Tag: internet

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Visitor retention

For media, platforms, stores, webpages as well as blogs one of the more interesting measures about popularity or spread consists in visitor retention. It is a bit like counting the pages of a book you have read, which you have at home, or have you read them all? The zapping across radio or television channels is also an indicator or unsuccessful retention of viewers. Webpages, online stores or the blog entries here are all more or less directly trying to increase the retention of visitors on the same page. Maybe this can be considered as one of the first steps into a (not-so) social media addiction. The IT-sector offers tools for this.
On this webpage “schoemann.org” we make use of “linkz.ai” a ready-made plug-in that provides overviews on the links entered on this webpage, mainly to avoid that visitors have many additional tabs opened in their browser, do not jump off to follow up the links, but rather stay on the same webpage and “scroll on”. At the same time this means referrals from other webpages, which use the same techniques, will be less frequent.
The visitor retention tool used on this webpage is besides the original content 😉 “linkz.ai”. This tool scans other blog entries and links, and proposes the image on the previewed link at the top of the blog preview, for example. Basic weekly frequencies on previews are provided, which might guide a strategy to increase visitor retention, if that is one of your objectives.
The current discussion of addictive potential of social media platforms could be measured through such tools as well and has probably been used already for years with even more sophistication and direct feedback loops into the algorithms.
(Image: basic own statistics Linkz.ai use 2026-2-28) 

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Shift to Linux

We have become rather lazy and sometimes even ignorant when it comes to what kind of operating system we use on our computers. The phasing out of security support for Windows 10 based computers creates worldwide a huge pile of computers that cannot update to 11 due to limited hardware 4Gb of active memory only. However, for many simple tasks these computers work perfectly fine. Browsing through the internet or just drafting texts or spreadsheets doesn’t ask for larger sizes of memory. Most AI applications run on the web and not locally on your computer. No need to throw away these devices and spend, spend, spend on the latest technology. It takes a bit of time and effort to read through the guides for such a shift. Maybe you need to come back several times between documentation and a bit of trial and error, but the learning of digital skills is always a rewarding experience as well. My fanless computer will serve me for many more years as a quiet companion in drafting blog entries and research. Additionally, it is a step towards digital sovereignty so many people talk about these days. (Image: Computer Screen with Linux cinnamon 2.2 and Libre Office in background).

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Smart Cars

Technology of cars and in cars has evolved rapidly with the move towards the smart cars. Smart cars are characterized by many additional sensors, almost permanent connectivity to the producer’s software platform, the internet, autonomous driving capability or, potentially, remote control. We might still curse some nostalgic feelings of being in driving seat, but the supervision of our capability to drive and monitoring of behavior has reached impressive levels of perfection beyond the fasten your seatbelt sign and alarm. The software that is driving our cars has become the challenge of the coming years and with this the concern for data privacy and cyber security. Smart cars have multiple cameras to guide driving and parking effectively. These cameras are also a perfect spy even around or in your home. From our smartphones we all know the scanning of connectable Bluetooth devices or wlan nearby. Smart cars are powerful assistants in data collection sometimes even beyond your control, for example who these data are sent to. June Yoon (2024-10-2 Financial Times) has developed this rationale even further to stir up additional fears: “A hacked self-driving car might even be turned into a weapon”. The weaponization of beepers, talky-walkies is certainly not the last step in this process of potential dangers of technology. Smart cars come with additional risks, not only additional comfort. Better choose your rollercoaster wisely.

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Webpage Analytics

I do not collect data of detailed webpage analytics. Therefore, I thought I do not know anything and do not want to know anything about webpage visits of this webpage. However, the most basic information of how many times the webpage is visited per months is given by the hosting service of the webpage. The previous jump beyond 20.000 visits/month had the implication to move the security level of the webpage for me and all visitors to a higher level. Additional information of how many seconds an “internaut” is staying on the webpage tells, maybe a little bit about the interest in the content or image of a specific entry. Reaching 84.000 visitors/month was a surprise that asks for an explanation. Apparently, the most visited page is the blog entry on “geo-politics”. The longest time people stayed on a page or blog entry is a recent entry on “nutrition policy”.
Other statistics show that people who visited an entry on “find trust”, trusted in the webpage to click on many other entries or pages on “www.schoemann.org”.
I do not collect data or statistics on where visitors go after a visit. The hosting service, however, measures the so-called “jump-off” rate. This indicates the importance of the webpage as spring board to jump to other pages on the internet. It is usually = 1, just showing that you left somewhere. For some pages this reaches higher levels according to the number of links you offer on a blog entry, for example. It gives an indication whether you manage to lead on readers to explore the topic further. This is a usual evaluation question of lectures and seminars given at universities.
Last but not least, even without collecting any “real data” about visitors, it is part of the minimum information your browser transmits is the “operating system” used for access. Your smartphone provides the information on IOS, Android, Linux, or Windows versions used. These technical purposes remind me that there are still vast amounts of users of what we believe are outdated operating systems. Windows 7 and Windows 10 are still heavily in use across the globe. The hype around the latest operating system and smartphone is most likely only a phenomenon of the rich and wealthy in the rich parts of the western world. This reminds me to include images, which are small in data size to allow fast downloads in all parts of the world. We should embrace this as an important topic of geo-political relevance.

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POSSE

for a German speaking audience POSSE stands for a farsical popular drama of the 18th and 19th centuries. Nowadays POSSE has particularly in the English speaking world a completely different meaning. POSSE is short for Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. In other words publish your own creative work, text, tech or melody on your own website first before spreading the content on other platforms. By this strategy you make sure your content stays your content even if a platform like eXitTwitter disappears or the hype has passed like with facebook. And if at any point in time you decide the whole internet is a farce, you will be able to edit the content from your own webpage as a book or audio version as an edited volume. Do not make yourself a modern slave of tobacco, drugs, alcohol or platforms for whom you create (mostly unpaid) content they use to sell advertisements with huge untaxed profits. With POSSE you can make an end to this farce. We still rely on search engines like QWANT, Ecosia, duckduckgo or Mozilla’s Firefox, to name a few less well known web searching tools. They ensure that other people find your webpage beyond the elephant in the room called Google.

Examples of search engines of the internet