1 January 2008, 16:36 by mark hoekstra

quite a year

(coming up with a blogpost title after this one didn’t take long)

Happy new year everyone!


everyone who got a snail mail xmas card from me will recognize this pic *^_^*
click to enlarge

The last couple of days I could’ve written a ‘review’ of 2007 of course, but, not so long ago I already did something like that. Next to that, for the first time in years, I’ve been some sort of ill for a couple of days. I really can’t recall being sick for more than one day and normally it doesn’t stop me from doing things, but this time it did. But, all is fine and dandy and I’m back being my normal me.

Still, a few words about last year. I guess I can say it’s been quite a year for this website. The way I feel it, this website has been doing okay for a couple of years now, so I was a little surprised to find that, compared to 2006, this site has tripled its figures(!!!).

For those interested, the full year figures of geek technique:

unique visitors: 1.2 million
pageviews: 3.2 million
bandwidth: 1.1 million megabytes

Now, since I do no ads, more pageviews doesn’t necessarily mean a thing to me and I’m not optimizing in any way to get more pageviews either (optimizing being a nice word for putting crap content online like top 10 lists and such, you know, the stuff which does well on digg *^_^*). I strongly believe content is king and that’s where my energy goes. If I’ve got nothing to say, I like to leave it at that and many times I wish other people/blogs would do the same (but they’ve got goals to reach! ads to burn!).

And as a last one, my (wholeheartedly wished) prediction for 2008. Now, first of all, this is just my two cents on the web. Maybe, in a while we can all have laugh about how ridiculously wrong I’ve been on this one, but still, I’d like to share my thoughts here.

I guess a lot of people feel that there’s a bubble (2.0) and a major over valuation of the tech market. But will it burst? Can it burst?

If there’s one bubble which can burst, I guess it’ll have to do with the potential single point of failure of all things startup and present right now and that’s the dependence on ad income and ad income only of nearly all business plans you see. Everyone is betting on the ad market and when Microsoft thinks 1.6% of Facebook is worth $240 million, merely because of the potential ad burning capabilities of Facebook, you know something isn’t quite right, right?

Well, again, maybe I’m horribly wrong on this one. But, one other thing, if I now read top blogs which I love, some of them start to remind me of the christmas tree kind of look which the top search engines back in the day thought would bring them fortune too. Altavista and others changed in god awful ‘portals’ and then there came this one search engine which took the world by storm simply because it had a clean interface. That’s right, Google. Now I do think it’s kinda hypocrite that it’s Google’s core business now to burn ads above all other things they do (imho), but that’s a whole different story ^_^ Anyway, it won’t take long before the top blogs become unreadable because of all the ads they’re trying to push and at this moment there’s only one solution and that’s reading the RSS feeds only, without the ads. Luckily ads in RSS feeds never gained any ground, I guess seeing your subcription base vaporate in thin air has stopped anyone from doing that *^_^*

Anyway, so what will it be? A disruptive technology which will make this ad burning a whole lot more difficult? A majority which will switch to RSS with ad less readers (on or offline)? Ad income which for whatever reason plummets to no value? I don’t know.

I do know I wish something will happen to get all things in the right direction again. Have some true innovation on the web instead of all these marketeers, gold diggers and search engine optimizers. There are other ways to make money than ads, it’ll only take some innovation

Ah well, we’ll see.

In any way, let’s make 2008 a good one, shall we?

*^_^*

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  1. Philippe @ 1 January 2008, 18:29 :

    I completely agree: content is king!
    btw, is that awstats?



  2. markie @ 2 January 2008, 00:02 :

    >is that awstats?

    Yes indeed it is. I also use Google Analytics, to double check figures and such…



  3. Luigi Provenza @ 2 January 2008, 16:58 :

    I’m with you!

    Happy new year!



  4. Orange @ 3 January 2008, 02:06 :

    Hi! Happy New Year!!! I have a question to you. I would be proud of your email adress, for some chat, but, its on you to gave it to me. I have a Thinkpad 600, with 192MB ram, and 800MB HDD. What do you think, about what OS may I put on it? windows is out of the question =)



  5. Alex ~ @ 5 January 2008, 17:06 :

    Happy New Year there Markie.

    Thanks for picking up an EEEpc, i’ve been tempted to get one for the last week, now you can give me inspiration what to do with it!



As mentioned in the Message from Mark's family this site has been made static. This means that it will be no longer possible to comment on his ideas and projects, but that we all can continue to cherish his creativity.

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