More: 60's Teenage Idol, Ricky Nelson

60's Teenage Idol, Ricky Nelson, of Ozzie and Harriet TV fame.

Believe What You Say


Waitin' School (with brother, David, on scene)


Teenage Idol

Old Elvis Festival - Courtesy of YouTube

Back to the 50's and 60's!

Don't Be Cruel


Love Me Tender


Heartbreak Hotel


Doin' The Best I Can


UPDATE:
Bush Takes Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to Graceland for Tour of Elvis' Home

Marty Robbins - Courtesy of YouTube

Up there with eternal favorite, Elvis Presley, is country singer, Marty Robbins, with the unequalled and un-imitated dulcet voice. Give a listen!

Singing The Blues


A White Sport Coat


El Paso

A Layman Looks At Site Visits Data Of Popular Political Blogs

The figures tallied by blog metering/tracking sites such as the very popular Site Meter may have unknowingly faced some mute challenges or doubts from certain quarters at times past with regard to their numbers' accuracy and authenticity. But most of these doubts might have been erroneously premised based on a lack of understanding of the data being counted. Thus, to this day nothing has really been publicly exposed to show that those figures as reflected in most blog sites do not really accurately reflect what they are supposed to show, whether as visits/unique visits, or page views. Thus, for all intents and purposes, these numbers reflect actual visits to the blogs.

Lately, this stubborn issue has expectedly re-emerged because of the boiling controversy over the alleged Kosola which targets Markos of DailyKos on his close relationships with buddy Jerome Armstrong. Some commenters in the different sites which have been blogging about this have advanced some rhetoric aimed at challenging the authenticity of the numbers as shown for DailyKos readers, which site is typically described as having at least 500K readers on a daily basis. Without question based on its numbers, it is the most widely-visited site in the entire blogosphere. And the other blogs individually, whether on the right or left of the political spectrum, have not even come close to the liberal-oriented Daily Kos’ numbers. Thus, on the right side, we have such sites as Michelle Malkin, Powerline, Instapundit, and Little Green Footballs, individually registering only in the low 100Ks or even less.

DailyKos actually works more like a collective endeavor whereby an elite select group, including site founder/owner Markos, blogs for the homepage, at times called the frontpagers, and hundreds or thousands of registered members blog on site under their own diaries; while those on the right mentioned above are essentially one-man/women operations, except for Powerline where three lawyers alternately blog on the site.

All the above-named sites use Site Meter and allow third parties to access their statistics. It is good to note that other sites, whether using also Site Meter or some other metering application keep similar statistics private.

DailyKos, Michelle Malkin, Instapundit, and Little Green Footballs


Powerline


Visit Detail From DailyKos


To put in a better light the figures tallied on the above graphics, it may serve us well to find out first what and how Site Meter collects data.

Here is some pertinent information from its site:

What is Site Meter tracking exactly?
Site Meter tracks page views and visits. You may also have heard the term "hits". When someone comes to your site, they generate a "hit" for every piece of content that is sent to their computer. Viewing a single web site page would generate one hit for the page and one hit for every individual graphics file that was on the page. A single page could easily generate a dozen or more hits. When you are browsing a site, every time you follow a link, it is treated as a single "page view". Site Meter defines a "visit" as a series of page views by one person with no more than 30 minutes in between page views.

Why do some of my visitors have visit lengths of 0:00?
That means the visitors are only staying to view a single page and then leaving. The only way that Site Meter knows how long someone is on a site is by the times of each page view. If they only look at a single page and then leave, we don't know how long they looked at the page. If they looked at two pages and left we would know they at least were on the site during the time of the first page view and the second page view. The difference between those two times would be the length of the visit.

What is the difference between a visit and a page view?
When you are browsing a site, every time you follow a link to a new web page, it is treated as a single page view. Site Meter defines a visit as a series of page views by one person with no more than 30 minutes in between page views. If you click on a link to another site, and then come back to your site within 30 minutes, you are still on the same visit and Site Meter won't increment the counter. But Site Meter will increment the number of page views recorded for your current visit.

Some personal observations:

1. It appears clear that page view stats are more significant than visits because they tend to give more information about the visitor and what he did on site, his human actions as opposed to those initiated by machines or applications (browser and server, or robots and spiders). And if the visitor views more than one page, we also get a good estimate of his length of stay in the site.

2. We can also discern why under Visit Detail, the Visit Length usually shows zero time. And it is because Site Meter cannot record a visit’s length if the visitor stays only on one page and leaves.

3. We have also learned that visitors from all over the world are recorded. Thus the more popular the blog, one could surmise, the more foreign visitors are recorded.

4. All summaries show that page views per visit averages only 1 and a fraction. In other words, the typical visit views only one page and then some. Since I assume that one can only view a full page and not a portion of it, a good number of visitors view more than one page of the blog.

