I’ve been something of an internet entrepreneur since the early days of the web, developing a variety of online projects, some more successful than others. In that time I’ve never ceased to marvel at the pace of change and the sophistication of new net developments.

One factor has remained depressingly the same though. From dial-up to superfast mobile broadband, the popularity of one measure of website traffic still hangs around in the public mind: Hits.

Only today I’ve seen the traffic to the new Police.uk site quoted by newspapers and the broadcast media in hits. The Scilly Isles are trending on Twitter because Prince William and Kate are thought to be eyeing up Scilly for their honeymoon — not surprising really as some or all of it is owned by William’s father, the Prince of Wales, aka the Duke of Cornwall, and will one day be his. The Scilly Isles website has had its visitations quoted by the media in hits.

Oh, come on, this is the most inaccurate measure of website traffic you could possibly employ and constitutes a fraud on the public. Here’s a simple primer for the hitsters:

Different measures of website traffic
Hits: Counts every object on the screen you land on — every picture, widget, block of text, graphic and whatnot. Almost always a huge overstatement of traffic.
Pageviews: Often used by advertisers as it accurately portrays the “click” potential of ads, rather than exact traffic volume.
Visits: Some people visit more than once a day. Having clicked on an ad once, it’s unlikely they will do so next time round, so this is not much used by advertisers.
Unique Visitors: This is now considered the most finely-tuned pointer to the level of traffic accessing a website page. However, it’s not measured directly, but by an algorithm involving other statistics. Awstats, an industry-standard stats gatherer, supplies only monthly figures for uniques for that reason.

One company relies on clicks registered on its toolbar application. Since the app will be used mainly by geeks, tech sites come out well ahead.

There are many ways of compiling website traffic statistics, some proprietary to individual businesses, but the whole field is anything but dependable.

One thing’s for sure, “hits” are totally redundant and tell the enquirer very little that the “bandwidth” stats don’t. They are used only by the technically illiterate, or by those who want deliberately to inflate the traffic to their sites.

Perhaps our cuddly coalition should make it a fraud offence to quote traffic in hits on commercial websites, since it’s clearly hitting well below the belt.

John Evans

There’s a wonderfully dorkish bit in Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol when a scientist attempts to prove the existence of the human soul by weighing a man’s body moments before and after his death. The difference must be the weight of the departing soul.

This begs a truckload of questions, of course, not least that the soul may not be physical at all. However, the author’s “noetic” scientist reports an infinitesimally small difference so, Eureka!

All great fun. The trouble is, something similar is happening across most of the conventional sciences. The recent swine flu pandemic scare is a good example of vested interests skewing the truth and driving massive public expenditure for no other reason than greed. So is “catastrophic man-made global warming” with its vast new global infrastructure, all paid for by you and me in the middle of a long and crippling recession.

I was thinking of that passage in Dan Brown’s book last week while watching someone blowing bubbles from washing-up liquid. The bubbles seemed to be weightless, even though they are made up of physical substances. But then that’s the nature of bubbles, they appear to be miraculous at first … then they come down to earth or just burst in the air. One should never invest hard coin in bubbles.

Unhappily, lots of people do, and go on doing so even when countless bubbles have burst down the centuries.

Human bubbles are made up of ideas and mental states composed of wishes and deceptions. They form into powerful psychological contagions as they mature, and even take on an apparently material basis as they grow, often posing as something different.

The two current global bubbles are, 1) the myth of catastrophic man-made global heating, and 2) the notion that global decisions are self-evidently better than local ones. Both are underpinned and given force by one of the most lumberingly under-performing institutions in history: the United Nations.

In the economic realm, there are the surpluses of cash built up by exporting countries, China and Japan, matched by the gaping deficits of the US, the UK and many European nations.

Bubbles define our world. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Trillions of our electronic banknotes are now being thrown at the global boiling hypothesis by unrepentant politicians, some well meaning, others self-promoting. The problem is, that bubble has burst.

Global warming by man-produced carbon in the atmosphere has been found not to exist, at least on any timescale we can measure or plan for. The data has been shown to be wrong, or deliberately tampered with. The politicians and their less-than respectable allies — hordes of anti-capitalists and unwashed any-cause hysterics — have gone too far down this road to pull back now. Most will retire to rewrite their personal histories, leaving a new generation to clean up the mess at huge further costs to us.

Here’s a proposition. All new ideas involving the spending of public money should be examined painstakingly for speculative (imaginary) content:

1. What do we actually know, and what are we being advised to believe?
2. Is there a real problem that we can see before our eyes?
3. If it becomes necessary to spend public money to avert an apparent threat in the future, let’s spend it on things that will be useful even if that threat is found to be baseless.

