Clicking the tabs from left to right
It looks like visitors to the Resolver Systems website are predisposed to clicking through the tabs at the top of the page, from left to right. Does anyone else see this kind of thing?
The figures I'm using are from Google Analytics, which is based on JavaScript embedded in the page and run in the browser, so I don't think it's caused by bots/crawlers just clicking each of the tabs in turn because they appear in the page source code in that order -- and in addition, if it were a result of automated systems, you'd expect a consistent bias, whereas it's actually quite variable.
Here's the full dataset. Each line below shows a Google Analytics overlay, which tells you for each selected tab what percentage of people clicked on each of the other tabs during July 2009:
It looks like we managed to break tracking of access to our "About us" page for that month, so I put the results for that tab aside and did a bit of simple statistical analysis (in Resolver One, naturally) on the remaining data. The results:
The "from" tab is top to bottom, the "to" tab is left to right -- so, the chance of someone who is currently on the "Buy" tab clicking "Download" is 29%. The average chance of someone clicking on a given tab across all sources, and the standard deviation of those figures, are summarised at the bottom. Each cell is coloured based on how many standard deviations from the average it lies -- if it's more popular than it normally is, it appears red, if it's less popular it's green. The intensity of the red/green is based on how much more/less popular it is.
I think there's a very clear pattern -- the line of red starting at the "Home tab to Buy tab" cell, and going down and to the right to the "Screencasts tab to Get help tab" cell. That indicates that people are significantly more likely to click on a tab when it's the one to the right of the one they're currently looking at.
You can download the analysis spreadsheet from here, and if you don't already
have a copy of Resolver One to run it on (shame on you ;-), you can get an eval
version here.
This is interesting -- is it just our visitors, or have other people seen similar results?
A Resolver One model on the FT politics blog
Yesterday, my co-founder Robert Smithson presented a fascinating spreadsheet he's built in Resolver One to one of the Financial Times' two UK political correspondents, Jim Pickard. The spreadsheet gives predictions about the next UK general election using a clever methodology Robert has developed, and if you're interested in british politics or clever spreadsheets, you should definitely take a look.
Jim has blogged about it, and Robert has also done a guest post on his father's incredibly popular PoliticalBetting.com website; unsurprisingly, our website traffic's spiked a bit today...
[Update, 27 July] Looks like The Register found the story interesting too!
Talk at London Geek Night
Last Thursday I did a talk at the London Geek Night about the business side of founding Resolver Systems; 10 minutes or so of prepared talk and then 20 minutes of Q&A, which was the structure suggested by the night's organiser, Robert Rees. Skills Matter recorded the whole thing, and the video's online now (albeit inexplicably categorised under Erlang). Be warned that I was talking particularly quickly that evening, even by my normal standards of gabble, so you'll have to listen carefully :-)
Other talks that evening were from my colleague Jonathan Hartley, who talked about the tech side of Resolver Systems, and Martin Dittus of Last.fm, who talked about some of the heavy-duty tech infrastructure they use.
Resolver One and Digipede
We kicked off the beta programme for version 1.5 of Resolver One today. It's got some really cool new features, including a console that lets you interact with your spreadsheets from a command-line-style interface, but there's one other change, a tiny one that enables something really interesting -- a combination of the spreadsheet's ease-of-programming with seriously parallel computing that I don't think is really possible with other tools.
We've been in touch with Digipede since Dan Ciruli, their Director of Products, blogged about Resolver One in January 2008. The Digipede Network is a system that allows you to easily code .NET programs that run on a grid of computers -- and he'd set up a Resolver One spreadsheet that was able to call into code running on a Digipede Network to perform part of its calculations, which was particularly impressive given that he only needed to spend five minutes or so putting it together. Looking at what he'd done, I found myself asking "wouldn't it be even cooler if the thing you ran on your compute farm was itself a spreadsheet?"
Ada Lovelace day
I'm a day late, but having just heard about Ada Lovelace day I couldn't but help make a slightly schmalzy post.
The aim of the day is to celebrate women who excel in technology, and while I've worked with some great women developers over the course of my career, there's one who stands out. Yes, it's my mother :-)
Back in the 60s, Yvonne Thomas was one of the first women to do Electronic Engineering (or Electron Physics as it was then called) at Southampton University, and she went on to work at various defence-related companies (that being the best place to be in tech back then). By 1974 she was working on ALGOL compilers at (I think) ICL, and then she decided to pack it in to raise her unruly -- but generally grateful -- offspring. Von, thanks for doing that, and for bringing me up to be technically able. There are few coders out there who can honestly say that they had programming fed to them in the womb, and I'm glad to be one of them.
She's still coding, and is now happily building an ever-expanding web application that links together all the information she's found in her genealogical researches.
Right, enough sentimentality. Back to our regularly-scheduled gadget- and business-of-software-related blogging...
SSDs
I'm very tempted to switch to SSDs for my home machines' boot drives. Videos like this aren't entirely representative of what's easily affordable, but it's pretty impressive...
One-day discount
We're running a one-day discount at Resolver Systems today -- you can get an unrestricted copy of Resolver One for $75! There's more about Resolver One here.
Click-through ratios
Shortly after writing about the correlation between music copyright and composers in England, I read one of Mike Masnick's thought-provoking anti-copyright posts over at Techdirt, and thought he might be interested in the book review that had prompted my post. I dropped him a line, and last Thursday he wrote an article which mentioned it.
He was kind enough to include a "hat-tip" link to my post as well, so I prepared for a spike in visitors here. After all, Google Reader says that Techdirt has 750,000 subscribers to its RSS feed; allowing for other aggregators, that means that maybe 800,000 people would have read Mike's article, and although there was no particular reason for them to click on the link to this site, I figured idle interest would probably lead to a few. The question was, how many?
Resolver Systems' banner ads tend to get three or four click-throughs per thousand impressions, and Google Adwords one or two per thousand. I figured that a hat-tip would be less effective than either of these, and might get one click-through in every two or three thousand, leading to maybe 300 visitors. On Friday I asked the people I know on Twitter what they thought I might expect, and their guesses ranged from 200 to 10,000.
The actual number was two. Not two hundred, but two visitors. When I mentioned this on Twitter, I discovered that they were both people who knew me anyway (presumably wondering if the "Giles Thomas" in question was the one they knew).
That's really quite a surprising data point.
(BTW, if you were interested in the music-related posts here, and were wondering when the next one was coming, I've moved that side of my blogging over to a new site: the Baroque Project.)
R in Resolver One (and perhaps IronPython generally)
We've just announced the winner of this month's round of our competition at Resolver Systems, and it's a great one; Marjan Ghahremani, a student at UC Davis, managed to work out how you can call R (a powerful statistical analysis language) from our spreadsheet product Resolver One. You can download a ZIP file with a detailed PDF describing how it works and a bunch of examples.
If you're not interested in Resolver One, but want to use R from your own IronPython scripts, you may be able to do that too, using her instructions as guidelines -- I've not tried it myself, but there are no obvious blockers. If you do try it out, I'd love to hear how it goes.