5. With Site Meter one significant detail about visit increments is that one visitor is given “no more ohan 30 minutes between page views”. A single visitor who spends multiple hours in one internet session could be recorded more than once, if he visits one site multiple times, and allows more than 30 minutes between visits. This applies to Site Meter patrons, but other tracking services may have longer time limits, or may be more discerning and discriminating such as defining characteristics of unique visitors.

6. Now, compare the above to a couple of sites, one receiving under 300 visits a day and the other only 16 visits a day.

The Ignatian Perspective and Philippine Commentary


Average visit length of The Ignatian Perspective is pegged at 8:32 minutes, with 2.6 page views per visit. Philippine Commentary with 277 daily visitors registered an average visit length of 2:40 minutes and 1.7 page views per visit. Yet as recorded, average visit length for DailyKos is a miniscule three seconds and not much better for the rest highlighted above. It is clearly evident that huge numbers of visitors can bring this particular stat to a very low number, taking into account the wide variances in visiting habits of hordes of readers.

Philanthropy, The American Way

Pictured Warren Buffett, Melinda and Bill Gates


My favorite link on Philippine Economics, Go Figure, ran this piece May 15th,
The biggest charity of them all:

I thought the biggest charity would by far be the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It's certainly the most famous. But The Economist found the biggest of them all - the Stickting Ingka Foundation.

The what? Amazingly, it's the nonprofit foundation that operates all the Ikea stores.

And I made the following comment on that post:

I'm a bit sad. I have always promoted and extolled the altruism of Bill Gates through his gargantuan foundation. This revelation may induce me to write him a letter to recommend that he transfers some of his personal stocks to the foundation, so he can get back to having the world's biggest philanthropic foundation. What's another 10B dollars out of a personal fortune of about 60B dollars. HeHeHe.

Viola! Two months later, this latest inspiring news hits media:

Giving generously, the American way
AMERICAN VIEW BY GERARD BAKER

It was this last device that was most noticeable in the letter he sent this week to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In it he pledges an initial "material" contribution of shares in his investment company worth about $1.5 billion (£824 million) and then adds that over the next few years he expects those contributions to reach an "eventually substantial" sum. I suppose that only in the small world occupied by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett could a personal gift not be considered "substantial" until it rises well above $1.5 billion towards the $30 billion the donation is expected to reach.

The generosity of Mr. Buffett puts the Sage of Omaha in a rare class of the greatest American philanthropists in history. In narrow financial terms, and translating large donations and legacies of the past into current purchasing power, it is certainly up there with those of the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Guggenheims. Unlike theirs, Mr. Buffett's generosity is literally self-effacing. The great contributions that wealthy Americans have made to educational, social or cultural betterment, including that of Mr. Gates himself, have usually come at one small but enduring price - eponymity.

For comparison, Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, distributes about $700 million. In Britain, the Department for International Development channelled about £4.2 billion in aid to less developed countries.

Two American philanthropists alone, in other words, will have contributed more to alleviate poverty and disease than the UN's principal development arm. Between them they will have given a sum amounting to about a third of the entire official UK contribution. (Underscoring mine.)

No other nation on earth has the capacity to produce individuals with the wherewithal and the motivation to extend such generosity.

Although official aid is famously lower in the United States than in most of the industrialised world, Americans are, of course, more inclined to give to charity than is almost any other population. Last year they contributed a little over 2 per cent of their gross domestic product, compared with 0.7 per cent in the UK. Of course the bulk of US giving is directed at domestic needs, much of it in the form of giving to local communities and churches. But that doesn't detract from the sheer scale of American generosity. Why is it so large? Income distribution presumably plays a role. Inequality has risen dramatically in the US in the past 25 years. The top 5 per cent of households made more than 21 per cent of total income in 2003, up from 16 per cent 40 years ago. At the very top, the growth in income has been even more spectacular.

Too much can be made of this. It's often forgotten in debates both inside and outside the US that America has some extremely generous expensive social insurance programmes. Social Security, for example, the public pension system, is actually rather more generous than many in Europe, including Britain's. But there's no denying that in terms of their own perception of their relationship to the State and its role in their lives, Americans are substantially different.

Because the comparison made with the Ikea owner in the original article highlighted by Go Figure was not really serious with regard to their serious philanthropy mission, this bit of news should make even bigger the already undisputed biggest private philanthropic organization in the world.

It might serve us better to remember the next time we are tempted to gratuitously trash the US, that these two distinguished persons are Americans, too.

And to end on a lighter trivia. It was also reported that Mr. Buffett will bequeath to his children the not too generous sum (according to him) of one billion dollars. But as I distinctly recall when Bill Gates just had his first son, he also made a similar announcement. And for how much? His was for a more frugal inheritance, something like 25 million dollars for his son.

If you are still conscious and alert, just remember that to a rich man those mentioned amounts are like the way we ordinary mortals value a 100 or a 1000 dollars.