traffic

I just got off a plane to arrive in Vegas for CES (where I'll be blogging here for y'all's reading pleasure). I saw this animation right before departing and it didn't make me feel real good about how many other people would be in the air at the same time...

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PR wonk and buddy Joshua Weinberg sent me a rant that the driving time app and interactive map on the Bay Area's 511.org Web site is down, "due to a high volume of users." It's a pretty stormy day here in the Bay Area, but as Weinberg points out, it's during storms and emergencies, when public transit is a mess, that people will go to state-sponsored route-finding systems.

The error message's advice to use the text version is flawed: It, too, is overloaded. Google's traffic maps are working, though. Leave it to … Read more

It's been quite a while since we visited the subject of best themes for Mozilla Firefox. It took a little while for some developers to catch up with the release of Version 2, but now there's a large number of cool add-ons for spicing up the look and feel of your your browser.

There's also a lot of crap. Luckily for you, I've waded through the morass and found what I consider to be the best themes for Mozilla Firefox. Of course, one of the greatest strengths of Firefox is the ability for every user to … Read more

Members of the SavetheInternet.com Coalition and Internet scholars from Harvard, Yale and Stanford law schools filed a petition and complaint with the Federal Communications Commission Thursday in response to claims that Comcast is blocking some kinds of peer-to-peer traffic.

The complaint comes after the Associated Press discovered, based on its own testing, that content was blocked on several Comcast broadband connections using the peer-to-peer filing sharing network BitTorrent. Other Comcast users have also complained that their BitTorrent content has been blocked.

In their petition, the groups claim that Comcast is violating the FCC's Internet Policy Statement, which essentially … Read more

DAVIS, Calif.--Reporters who covered software in the '90s will remember Karl Jacob. Microsoft bought his company, Dimension X, in 1997. He was chatty. Occasionally, some reporters referred to him as "sources close to the company."

After leaving the big M, he went off to Keen, Benchmark Capital and a few other things. And now, he's the world record holder of the standing mile speed record.

In July, Jacob cranked up his modified Dodge Viper from a standstill to finishing a mile in 27.41 seconds. He hit 220.7 miles an hour during the sprint, a … Read more

Davis, Calif.--This is truly a creepy presentation, this one being delivered by Kamal Hassan, CEO of Skymeter.com right now at the GoingGreen conference in Davis, California.

The company has come up with $130 boxes that, when placed in cars, lets the authorities turn public roads into toll roads.

"You could price every road in the state" with enough cars, he said. The cars also have to have GPS units.

Gee, thanks.

The company doesn't have signed contracts yet, but apparently toll roads are growing in popularity. Singapore has been putting in more toll roads since … Read more

DAVIS, Calif.--A lot of time gets wasted in traffic.

Americans lose 3.7 billion hours a year in traffic jams, both anticipated jams and unexpected ones, according to Mygistics CEO Michael Ostrom, speaking at the GoingGreen conference taking place here.

Those delays result in 2.7 billion gallons of gas being burned unproductively. And 5.8 billion gallons of gas a year could be saved if Americans chose to work one day a week at home.

Why is Ostrom such a font of national traffic patterns? Because Mygistics is trying to create a dynamic, national-scale traffic model. The company … Read more

Rising up out of the chaos and career collapse that was Britney Spears' performance on Sunday are MTV's traffic numbers.

The cable channel's Video Music Awards were bad for Britney but a boon for Viacom, MTV's parent company. Users flocked to MTV.com to watch Spears' on-stage misadventures.

On Sunday, MTV.com saw 2.6 million visitors log on, a tally that smashed the site's previous record for daily Web site traffic. The site also delivered 7 million video streams on Monday as of 3:30 p.m. ET, which topped its previous best day of … Read more

Using a keyword research tool like Google Trends or KeywordDiscovery.com, one can see the seasonality in search term popularity. For example, as one might expect, gourmet chocolate related searches peak at the holidays, as well as around Valentine's Day and Easter.

The ebbing and flowing of searcher activity is also evidenced in your website stats. Search referred traffic will drop in the low season, unsurprisingly. But would you have expected to see the relative share of each search engine to change depending on the time of year?

Well that's what Enquisite has found by crunching search engine … Read more