A good example from the past is London fog. In Victorian times, right up until the early 1950s, London was often draped in a pall of yellow smog caused by the burning of cheap sulphurous coal. Millions of lives were lost early from respiratory diseases, heart problems, and simple misery. China and India are still burning this stuff.

The solution was the appliance of science at its best: practical technology. The National Coal Board, then a nationalized industry, brought in two eminent philosopher-scientists: Dr Jacob Bronowski, best remembered for his stagey, but brilliant, BBC series, The Ascent of Man, and E.F. Schumacher, author of the evergreen Small is Beautiful, which was based on Burmese Buddhism. Polymaths both.

They developed the first smokeless fuel. Politicians did their bit and passed laws making it an offence to burn anything else in the big cities, and hey presto, problem all but solved.

The trillions now committed to various schemes for carbon reduction, dreamt up by naive politicians, including the fraudulent brokerage schemes and the “new industries” devoted to pulling wool over our eyes, should be re-evaluated by incoming hard-eyed administrations looking for real value, not notional empires in the stratosphere.

Once again, reducing smokey particulates in the air is worth spending money on for solid health reasons. But the vast array of wind farms and new French nuclear reactors, should be replaced by cheaper, simpler, and more reliable, home-grown alternatives: for example, natural gas derived from Britain’s own methane beds and oil shale deposits. While the Americans and others are pioneering this new technology, Britain — led by the proboscis by bureaucrats in Brussels — is prevented from doing so by self-inflicted barriers reaching as far ahead as 2050. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.

By what natural right do these people boss future generations around? The answer lies in the feeble compliance of our lacklustre politicians.

Why not cut free from the whole ridiculous rigmarole and go our own way for our national interests alone. Everyone else is secretly doing this to some degree. If we succeed, you can be sure others will follow. That’s real influence, not the shadowy, pretend kind put forward by Gordon Brown.

Summary: Always be aware of bubbles as they form, and only ever spend public money on what is immediately apparent. Speculation on thinly-based science is rarely profitable. Nature is cyclical and comes and goes, rises and falls in roughly predictable ways. Mankind’s lives are too short to grasp the full picture. Some kind of trust in the future is essential. Most of it is unknowable. If we accept our limitations, we will be happier here and now.

Solution: Replace the top tier of government scientists with practical philosophers who can think any situation through without spending money.

John Evans

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We’ve been beavering away at this for quite a while. Our new company, Local Ventures Online, will launch Devon & Cornwall Online around June 15.

Designed by Swedish web maestro Thord Hedengren, the site is a hybrid between a local newspaper and a classy weblog.

It’s also an advertising vehicle across a number of local and national fields, concentrating on familar categories, like Holidays, Property, Finance, Professionals … and many more.

There are some great deals for advertisers in the first three months, while we tweak and add complexity, so get in quick before all the prime positions are taken. We’ve already got banners for Sainsbury’s, Scottish Widows, World Vision and, yes, Syntagma Media, among others.

Don’t lose out on our bonanza introductory offers. In the first instance, contact: john@syntagmamedia.com for an electronic ratecard.

A view frequently expressed by internet entrepreneurs and commentators is: “Local is good”. To put it bluntly, it means that there’s more money to be made by serving a local community with advertising than by offering global coverage.

Three years ago that was not true. Even when the dollar was low and the pound high, a British website could make more from U.S. ads than British ones. I know, I tried both.

Here I’m more concerned with very local conditions: individual towns and counties. And, in particular, that “river of gold”, classified advertising.

Small Ads, as most people call them, are deserting local newspapers in a mad stampede and migrating online. Big ticket categories like cars, properties and jobs are piling into specialized websites where you can upload pictures and text, then sit back and wait for the response.

Local papers are losing out across the board in these areas. Many are closing down, most are currently up for sale. A month ago the Daily Mail group sold the prestigious London Evening Standard for £1 to a Russian oligarch who was once a KGB spy. The original Northcliffe must be spinning in his tomb.

The economics are stark: the costs of printing and distributing a newspaper or magazine, to the standards we have grown used to, are now prohibitive. Big websites may not yet be yielding a profit, but their smaller, nippier competitors are, or are about to do just that.

The question of where we will get our local news from is a pertinent one, especially as many councils are using badly-drafted anti-terror legislation to spy on people’s habits and activities. Not only do we get a KGB spymaster owning a major local newspaper, but KGB methodology too.

