The new record for third highest traffic day set on July 20 was quickly broken on July 27, just one week later. The July 20 record was 3,353 hits. Just one week later, that record was broken as 3,498 hits were recorded on July 27. Additionally, there were 177 visitors on the old site, where traffic has been growing since July 20, for a total of 3,675 hits.
Both records were set on Mondays. Mondays have traditionally been my highest days on both sites. I’m not sure how it is with other sites, but it seems like Mondays may be high traffic days for lots of sites. Traffic slows down on the weekends, and Sundays is typically the worst day of all. Friday is the slowest day during the week.
That’s because at least on my site, I think most folks still access the Internet from work! On my old site, traffic used to get high around 8 AM, often peak around 10 AM-2 PM, and then decline after 5 PM. Late at night and very early in the morning there was little traffic. Part of the problem is that most traffic to my site is from the US. If I were able to draw from around the world, those hourly trends might get a lot fuzzier.
It’s interesting that people still access the Net a lot from work, when one would think they would be working. And when they go home, the last thing they want to do is go on the Net. Same thing on weekends.
As the owner of a website, I’m much in favor of anything that gets low income, poor, working class and even Third World people on the Net. The Internet, even in the US, is still very heavily male and upper income. Traffic from the Third World tends to be the elites. So the Net ends up being a pretty rightwing place. As a Leftist, I would love it if my natural constituency had more access to the Net. Also as a linguist, it would be nice to see speakers of a lot of these lesser spoken languages get on the Net.
It would also be nice to hear the voices of ordinary folks in the Third World. It’s gets tiresome listening to a bunch of elitists all the time.
There are serious problems connecting the world. Much of the Third World still accesses the Net in Internet cafes, when they even have access to the Net. Wireless networks are dramatically needed. Cellphones have unbelievably been able to penetrate the Third World very well, and have ranged down below the mere elites towards more ordinary folks.
The price of a computer is still a big problem. In my apartment complex, I am one of the only folks on the Net, and this is an American city. A computer still costs $400-500, and that’s beyond the reach of most of my neighbors. On top of that, broadband is another $25-50 month.
In a lot of areas near me, we now have virtual monopolies on broadband. You have a choice between cable or DSL, and both are seriously overpriced. There’s also satellite, and that’s even more. Each seems to have a monopoly in its area, and no one seems to be competing on price. Instead it looks like non-competition agreements and price-fixing.
In the mountains where I type this, you can get your broadband from the cable monopoly, the phone monopoly or the satellite monopoly. Obviously, the customer gets screwed hard by all these monopolies, a monopolistic fact as simple as night following day.
I don’t know what to do about it. The problem is that the evil cable companies have laid a lot of their own lines. Since they own the lines, it’s going to be hard to force them to make others use them. You run into the problem of the phone monopolies, who typically put up the poles and run the underground phone lines.
Around here, the government does a shitty job of regulating the phone companies. The cable monopolies, as natural a monopoly as the phones, are an unregulated monopoly. If the phone, electric and gas natural monopolies are regulated, cable needs to be too.
For starters.
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