Coyote Blog

Someone out there is coining the word "blook" to refer to printed books that archive or are a descendant in some way from a blog.  Since Lulu, who is sponsoring a blooker contest, used my "blook" here as an example in their contest announcement, I guess I have to enter, huh?  While the contest is obviously a clever way to market themselves and perhaps create a new product category, my whole experience with Lulu left me quite satisfied.

I can't emphasize this enough to those of you who may be younger than I am and have lived through fewer generations of computing technology:  Do not count on the digital storage of today being accesable or easily readable 20 years from now.  If you have something you want to make sure your kids can read when they get older, back it up on paper.

I have my coyote blog email forwarded to my work email, which is where I read and respond to it.  I just found out I did a bonehead thing and had my settings for the email all wrong.  I had checked the "keep copy of email on server" in addition to the forward button, and apparently the mailbox on the server I never check filled up.  Sorry if you got an email box full message.  Also, apparently I had some sort of lame spam filter turned on because about half your emails were not getting forwarded to me.  Sorry again.  Hopefully all is fixed now.

Blogging is light this week because I am trying to get a couple of proposals out, and tomorrow I am taking my son to Palm Springs for a baseball tournament. 

Up until the last month, I have been very happy with Amazon Prime, the service where you pay $80(?) for a year of free 2-day delivery.  I am sure I have ordered more stuff from Amazon because of it, and I know I order it faster because I don't wait weeks with things in the shopping cart to group shipments.   

However, in the last month, I have had not one but two orders show up in 7-8 days instead of two.  The first was a Batman Begins DVD, pre-ordered to ship on its release date (which it apparently did).  It was shipped USPS, so there was obviously no hope that it would arrive in 2 days.  The second was a new Nikon D50, which was back-ordered for about a week.

I never really got an explanation for the DVD shipment (maybe they don't apply Amazon Prime to pre-orders?), but I did get some explanation for the Nikon D50.  After writing Amazon, asking them why my item shipped UPS Ground with a 7-8 day delivery time instead of 2-day, which I had paid for with Amazon Prime and was listed as the shipment method on the order page, I got this response  (greetings, apologies, etc. omitted):

After your order leaves our fulfillment center, we may use any
appropriate ground or air shipping service necessary to ensure that
your order is delivered within one or two days, depending on the
delivery option you selected.  These delivery options do not
directly correspond to any carrier-branded shipping services.

I have researched the order in question, and it appears your package
will arrive on time.

We understand that customers who select Two-Day or One-Day delivery
want to receive their orders faster, and we will only use an
alternative shipping method when we know your order will arrive by
the estimated delivery date. 

This is obviously not very clear, but here is what I infer:  When the item was back-ordered, they gave me an updated delivery date range, something like "estimated delivery Nov 2-10".  What I infer from this email is that once they give you an estimated delivery date range, they feel like their obligation to ship 2-day is voided.  The only obligation they now feel they have is to hit that date range.  So, despite the fact that my camera shipped on Nov 2 and I paid for 2-day shipping, they feel they are meeting their obligations if it gets to me by Nov 10, the back end of their estimated range.

The conclusion is not to feel sorry for me that I have to wait to play with my new toy, but that this may be the first sign of a program that is being gutted under profit pressure.  When lawyers looking for loopholes take over the customer service and fulfillment department, things can go downhill pretty quickly.  Note that the "est. delivery date" dodge really gives them carte blanche to get out of the 2-day obligation any time they want, since they set the estimates. 

As a note, I tried to confirm my interpretation with Amazon and have been unsuccessful.  In the tradition of making itself one of the hardest companies in America to actually contact, one can't reply to their customer service email so I can't get an easy confirmation or clarification.  I actually got and called their customer service phone number, which you will never find on their site (write this down:  1-800-201-7575).  The person on the other end of the line was useless, not understanding that I wanted a clarification of the Amazon Prime rules rather than some resolution of a particular order.  She couldn't access the emails I had sent to customer service or had received from them, and didn't seem to understand Amazon Prime rules, so she was no help.  The only funny part was that as I kept trying to clarify what I wanted from her, she kept upping the gift certificate amount she offered me as compensation, despite the fact that I kept saying "I don't want money I want to know what the rules are".  I think I ended up with $20 without even wanting it.

Which makes me wonder why I can't reply to Amazon's customer service emails.  I don't have a problem getting customer support via email rather than the phone, but to make this work I really need to keep working through to resolution with the same person, and the Amazon process makes this impossible.