Clearly we need to be informed in our local patch. While 24-hour news concentrates on mainstream concerns at a national and international level, big TV is generally retreating from small stories in small towns. It’s not at all obvious whether small stations can fill the gap, while radio is blind and full of pop music.

It’s also true that big broadcasting and big print occasionally miss the point big time. The Daniel Hannan moment where a politician’s denunciation of Gordon Brown bypassed the mainstream media completely, but became a worldwide hit on YouTube, is a typical case. The story subsequently reflected back into MSM as an internet phenomenon rather than a political one.

Local information needs a light and deft touch, often absent from the big battalions.

As local newspapers fade away, they will be replaced by cheaply run local websites — a cut above blogs but using the same kind of technology and methods.

Here at Syntagma we are setting up a separate company to move into this space. We will start with a Devon and Cornwall site in May, followed by Somerset, and other counties down the line.

It’s an exciting time to be online in the content business. Costs are low, opportunities wide. But above all, with a whole tier of local news disappearing, including ITV’s variable contributions, it’s all to play for.

Local is not only good, it may well be best.

John Evans

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A new feature summarizing policy ideas suggested on this site.

From: DIARY: Education, March 1, 2009.

The State education system in Britain just gets worse and worse. Hyperactive jobsworths are forever coming up with new wheezes that dazzle in the headlines for an hour but have no merit in practice.

The entire structure is probably beyond repair after 12 years of scorched earth policies for everything that promotes a well-stocked mind and an understanding of the principles that stand behind ideas and formulations.

The Conservatives have yet to jettison some of Labour’s most pernicious obsessions, like the refusal to allow selection in academic subjects. I have high hopes they will do so in office.

But what should the basic education system provide?

It should give students the ability to position themselves in time and space, with historical narrative as the time axis, and geography as the space axis. Both subjects have been severely downgraded in primary and secondary schooling.

The curriculum should also be shorn of soft “social” subjects better learnt at home or through experience. All attempts at social engineering should be strictly outlawed.

Psychobabble has become a wordy substitute for a true understanding of human nature, which is not a machine. Allied to that, PC (political so-called correctness) has assumed fascist proportions in attempts to control the thoughts of the population. Schools lead the way as mind-cleansing centres of anything with which the government disagrees.

Why do they do that? Because “they” — and we know who they are — want us all to be just like them.

Sorry, we don’t.

A lost generation of schoolchildren from the Labour years will probably never be redeemed and will haunt the future as they carry the mouldy seed of mediocrity forward.

The Conservatives can make a start on creating a new wave of educated young people with a better grasp of the fundamentals and of more use to the 21st-century world.

From: Conservatives dream of Silicon Alley, February 27, 2009.

The British happen to be very good at these secondary and tertiary levels of the manufacturing process. One thing holds them back.

The national curriculum and the educational establishment relentlessly discriminate against “abstract thinking”, the basic skill for succeeding in these areas. Universities are encouraged to subvert their course lists in favour of cottonwool subjects like media studies and sports management.

In Britain, you can select students for State schooling only in areas of music, sport, and other physical and dexterity arts. You can’t select for mathematics or disciplines which require abstract thinking, like philosophy, theoretical physics or logic.

Stupidly and destructively, the Labour party has created all manner of taboos against it, raising academic selection almost to criminal status. So far, the Conservatives have gone along with this for a quiet life. They fear the demonizing power of the left, which is far nastier than they are.

That amounts to national suicide, especially for a country that was, within living memory, responsible for 55 percent of the world’s primary inventions and discoveries.

If George Osborne wants to adopt the can-do attitudes of West Coast Silicon Valley and Seattle, let him sort out that problem first. Britain needs to train home-grown developers and software engineers, not import them from India and the Far East. More engineers in general are also urgently needed.

From: Why is Gordon Brown protecting the rest of the world?, January 31, 2009.

Ralph Waldo Emerson had a simple solution to most economic woes:

“If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”

That worthy objective can’t be achieved by government. All it can do is ensure that education is tip-top, support meritocracy and real social mobility, and give up trying to micromanage national life.

Gosh, I think I’m making a case for a Conservative Government.

It would be a new dawn, would it not?

The Conservative Shadow Education spokesman, Michael Gove, will have his work cut out to make instant improvements to a depressingly hopeless State education system. It will take three Parliaments to get the structure right, never mind the quality teachers it needs.

Opposition from the blockheaded educational establishment will be fierce. An alternative approach might be to set up a separate system alongside the State one, allowing parents to migrate across voluntarily. It would be difficult for teachers’ unions to strike against the freely made choices of parents and pupils.

Abolishing the politically contaminated teachers’ training colleges would also be a godsend to good heads and concerned parents.