May 1st, 2008 -- Posted in Chinese Politics, World Politics |
I was doing my end of the night browse through Digg when I came across the headline that Time had released their list of the 100 most influential people. Number one on that list for “Leaders & Revolutionaries” was the Dalai Lama which is quite fitting given the strength of the character the man has shown in recent months considering the deaths of over 100 of his people at the hands of the Chinese government. Despite all of this adversity, he has chosen the peaceful course for his country which is simple autonomy rather than pure independence. Can you imagine making such a decision? Can you imagine the harmony that must exist in the man’s soul to deal with adversity on a daily basis? I simply cannot since I quite often lose patience over the simplest things therefore the lesson I would like all of us to take away today is one of “Patience.” Patience in all things especially politics.
May 1st, 2008 -- Posted in American Politics |
Being a former numbers man, I can’t help but go back to the 1’s and 0’s from time to time because they do hold some truth in today’s world. After a quick review of the respective candidates sites yesterday, I thought that it might be a good idea to take it one step further and have a look at the internet traffic heading to these individual sites. One of the most popular and also free traffic analysis tools is Alexa.com which allows you to compare the traffic statistics of one or more sites. I decided to compare the traffic heading to all three of the remaining candidates sites to see what came up:
I think this graph speaks to what many Americans are feeling which is that they are getting bored with the election. We can see an overall dip in internet traffic for all candidates after about February with a slight increase for the PA primaries. It is also interesting to note that Senator Obama at one stage was recieving 0.16% of all internet traffic. That may not sound alot to many people but the number of internet users worldwide is just over 1 Billion people according to the website internetworldstats.com. So try to imagine 0.16% of an even 1 Billion and you come up with 160 million people having visited Senator Obama’s site. Now that is an impressive number of people but the worrying thing to me as an Obama supporter is the steep decline from February to 0.03% of all internet traffic in April. I think Senator Obama needs to do something to re-ignite his support base in America and around the world because at the moment it seems to be fading.
Lastly Google Trends had some interesting data with regards to Indianapolis, IN which shows that the majority of people within that internet zone have searched for the term “Barack Obama” (Blue) more than “Hillary Clinton” (Red). This is good news but than again the same could have been said for Philadelphia.