Recently, I just finished a two-book archive of the first year of Coyote Blog.  Today, I got the books (or blooks) in the mail and they look great!

Why, one might ask, did I put my blog in a book, when everything is archived by pressing links right over there to the right of this page ------>

The first reason was for my dad.  My dad is 80-something and refuses to join the Internet age, but he would like to read my blog.  So, I produced a couple of volumes of my blog posts to give to him for Christmas.  (See, that's how confident I am that he is not reading this online -- I just published the contents of his present).

The second reason is based more on my having been a part of computers since getting an Apple II back in the late 70's.  Electronic media are not necessarily the greatest for archiving.  I wrote a lot of neat little games on my Apple II.  I wrote programs in college in pascal and assembly language on an S-100 bus C/PM computer.  I wrote programs in SNOBOL on cards for the mainframe at Princeton.  I received hundreds of emails on early CompuServe email.  Anyone know where all that stuff is today?  Neither do I.  Already I remember some cool web sites with content that seems to be gone from the Internet.   There is some kind of reverse-Moore's Law here that, if concocted, would say that the cost and complexity of reading and retrieving electronic files doubles every five years it ages.

So I decided to create a paper archive.  In the end, it cost me about 8 hours in formatting time and $30 in publishing costs to get the first year of Coyote Blog in book form.  For anyone who is interested, here is what I did:

First, I picked a printer.  It was important to do this first, since it determined what format and formatting I had to get the electronic files into.  I first considered BlogBinders.  The advantage of this service is that they can suck all of the content they need right off the web site, really making the process quick.  I decided not to go with them, because (at least 4 months ago) they did not retain any of the HTML formatting.  This means that the blockquotes I make heavy use of just became regular paragraphs.  As a result, a reader could not tell the difference any more between my writing and what I was quoting.  This caused me to look for another option, but you might still want to check it out -- I know their product is maturing so they may have more functionality today.  There is also a Beta going on right now at QOOP Blog Printing that might be a good option soon.

These were the only two direct print from blog options I found - if you know of others, please add them to the comments section.  So, I then turned to the print-on-demand self-publishing world.  CafePress has done a few things for me in the past, but I decided their print on demand was a bit too pricey for this.  Based on a few recommendations, I chose Lulu.com to publish.  I thought their pricing was reasonable, and I liked their royalty and pricing flexibility.  While I don't intend to sell the Coyote Blog archive, I am close to self-publishing a novel and I wanted to give Lulu a test spin.

Once I chose Lulu, I then needed to choose a format.  I knew I wanted a Perfect Bound book, and, scanning the pricing calculations, it was clear the cheapest option was to go for 8-1/2 by 11, since this reduced page count.  Having decided this, I downloaded their Microsoft word template, which made sure that I had all the margins and gutters and such right.

Now came the tedious part.  I wanted the posts to be in chronological order, but my blog displays in reverse date order.  I had to temporarily change the way the blog publishes.  Then, with the posts now in the right order, I just copied and pasted the text right off the site monthly archives into the word template.  I did some trial and error - cutting and pasting out of explorer gave different results than out of Firefox.  Pasting as HTML gave different results than pasting as rich text.  Eventually I got what I wanted.

Now came the really really tedious part.  I went through and did a few different edits, actually working in Open Office writer because I find it easier for this type work than Word:

• I changed the font from sans serif Arial to a more book friendly serif font (patalino)
• I deleted posts that had no value without the links (posts like "check this out") and some but not all my frivolous picture posts
• I added monthly chapter headings
• I played around with font size and line spacing for readability (remember, the first reader of this will be in his eighties)
• I added an index with the page numbers for the monthly chapter headings as well as page numbers for may favorite posts.  I did the latter by setting the titles of my favorite posts to "heading 2" rather than "heading 3" for the other posts.  Both had the same formatting, but I told the contents to only index down through heading 2, but not heading 3.
• I cleaned up a bit of spelling
• When it was clear the whole was too long for one book, I broke it into two books

(update:  Several people have misinterpretted the "tedious" and "a lot of work".  This was really just minor whining.  The time spent taking the electronic material and finishing it out into a book was about 0.1% of the time it took to actually write the articles the first time around on the blog or that it would take to write a 800 page two-volume tome from scratch.)

Since I was using Open Office, it was easy to just save the final file as a pdf and upload it to Lulu.  Lulu also provided templates for the covers (front and back) and I did some simple work on the covers, uploaded everything, and two days later the books were in the mail.

