20 most popular currybetdotnet posts 2007

 by Martin Belam, 24 December 2007

Well, it is Christmas week, and so, with nothing happening in the world, it is time to be introspective and make end-of-the-year charts.

Actually it isn't strictly true that nothing happens at Christmas- republishing the currybetdotnet archives I was reminded that Yahoo! announced the purchase of Inktomi on Christmas Eve 2002, and that in 2004 I was fully stretched at work trying to get the BBC homepage to respond to the tsunami in Asia, and fend off cheaters from the Today Listener's Lord vote.

This year, given that I am always complaining that news publishers are not open enough with their web stats, I thought I would do my currybetdotnet review of the year as a pure popularity number-crunching exercise.

Here are 2007's 20 most popular currybetdotnet posts, based on the figures I get from Google Analytics - which, it must be said, excludes people reading currybetdotnet via RSS or email subscription. Or on splogs that keep ripping off my content despite being repeatedly reported by me as spammers to Blogger.

BBC iPlayer launch: The first 14 days
Over 10,000 people looked at this, and I still think I should make a t-shirt of the diagram which illustrates the way that the BBC iPlayer facilitates the peer-to-peer distribution of child pornography. Of course, it is all-singing all-dancing Flash streaming these days, it were all hideous DRM-encumbered downloads in my day

iPlayer p2p child pr0n spoof

The ten things most likely to be on The Daily Express front page
Everybody knows that the Daily Express has ceased to be a serious newspaper and now concentrates on selling copies by putting pictures of Madeleine and Diana on the cover day after day after day. This though, was the statistical proof that actually they love their quack cures more. I was secretly crushed that Diana wasn't #1, and in the spirit of Blue Peter, was tempted to nobble the results.

Daily Express Diana front page

The Sun using blogs to solicit amateur Page 3 Girl style photos
The first of several posts in this list that gain their position purely from the fact that it appears putting the words "the sun" and something about ladies breasts in a <title> tag will guarantee you traffic from Google. In the comments on this entry I was castigated for a factual inaccuracy - apparently it is perfectly legal to publish in a national newspaper pictures of the breasts of 16 year old girls, provided you have consent from her parents or guardian. It is a funny old world.

The Sun's amateur glam girls

Watching the Rugby World Cup on ITV.com
Nearly every one of the 4,000 people who read this post did so during the times that England were playing. Which rather suggests they were rather looking for actual coverage of the matches, rather than my article about how getting to watch ITV on the web was a lot easier than installing the iPlayer.

The Sun's sexiest barmaid vote goes a bit tits up
You would be astonished at how many people type in "Big tits" to a search engine. And spell it wrong as "Bit tits". And then click on this article. Another 4,000 disatisfied customers - I really should work out a way to partner with some soft-porn affiliate marketing programme on these sorts of pages.

Too much Big Brother nipple for the Daily Mail
The Daily Mail self-censored their online coverage of the start of 2007's Big Brother after initially using some pictures from Xposure of Charley Uchea. Another huge draw for people wanting to see boobies, who are presumably disappointed with my sanctimonious liberal elitist attitude to the whole tawdry Big Brother affair.

Busting the BBC's 600 Linux users myth
Back to serious stuff. Links from the BBC Internet Blog, Groklaw and Digg meant over 2,700 people read my take on Ashley Highfield's surprise 'only 600 Linux users' announcement.

Free the BBC from the same old tired DRM debate
In some people's eyes it means signing a pact with the devil, but personally I understand that the commercial business of dealing with PACT and other rights-holders left the BBC with little choice but to offer either 'no TV on the internet' or 'some TV on the internet with horrible DRM on it'. As I think I've said on more than one occassion, it always amuses me that the people most vocally against DRM are the same people who, because of their understanding of technology, find it most trivial to get around. For example, trust me, I'll be watching this year's Christmas Doctor Who in Greece before it comes out on DVD.

Free the BBC anti-DRM stance

Guess Brit babes bra size, and you can help catch rapists in The Sun
I think we can put search down as the culprit for the popularity of this post about an astonishing 'Women shouldn't be treated as sex objects / Women are sex objects' editorial juxtaposition.

The Sun's editorial juxtaposition of rape and bra sizes

The new UK digital singles chart tries to avoid the old hype
One of my nostalgic trips back to when I used to work in record shops, this looked at how the charts were subject to a very analogue type of hype during the early 90s. This followed the excitement that digital downloads without a corresponding physical release were going to count towards the charts for the first time. Personally, I still miss Fearne and TOTP.

It was twenty years ago today...The Beatles CD reissues from 1987
I predicted that the fortieth anniversary of the Sgt. Pepper album would see The Beatles catalogue emerge on legal download sites. I was wrong about that, but in the process I rounded up what it was like when The Beatles last entered a new digital music market - the CD.

Sgt Pepper sleeve

The curse of annoying Windows XP speech bubble system alert pop-ups
Search engines bring me a lot of visitors also grumpy about constant nagging reminders from Windows about things they have explicitly chosen to do.

Madeleine McCann and Alex Meschisvili - a culture contrast
One has been the British media's obsession of the year. The other, a missing Georgian boy who was living in Greece, has met with little continued coverage in the Greek press, despite it being believed that he was murdered by a group of children his own age, whose adult relatives then helped hide the body. It is coming up to two years since Alex disappeared.

BBC search plugins for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2
Did what it said on the tin.

The BBC's UK website...brought to you by Airbus
If I had a sub-editor here, they probably would have rephrased the headline, which looks a little like I am suggesting you see the adverts in the UK, not just on the UK edition. They seemed to be some of the first screengrabs of adverts on the BBC site on the web, and so were linked to quite a bit.

Who benefits financially from the Madeleine McCann publicity juggernaut?
Most traffic delivered either via messageboards or search just because of the name in the title of this article.

DRM protecting me from playing my new video clips
By the end of the year Radiohead were being hailed / derided as re-inventing the music industry business model. At the start of the year, however, I couldn't get my brand spanking new Thom Yorke videos to play.

Getting Sony's SonicStage for Christmas
Frankie Roberto provided personal link bait by writing about a product I was working with at the time for Sony in Austria.

National Television Awards vote seems wide open to multiple vote fraud
Basically proved what the title says.

Newspapers 2.0: How Web 2.0 are British newspaper web sites?
The conclusion piece of a series of articles looking at RRS feeds, blogs, user-generated comments and social bookmarking widgets on British newspaper websites.

Last year's review can be found here, and tomorrow I'll be looking at the posts and articles on the site that remain popular, despite being over 12 months old.

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