My SiteMeter stats have made one thing clear over the last several months - my traffic from Google and Google Images is growing rapidly, and no other search engine, including Yahoo!, MSN, Live.com or AOL, are even making a dent.

There's really no second place. Instead, there's Google, and then there's everybody else.


Google traffic to louisgray.com dwarfs all competitors.

In the last few months, referrals from Google Images have largely taken over the #1 position from Google's standard searches. Over time, the ANtics comics have drawn a tremendous amount of traffic from curious baseball fans, and the occasional odd post on The Simpsons and adult material have delivered the lion's share of the rest.

Using the Summary Web logs analysis application, I reviewed the site logs from January 1 forward, and saw the massive gap between Google and everyone else to be more than I had ever anticipated. It turns out that thanks to Google's unique combination of Google search, Google Blog Search, Google Image Search and Google Reader, the company is delivering almost 96% of all referrals from search engines to my blog. AOL, MSN, Live.com and Yahoo! don't even crack one percent apiece.

A lot of people are concerned that Google's position is a bad thing for consumers and for competition, and it's clear the competition isn't making a good show in this race. But if the other players even had serviceable offerings, this would be a different story. The sad truth is that they don't. If they want to stick around, they should either dramatically enhance their offerings, or forget competing with Google, and stick to other tools they do well - whether it be start pages, instant message tools, news or social media. As it stands today, the verdict is in, Google has won, and they've won big.

Now that we've broken through the "Great Netflix Backlog of 2007", Kristine and I are trying to enjoy her summer off from teaching by catching up on some long-awaited DVDs, some which were shows well recommended by others, and some we instead opted to skip when they were in the theater.

Last week, we enjoyed the topical comedy "Thank You For Smoking", which followed a big tobacco lobbyist and his crusade to creatively promote cigarette consumption, while at the same time, maintaining his sanity and being a good role model as a father. At a time when so many communities are becoming smoke free, and headlines of death and disease are common, the lead actor, a spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, had quite a tightrope walk to do, to espouse both the purported positives and minimize the evils of cigarettes.

The movie is amusingly done, such that you find yourself rooting in favor of the tobacco lobbyist, and against the political and cultural machines that swing in action to destroy his work. Unfortunately for him, he becomes too tightly entwined with an investigative reporter, who mixes business with pleasure, and costs him his job. But unmatched in his ability to spin out of the situation, he survives.

Surprisingly, the film isn't preachy. It doesn't try to convince the audience that smoking is evil, or in reverse, that the lead actor's spin is on target. Simply by placing us in the mind of one of America's most likely hated people, we find his daily challenge intriguing. He didn't convince me to start smoking, but I'm definitely glad I saw the film.

When it comes to e-mail etiquette, I'm quite particular. I tend to roll my eyes and think less of people who don't know the difference between "Reply" and "Reply All", I'm not all that forgiving with typos, and think that the way e-mails are written should be in line with your own capability for writing or communicating. So when I goof up, I'm particularly annoyed. Today, I most certainly goofed.

Late last September, I had tried to send a message at the office via the Microsoft Entourage desktop client, as Webmail was having issues. For some reason, that didn't go through either. After a few hours of struggles, I ended up sending the note from my personal e-mail account, using Apple Mail, and hadn't opened up Entourage since. Until today.

Prompted to revisit Microsoft's sorry excuse cousin to Outlook for the Mac, I fired up Entourage and set it up to synchronize, so each folder would be updated. As the app sluggishly whirred to life, filling my inbox with the latest, a familiar "Sending Mail" sound echoed. Oops. Seconds later, my message from September hit an internal distribution list and I was made to look like a fool, as the note gave a snapshot in time from 10 months prior. In the age of instant receipt and Blackberries, there was no good reason to recall. Instead, I just sighed and apologized to all for the error.

I hate that. The next step is to just make sure I never open Entourage again.

Update: Ars Technica in parallel has posted a note on curing "sender's remorse"...

Cross-posted to Athletics Nation...

Were you at that game where the A's got shut out? What? You want to know which one?

Trust me, we know how you feel. And it looks like the players are feeling the strain of being a very average team with some quite below-average players. Jettisoning Kendall was a start, but the ANtics show there's much more to go...


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