I have posted excerpts from the files with links below, both word and pdf, so anyone who is interested in trying blog printing themself can see what I did. 

• Download blog_print_example_doc.doc  (word format)

• Download blog_print_example_oo.odt  (Open Office format)

• Download blog_print_example_pdf.pdf   (PDF format)

You can see the book here in my Lulu storefront, which has both the electronic and paper versions available for sale.  I am NOT recommending anyone buy it - I just wanted to test Lulu for future projects (verdict:  I was very happy with the entire experience).  The only reason you might buy one is to see a sample if you are considering a similar project.  The cover looks great, and the paper quality is first rate.  The text printing is good but the non-cover graphics printing leaves something to be desired, but that was probably the fault of the source file having low-res graphics.  (update:  Welcome to Blooker Award readers!)

As a final note, in the extended post I have put the text of my forward for the volumes which explains some of the shortcomings of paper blog publishing:

Continue reading ‘Archiving Coyote Blog in Print Form’ »

OK, I managed to kill all commenting, since the Typepad registration does not seem to work right.  I wish I had tested this when I first made the change.  I knew there was a problem when I tried to write as inflammatory as possible and was getting no comments.  I love the ability to get comments so I will, for now, leave commenting wide open and just cull the bot spam manually.

A couple of notes on comments:

1.  I cleaned out a lot of past spam.  I am sorry for not doing this sooner.  If I decide I want to advertise bestiality or transvestite sex, I will do so myself.

2.   I updated my ban list.  My ban list is based SOLELY on spamming.  I have not, to this date, felt the need to ban anyone based on contents of a real comment post, though I suppose with enough provocation that could change (this is NOT a challenge!!).  If I banned you by mistake, send me an email.  I am just trying to get some of the bots.

3.  Going forward, I just can't stay on top of the bot-driven spam, so I am now requiring authentication.  Frequent commenters on other sites will know the drill, and many of you may already have a TypeKey account.  It is a simple, non-intrusive, one-time registration whose only purpose is to try to defeat the bots.  You can link to the registration right from the comment screen.  Sorry for the extra work.

Update:  By the way, I had a blinding glimpse of what I guess is the obvious for most bloggers, but I have been missing a lot of my comments.  I read comments by looking over the last 8-10 posts each day and seeing what new things have been said.   I have never used the "most recent comments" screen in the dashboard Moveable Type gives me, except to attack spam.  I found, though, that many of my comments are coming in, presumably via Google hits, weeks or months after the post.  In particular, I get my most negative comments this way (for example, per a recent email, I am the spawn of Satan for posting this).  Sorry if I have been missing your comments, and I will try to keep up better in the future.

Yes, I am still out in Hawaii for the week, so blogging continues to be light.  See you next week.

Apparently, this is one of the top new features MS is touting to get people to pay hundreds of dollars a screen for MS Office upgrades:

The new version of Microsoft Corp.'s Office
software will let users save documents in the popular PDF format, as
part of efforts to broaden the appeal of the new Office product and get
people to upgrade.

 Office 12, which is due out by the end of
2006, faces some of its stiffest competition from existing users who do
not see the need to upgrade from previous versions. Microsoft is
aggressively touting new functions, such as the PDF support, to try to
spur upgrades and appeal to people who might otherwise not buy Office
at all. The Office suite retails for between $149 and $499, depending
on which edition a user chooses.

Oooo, that's really going to do the trick.  Kind of like urging you to trade-in your car because the new one has more cupholders.  Of course, Open Office is free, is working great for us, and already has a built-in export to pdf.

The US has refused to turn control of the Internet over to the UN.  Thank Goodness. (via Instapundit)

A senior U.S. official rejected calls on Thursday for a
U.N. body to take over control of the main computers that direct
traffic on the Internet, reiterating U.S. intentions to keep its
historical role as the medium's principal overseer.

"We will not agree to the U.N. taking over the management of the
Internet," said Ambassador David Gross, the U.S. coordinator for
international communications and information policy at the State
Department. "Some countries want that. We think that's unacceptable."

Beyond the potential fortunes UN officials could make in bribes and kickbacks with such control,

Many countries, particularly developing ones, have become increasingly
concerned about the U.S. control, which stems from the country's role
in creating the Internet as a Pentagon project and funding much of its
early development.

Too bad.  If you don't like it, band together and create your own.  This is classic socialist thinking - don't bother to invest or try to compete, just confiscate the assets of whoever is already successful.

