AssembleMe

Check out this visualization of support for same sex marriage, state by state.  It's absolutely fascinating how fast change is coming to the US on this issue.

Be sure to add BaselineScenario to your blog role -- they have some great stuff.

In preparation for the holidays, I've been looking for ways to drive traffic to two new landing pages on Shopobot -- namely our iPod and Canon price guides.  I ran across RealTrafficSource.com randomly and I noticed they have dirt cheap rates for driving traffic to your site, so I thought I'd investigate more.

First thing I noticed was the offering sounded a bit shady.  Usually if you're buying traffic for a quarter of a cent per click (their cheapest package is 1,000 visitors for $2.50) to $0.0001 per click (their most expensive package) you're going to get a lot of junk traffic.  I was wondering what their source of traffic is -- but their website doesn't give much information:

Our traffic comes from our own large network of specialized websites and from expired domains, each with its own narrow market, we have come across during our long experience in the online marketing industry. Because we've been in the business so long, we know where to find the hard-to-get traffic.

Our own network of websites receives thousands of visitors every day. We collect this traffic and, using a special algorithm, deliver it to our customer's website.

Well, fair enough!  I thought I'd give it a try -- because if worse comes to worse I'm only out $30.

After a day or so I started seeing hits.  One thing I've noticed is that 2/3rds of the hits are coming from Russia, Ukraine, and Romania.  Hmmm, odd.  Here's what I saw in Google Analytics:

Since you can only really use Shopobot if you live in North America, this isn't exactly what I'd like to see.

On another website I manage an individual user tried using RealTrafficSource.com and didn't find much success.  In fact, 100% of visitors left the site immediately upon viewing the page.  Check it out in Google Analytics again:

100%?  Ouch.

After this has run for a while I'll check my log files to see if I can find out more about these mysterious Russian visitors and what they've done on my website.  However, the bottom line for now is that this seems like a bad deal for any websites that require American or English Speaking visitors.

I'll update this post with any findings.

Check out this awesome chart of daylight by time of year and latitude.

Big props to Thesevenseas for this creation.

Check out this awesome visualization of the Lord of the Rings, along with a few other (less epic) moives. Hop on over to xkcd to see the full sized visualization.

(Hey, xkcd, make this into a poster so I can hang it up on my wall!)

Check out this great piece in Forbes about how the cellphone market is quickly becoming commoditized
(like all technology) and is finally starting to experience downward price pressure.

Check out the full piece, The $10 Phone Bill here.

Although he buried it after a lot of smug mockery of the WSJ, Krugman posted a nice infographic that shows how the world's major economies began to recover from the great depression. The implication is that the first economies to bounce back were the first to ignore the gold standard.

Here's a fun brain teaser courtesy of Tanya Khovanova’s Math Blog:

Which shape below is the odd man out?

Tufte has an interesting discussion going on about project management charts and how they generally suck. Check out this beautiful illustration of how project management could look:

Beautiful!  Just seeing this makes me want to work on this project!  Check out the full discussion here.

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting analysis of response rates to messages for the online dating site OKCupid.

A few interesting findings:

• Black women had the hardest time getting a response to a message, even from black males.
• Middle Eastern women had the easiest time getting a response to a message.
• White men responded less than every other group of males.

Check out the original post for many more findings.

Check out this great interactive visualization from the New York Times that shows how American's spend each minute of their day.