Brandon Adcock dot com

Just an update about the previous post. The post about getting fired from Dairy Queen, the one below, made #1 on Digg this past Friday. It was submitted during Thursday afternoon and made popular in the wee hours of Friday morning while I was sleeping. It was a nice surprise to say the least, to see that 40,000+ people had come to my site while I was sleeping. The post received about 700 users on Thursday, 71,000 on Friday, and so far about 2,200 Saturday and today each. I am pretty happy with how the site held up, never offically going down but getting slow at some points during the day on Friday. Kudos to the wp-cache plugin helping with the load and Nationvoice.com for hosting my site for me in Dallas (through The Planet I believe). I will post a much more comprehensive update later this week on life after the front page of Digg, covering total users, time on site, number of links gained, jump in alexa, jump in Technorati ranking, and how long did I continue to see traffic from from this particular Digg post, which received a little over 1800 Diggs. Basically just an in-depth look at how the site was affected by becoming the #1 article on Digg.

*Per Jon West’s need for me to specify, when I say #1, I mean #1 across all topics or top of the top 10 list.

This is how you get fired from Dairy Queen

A recent study at Vanderbilt University found that women who get cosmetic breast implants are 3 times more likely to commit suicide than women who do not. I am assuming that “cosmetic breast implants” refer to people who are receiving a breast enlargement and not implants for some other medical reason.

The study had some other interesting findings, these same women with breast implants are more likely to die from smoking, drug or alcohol abuse than women who do not have breast implants. It is definitely worth the read.

A colleague of mine passed me this study in an email today, I am surprised that I have not seen it before. Nonetheless, it is a very interesting find that anyone in the Search industry should read.

Cornell University did a study of 397 search queries to determine eye tracking patterns for Google results. They used undergraduates students to perform searches in areas related to movies, travel, music, politics, local, and trivia. The picture below is a representation of the results they found.

While this study only covers organic/natural results, not paid, and does not include anything past the first page, I don’t think it would be an outlandish assumption to say that these trends also hold true for those two areas as well. It is obvious from this heatmap image, how important rankings are and specifically being “above the fold”. I would be very interested to see Cornell repeat this study after a few years and see if there is a pattern change of how users look at search results. Maybe users would become accustomed to seeing “spammy” results at the top of the page for certain queries and start to naturally shift focus to lower results. Or, the results could be similar. Anyway, its food for thought.

Link to original study

Mirror For Digg. Original is here

Digg Mirror, Original posting on Digg is here

I have been a big fan of HBO tv shows for quite sometime. In my opinion, outside of South Park and the Discovery Channel, HBO shows are the only ones worth watching. In May of 2002, TV Guide rated the top 50 shows of all time and only 2 cable shows appeared on that list, The Sopranos at #5 and Larry Sanders at #38, both of which are HBO shows. I will save my commentary of the Sopranos for a later date, but I will say it might possibly the best show ever created.

I have been watching Entourage since the middle of season 2, it is currently halfway through the 4th season, and it only seems to get better. Kevin Dillon (plays Johnny “Drama” Chase) and Jeremy Piven (Ari Gold) make the entire show. Piven (who won an Emmy in 2006 for the role as Ari) and Dillon are both nominated for 2007 Emmys in the Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series category, and they both deserve it. If you have not seen the show - watch it, if you are behind in the episodes - catch up, and if you do watch it regularly - I’ll give you a cookie. The show is hilarious and entertaining. They are like South Park in a sense that they will make fun of and use just about everyone in their shows, especially in Ari’s one liners.

In light of a recent management scandal at HBO and The Sopranos going off-the-air, they really need to keep Entourage around (The Wire too for that matter) to make sure their programming stays top notch. Also, tip of the hat to Drama For President since it is the best and just about only non-HBO resource on Entourage. The site used to do a really good job on posting rumors and spoilers last season, they have been slacking some this season, but nonetheless, it is a really good site.