Meryl Yourish, by the way, brings us this delicious irony:  Tunisia, whose government actively censors the web and restricts its people's access to the web, will be hosting the next UN Internet summit:

Facing heated protest, the United Nations on Wednesday defended
Tunisia's hosting of a U.N. summit about Internet access in the
developing world, even though the north African nation has been
repeatedly accused of rights abuses that include blocking Web sites it
dislikes....

the government has blocked access to Web sites belonging
to Reporters Without Borders, other human rights watchdogs, and the
independent press, while police monitor e-mails and Internet cafes.

"It
does question to some extent the U.N.'s credibility that a world summit
on the information society is taking place in a society where access to
some Web sites is restricted," said Alexis Krikorian, of the
International Publishers' Association. "It's amazing that such a summit
would take place in a country like this."

No kidding.  When you think of turning tasks over to the UN, remember that over half the membership and the bureaucracy is dominated by officials from dictatorships.  Turning the Internet over to the UN means turning it over to Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro and Kim Il Sung.  And to Syria and Saudi Arabia and Iran.  And don't forget China, currently in the middle of the largest and most aggressive government Internet censorship project in the world.

New Chinese regulations governing Internet
news content tighten the noose on freewheeling bloggers and aim to rein
in the medium that is a growing source of information for the
mainland's more than 100 million users.

The day we hand the Internet over to the UN is the day we should start building a new one.

Apparently Yale's Econ 109 Microeconomics class has been assigned my post on Business Relocation and the Prisoner's Dilemma as part of this week's reading.  They are paying tens of thousands of dollars to read this site, while my 17 regular readers are getting it for free!  I'm not sure I am a huge Yale fan, given I attended Princeton and later Harvard, but I may have underestimated them now that I know what discriminating taste they have in blog reading.

Interesting Arcana:  The actual reason I think the professor found my article is probably because he used the spelling "dilemna" rather than "dilemma" when Google searching, as I did in the post title.  For some reason, I have always gravitated to this funny spelling with an "n" rather than a second "m".  I don't seem to be the only one - Google has hundreds of thousands of hits for dilemna.  What is the deal here?  I can't find dilemna as an alternate spelling anywhere in a dictionary, but it gets used a lot.  Hell, its in a CNN headline here.  A bunch of the Google hits for "dilemna" are in articles written by university professors.

So here is where you really have to love the web.  It turns out that this has actually been a discussion board topic in a number of places.  Here is part of a thread, for example, on dilemna vs dilemma.

John's note about being certain the word was spelled "dilemna" really hit home for me. It's almost as though at some point in my life I learned that was indeed the correct spelling and somehow had an edge on the masses. As with John, when I write I tend to pronounce words in my mind the way they are spelled - ie. FebRUary, WedNESday, etc. And as a champion speller in my younger days, it only seemed natural that I would be in the know.

As it happens, I'm writing a book right now, and the word came up. Though I spelled it the way I always knew was correct, I decided to double check with the dictionary and suddenly it was as though I was in the Twilight Zone. It was gone. Since dilemna is not as the word sounds, I can't figure out how the situation developed. I'm still convinced the spelling has changed somewhere along the way (ha!). I also recently had this same revelation with the word "pom-pom" (as in cheerleader's) which I always thought I was so smart in spelling as  "pompon." At least pompon is in the dictionary, though it has a slightly different meaning as the head of a chrysanthemum.

The only thing I can conclude is that I must have been living a parallel life in which these words were indeed spelled this way, and somehow made a crossover in recent years ....  (Twilight Zone Theme: do-do-do-do do-do-do-do)

There is a whole string of conjectures like this, but no real answer.  I will admit, now that this guy has, that I too had a certain Ivy-League-smarter-than-the-masses confidence that I had it right.  Ooops.

Coyote Blog is one year old today.  I see below that the coyote must be working on a gift for me...

I didn't really have any expectations when I started, but I am pretty sure that a quarter of a million page views to date is more than I would have guessed.  I also seem to have recently made "large mammal" status, meaning that NZ Bear probably gives me more credit on the evolutionary scale than does my wife.  Thanks to all my readers.

I mentioned in a post previously that I didn't like what Powerpoint was doing to presentations.  In fact, I have actually abandoned Powerpoint entirely even
for the few slides I do use in favor of the presentation package from the
free Open Office applications suite.
This package, which has really come into its own with the version 2
beta, opens and writes MS Office applications and is a pretty good
substitute, sometimes better, occasionally worse, for MS Office. 

