] Folks have been predicting a big year for mergers and
] acquisitions in 2005, and we are starting the year with a
] bang. I have learnt exclusively that Six Apart, the
] parent company behind hosted blogging service TypePad,
] and Moveable Type is about to acquire Live Journal, for
] an undisclosed amount. The deal is a mix of stock and
] cash, and could be announced sometime later this month,
] according to those close to the two companies. If the
] deal goes through, then Six Apart will become one of the
] largest weblog companies in the world, with nearly 6.5
] million users. It also gives the company a very fighting
] chance against Google's Blogger and Microsoft's MSN
] Spaces.

Here is your rumor of the day.

Om Malik on Broadband - Six Apart to buy Live Journal

] Reenie's head chip woke her by steadily increasing
] the perceived volume of a song by a British comedy
] troupe. Lots of trippy dreams last night. She
] couldn't remember them all this morning, but she was
] sure they were cool. She rolled out of bed and prepared
] for her "Commute" to the adjoining room. Reenie
] loved her job, well, as much as she could love any job.
] She got to work from home as much as she liked.

If you liked "Ownz0red" by Cory Doctorow, which many of you did, you will definitely like this quick little 10 minute read.

Futurismic: Fiction

] On Tuesday, January 4th BlackRatchet and I released our
] latest project on the unsuspecting internet world.
] DocDroppers is a hacking library of sorts. On it, you
] will find not only all of the texts from myself and the
] DDP, but any and all text files from the world of
] hacking. People have attempted collections like this
] before, but ours is much different.

The Docs have been Dropped!

] What do you want to do with your life?

It appears most want to start a company that lasts longer then two years and drink eight glasses of water a day.

43 Things

Since 2002 we've been publishing the httpd log statistics for this site on an annual basis. This gives you some insight into traffic levels, popular pages, and the kinds of search results that bring people to MemeStreams.

From the time we went online (in the fall of 2001) until September of 2003 we saw a fairly constant growth in the number of unique visitors using this site. This year that pattern has changed. The growth, as measured in terms of unique visitors, seems to have leveled off shy of 30,000 people a month, and this year we settled into a static pattern typical of older websites, where more traffic is received in the winter months than in the summer months. As our site is current events focused we also get an occasional boost from popular news stories.

However, while the same number of people are using MemeStreams as were using it a year ago, those people seem to be using it a lot more. In September of 2003 we got 27,825 unique visitors, who visited 101,041 pages on the site. In November of 2004 we got 27,496 unique visitors, but they visited 155,421 pages on the site.

Truth be told, this is probably a more significant change. A lot of those 27 thousand people wash in from a search engine looking for something specific and never return. The vitality of this site is more dependent on the people who stick around a while and actually make use of it. Those people seem to be growing in numbers even as the overall total remains the same.

The main page of the site was hit 259,011 times this year, which works out to about 708 times a day. Thats up from 148,826 last year (which is 408 times a day). Also, in 2003 29% of our traffic came from search engines and 33% came from bookmarks. This year 19% came from search engines and 57% came from bookmarks.

2003 saw the birth of the referrer spammer and they are not going away. The 5 "links from an external page" listed here were the only ones that made the top 20 who I'm absolutely sure aren't spammers. (Honestly, the Netnewswire link may be considered spam, as it is offered by that RSS reader, but its somewhat interesting data and not exactly the same thing as robots that hit your site over and over with no interest in fetching the content.)

If you're interested, you can find the links to older annual statistics here:
http://www.memestreams.net/allabout.html

Happy New Year!

2004 Statistics for www.memestreams.net

The leading provider of pet gene banking and pet cloning services.

] Genetic Savings & Clone enriches the lives of pet lovers
] through superior cloning technologies. Cat cloning
] available today; dog cloning available in 2005.

Great company name!

Genetic Savings and Clone

] The secret to programming is not intelligence, though of
] course that helps. It is not hard work or experience,
] though they help, too. The secret to programming is
] having smart friends.
]
] Once we had a plausible way to ship, Apple became the
] ideal work environment. Every engineer we knew was
] willing to help us. We got resources that would never
] have been available to us had we been on the payroll.

Clandestine Apple Skunkworks.

Skunkworks At Apple -- The Graphing Calculator Story

This is not "news", but the download is worth waiting for, and the video is worth the time.

It's a Flash presentation of selected images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. If you liked the images of the Ultra Deep Field that were published back in March (and cited widely, including here), you'll probably like this, too. Whereas the UDF was a panoramic view, these are more like "close-ups", although the term takes on a rather new meaning when the scale is on the order of one light year to every four inches.

If anything, the pictures go by too fast..

The Best of Hubble

This is a student film my cousin did 20 years ago. Its aging like a fine Scotch.

Listen to your parents, Santa isn't a man you want to screw with. No peeking.. And if you do see Santa, under no circumstances bother the man. Just let him do his thing and leave..

A Christmas Treat

Winter Solstice Dec 21 2004 7:42 AM EST

For those of us on the east coast, the sun will be at its closest about a half hour after it rises.

The reason for the season