Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

People keep saying that the Alexa and Klout metrics are worthless. From a purely scientific point of view, they have a point: the algorithms to calculate the world-wide ranking of your site or your world-wide influence are bound to be suboptimal. It's madness to think that you can 'measure' something like 'influence'. Yet that doesn't mean the metrics are worthless! Let's see how I use Alexa and Klout:

Heb je altijd al willen weten hoe dat in zijn werk gaat, schrijven voor een grote uitgeverij? Wil je weten hoeveel je verdient aan het schrijven van zo'n boek? En wat is een 'goede oplage' voor een boek dat niet de nieuwe Aspe, Harry Potter, Jeroen Meus of Piet Huysentruyt is? Je leest het allemaal hier:

James Gosling said it about JDK 1.4 users: Will You Please Stop Using 1.4.2... There was a Death to IE6 website. At iText, we strongly discourage the use of versions prior to iText(Sharp) 5 for both technical as well as legal reasons.

Klout has finally upgraded and now you can immediately see which posts on Twitter, Facebook and G+ had the biggest impact on your score. This was my top-tweet of last week:

I see that many colleagues from the open source world agree with me. Let me explain the context of this tweet.

Take a look at the following cartoon:

A Math teacher is asking a student named Devolder to pay attention. A principle is thinking "maybe the sponsor contract wasn't such a good idea." Why is this NOT funny? What's wrong in this cartoon? Why do I feel the urge to contact Bart Van Tieghem and slap him in the face?

I predicted that August would be better than July. I was right regarding sales; I was wrong regarding the web statistics:

The itextpdf.com site still has a healthy heart beat. There's only one dent in the graphic on August 15th (a holiday in many countries).

Ja, ik heb deelgenomen aan iBoot, en ik vond dat een schitterend initiatief. Ja, ik heb deelgenomen aan FTF-F, en ik vond dat tegenvallen. Wat was het verschil? Dat vond ik onlangs goed verwoord terug in De Standaard, in de column van Dominique Deckmyn:

Looking at the ranking of itextpdf.com, I think the summer vacation is over for most developers:

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