First - I did not went back to research because the "time for CEP has not come", on the contrary, since IBM got on track for the current generation of products in this area, I thought that I have better added value in working on the next generation. I'll gladly meet you and the other CAC guys in Stamford and hope you'll contribute to the discussions in the EPTS meeting. Thanks a lot for translating the EPTS glossary to Japanese.

cheers,

Opher