I am
stress testing the whole package this winter, plus Thunderbird for email and of course Firefox
on which I am already sold for browsing, as a way to begin migrating
our company to having no MS Office at all.  I am tired of paying
hundreds of dollars per seat for applications that overwhelm and
confuse my employees.  Because of our need to interchange files with a
number of other entities, we need to be able to work with .xlw and .doc
files, so this makes for a nice solution for us.  My experience has
been very very good so far - let me know in the comments if you have
experience with these products.

Update: Thanks for the comments, keep them coming.  I continue to have very good luck in my stress testing.  Thuderbird is great, except that the spam filter sends to many good mails to spam - I would like the control to dial it back a notch.  OO Writer is good, with only some small formatting changes on tables from MS word.  I actually find its formatting and outlining tools better than MS word, and like the built in export to pdf.  The excel clone is working fine, and I can hardly tell the difference between the presentation package and powerpoint.  I have not played with the equation editor yet, but my daughter likes the draw package.  I had trouble with the database, but I find it is always hard to migrate to a new DB.  I never was able to switch from access to filemaker, and everyone tells me that filemaker is easier but I just got used to doing things in access.

One of my worries about migrating this to my employees is that many of my managers are computer noobs, and tend to go out and buy excel and word books from Barnes and Noble when they get the computer on the first day.  There are no such reasources for Open Office, and it is different enough from MS Office that the books don't really apply well.

It was fun to see my brother-in-law's company mentioned in the local paper today.  It was even funnier to see that the newspaper-run web site that screwed up the link to my wife's handbag site did the same with his site.

Eric, my brother-in-law, is the SVP of Sales at email marketing firm Constant Contact.  A while back I was half-convinced that email marketing, at least for quality companies, would die under the spam deluge.  It turns out that this is not the case.  There are many companies and organizations engaging his firm to manage their member communications and customer mailing lists.  I know that there are now several companies I do business with that I have white-listed in my spam filter in order to see their special offers and such (for example, 1-800-contacts does a good job of emailing me right about when I need to reorder, and I always like seeing who is coming to town in the Ticketmaster email).

Lately I have been playing with Google Earth - I love flying from outer-space right down to my house.  However, this caught my eye yesterday.  As the risk of being the last person who has seen it, A9 (owned by Amazon) has a mapping program that shows pictures of the ground level view wherever you put the cursor.  Not all roads, by any means, are covered, so turn on the "mark streets containing images" box to see with blue lines where they have pictures.  I found the user interface for scrolling the maps around and zooming pretty counter-intuitive, so its kind of immature, but it is an interesting idea to be able to know what your destination looks like and maybe look at landmarks for key intersections.  A9's original product was a yellow pages that showed what your search results looked like and plotted them on a map.

I played with this tool this weekend, and it makes some pretty cool web relationship maps.  I am not sure it is authoritative, but it is fun.  It maps relationships between sites and pages based on Google forward and back link data.

I have gotten a number of folks telling me that the color choices on the comment preview page made the text very difficult to read.  I was not ignoring these comments, it just took me a while to figure out which stylesheet variables controlled that page.  I think I have it licked, but let me know if you have problems.

OK, an event has occurred that tells me that blogging is officially a trend.  My mom has actually trolled my blog with her first blog comment.

Several people emailed me this morning.  Yes, that is me on Instapundit this morning.

Sometime when I was over the Atlantic, we passed 100,000 visitors since I started counting last December.  Thanks to all my readers!

I am headed off to Paris this weekend, so blogging may be light the next few days.  I am going to try to blog from France, and try to get a sense for the issues being discussed there post-referendum.  In the mean time, I will leave you with this heartwarming scene from Team America: World Police.

I thought the movie was very funny, though if you don't like South Park-type humor, don't even bother.  I still can't get the Team America theme song out of my head, or at least the main refrain that goes

America... Fuck Yeah!

If I had a baseball team, I would play that at the 7th inning stretch.

After 6 months, I still think TypePad is the best tool out there to quickly start your own blog.  However, and I know this point has been made before, but could you guys please add variations of the word "blogger" and conjugations of the verb "blog" to your spell check dictionary.  Thanks

For the next few days, I will be trying to blog from my parent's ranch in Wyoming.  The ranch is 25 miles by dirt road from a town of 2000 people, so it's tad isolated.  We do have phone service, but for a number of miles the phone lines are just draped over a fence.  On a good day, I get about 16K speed, but that can drop to about 200 baud when the cows are chewing on the line (no, I'm not making that up).

