BlogCadre - traffic

Beautiful time-lapse video of busy Hanoi intersection

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:56:18 -0500

v!Nc3l4s put together a beautiful time-lapse video of a busy intersection in Hanoi, Vietnam. Can you believe that this intersection doesn't have any traffic lights? Link [via]

Creative ways of controlling traffic

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 12:15:03 -0600

With traffic accidents at all time records in most major cities, the DOT has had to come up with creative ways of adjusting drivers behavior.
One instance on Lake Shore Drive is to use stripes that get closer and closer as you approach a curve to get people to think they are driving faster than they really are. This seems to be working much better than the flashing yellow lights and the electronic signs that tell you how fast you should be going. Now I wish they would put as much thought into making the traffic lights leading away from LSD move traffic a little more efficiently.

Digging Alexa - how the geek demographic doubled overnight

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 22:52:03 -0500

It seems to have passed without huge fanfare, but on April 20th 2006, the Alexa rankings for tech sites around the globe suddenly doubled, literally overnight.

The Day The World Got Geeky

Ian Clarke writes, "Did the world get geekier around April 20th?"

Some kind of change to how Alexa calculates traffic – or did something happen to so dramatically affect these four websites? Perhaps a bunch of geeks suddenly decided to become Alexa users.

Alex Walker noticed the phenomenon as early as the 27th, titling it "The Great Internet Spike of 2006." Alex noticed that only tech sites seemed to benefit from the Alexa bump:

sites with no notable ‘tech-skew’ (i.e. CNN.com, EBAY.com, etc) have either held firm or been shuffled backwards by the sites bubbling up around them.

Have Alexa changed their statistical algorithms?
Is this a temporary anomoly?
Which sites lost out the worst?

Even Digg users have been speculating:

hayseed: also possible that a crapload of people installed the alexa toolbar at that time as a result of some sort of promotion ...

hottuna: Alexa is so incredible unreliably its strange that the site hasn't been shut down.

jarcoal: exactly. there have been several articles reporting major traffic boosts in the last few months. i'll bet this is all some stupid glitch.

When Elephants Fight

I've been looking at this a bit, and I'm convinced it's no Alexa glitch. Rather, the Alexa population did, in fact, change overnight.

Here's the funny part: Digg users were the scalawags who did it!