In the spirit of Marginal Revolution's "markets in everything" series, I think I will start a "blogs for everything" series.  One of my favorite early on in this series was the Remote Blog, blogging on home theater remote control issues.

In this episode, we feature the Baby Names Blog, from the Baby Name Wizard.  It has pretty interesting features on names and why they go in and out of style.  And make sure to check out their name voyager, a cool java app on name popularity over the last century.

When we named our first child Nicholas, we soon found that we were on the front edge of a huge Nicholas revival.  For our second child, we wanted something less common, so we chose Amelia, which was way out of favor at the time but now appears to be in a revival as well.  The one thing that stands out from the chart is that 50 years ago, there were a few dominant names: John, Mary, etc.  Now, there are no dominant names.  I think this is signaling a change in parents attitude, from wanting their name to be safe and fit in, to wanting their kids' names to be unique and distinctive.  Certainly this was the case for us.

Suddenly, over the last several days, this site has seen a huge increase in Google search hits.  These hits are on a wide variety of articles, and not one in particular.  In following back the search terms on some of these hits, its strikes me that my blog is suddenly oddly high on some search terms that have never hit in the past (by this I mean, higher even than the historical over-ranking of blogs that occurs on Google).  I know that Google changes their algorithms from time to time without notice.  Anyone know if this happened recently.

I have been a marketer for almost 20 years, and one of the classic mistakes in marketing is to rely too much on your own experience and preferences.  Its often easy to fall into the trap of saying "everyone I know would like that" or vice versa, only to find that "everyone you know" are not necessarily representative of the market as a whole.

When I was a consultant at McKinsey & Co., we often asked people we were interviewing questions like "what is the market size for window glass in Mexico".  The key to successfully completing the exercise was to break the problem down into cascading assumptions, each of which could theoretically be researched and checked.  For example, with the window glass problem, a good answer might be:

The glass market is probably made up of housing, commercial buildings, automotive, and other.  Take the housing market.  Assume 80% of the market is new construction.  Assume the population of Mexico is 50 million, and there are 5 people per home, so there are 10 million homes, and lets assume the housing stock is increased by 5 % a year and that each home has 100 square feet of glass..  etc etc.

It was kind of fun to see if they get to the right answer, but the whole point was to see how they could break down and analytical problem.  The reason I bring up this whole episode was sometimes we would ask our recruits, typically Ivy Leaguers, to come up with the market size for annual snow ski sales.  So they would work through the logic that there are 300 million people in the US and x% ski and these people replace their skis on average every 5 years, etc.  However, it always made me laugh that these folks would be guaranteed to miss the number way, way high.  Why?  Because in coming up with the percentage of people that ski, they would look around the room and say, well 80% of my friends ski and so lets assume 30 or 40 or even more percent of Americans snow ski.  In fact, I have not looked up the number lately, but the actual percentage of Americans that ski is something less than 5%.  Recruits intuition was fooled because, at least in terms of skiing, they were surrounded by an anomalous population.

All of this is a long, long, overly long intro into an interesting set of facts around browser share between IE and Firefox.  A while back I wrote that, from my traffic logs for this site, Firefox appears to be killing IE.  In fact, since I posted this, Firefox has gained even more share on this site:

Now, to the issue of this post, one might suspect that my traffic might not be representative of the whole market.  I would argue that blog readers probably are heavier Internet users, more Internet-savvy on average, and therefore more likely to have investigated browser alternatives beyond the one pre-loaded on their PC.  It turns out that I have a way to test this.  I have another group of sites for my business, including sites for Forest Service Campgrounds, Lake Havasu Jetski Rentals, and Campground Jobs.  The readers of these sites tend to be older on average and less computer proficient.  The browser market share at these sites looks like this:

Wow, that is a huge difference.  Take it from me, its unusual to find a market segmentation that dramatic.  It makes me wonder about all of the talk about blogs replacing the MSM.  How much are we breathing our own exhaust?

Postscript: This is an age-old problem and takes many forms in many businesses.  For example, thousands of farmers have bankrupted themselves in the commodities futures markets making bets on worldwide crop prices based on their local weather and harvest expectations.

Disclosure: Yes, I did take the opportunity to shamelessly Google bomb my own sites.  Sorry.  I don't do it very often, maintaining a pretty solid firewall between my business and blog.