Looking for Group: Ravenchase Great America Hunt

Are you putting together a team for Ravenchase's Great America Hunt? I wanna play. You should pick me for your team.

The good news: Scurrying around all day solving puzzles seems normal to me.

The bad news: I don't know how to drive.

This tech talk about election software http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBSiuVGQECs shows politicians can't cooperate. In theory, it's a UX programmer talking about how he and other geeks worked with the Obama campaign to develop software to help folks organize. It's pretty interesting even if you think of getting Obama elected as misdirected effort.

If you're a computer programmer, working with non-programmers is tough. Apparently, folks don't come much more non-programmerish than politicos. Only… it's not that they weren't programmers. They are generally mired in the past.

Early on, our hero jokes about why the programmers used post-its on a wall to schedule their work: it's not that they didn't know more sophisticated tools. But they needed to get politicos involved with prioritizing/scheduling—and those folks don't do planning, issue tracking, none of that, nope. Post-it-based schedule on a wall was longer-term thinking than they were used to. At first it seems like a throwaway anecdote illustrating the difficulty of nerds getting along with non-nerds.

But then you hear about how political campaigns have operated historically. If politicians had ever tried to gather opinions from the electorate by anything more sophisticated than a multiple-choice poll, they would have been overwhelmed with the data. They didn't really have tools to gather it, measure it, make sense of it. It's 2013, the world has figured out something about how to conduct useful surveys, but these folks are still living in the 80s. They rely on hierarchy, rely on news bubbling up through the ranks. If most voters in the nation disagree with you on the economy, you might figure that out… but you might not. Obama's software made more things measurable; not that many more. From an outsider's perspective, it still sounds like they were stumbling around kind of blind. But the campaign was getting a lot more feedback than it was used to. (Well, probably the same amount of feedback; but maybe more signal and less noise in the mix; less distorted by games of telephone.)

Who knows? Maybe in another 20 years, politicians will listen to the people.

Yeah, I know, be careful what you wish for, right?

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Milestone: 22 Million Hits

Wow, it's the site's 18 (edit: can you tell I "wrote" the intro to this post by copy-pasting an old post?) 22 millionth hit. (Not as impressive as it sounds. It's hits: someone loading a page that shows nine photos will generate 10 hits, because the photos count, too; robot visitors lumped in with the humans, even in the cases where it's easy to tell them apart.) Looking at the apache log line, I see:

76.95.43.69 - - [08/Feb/2013:03:10:25 -0400] "GET /slick.css HTTP/1.1" 200 2856 "http://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/anecdotal/hunt/teamlist/" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; Trident/5.0)"

This is a browser loading the stylesheet information that goes with a page. This visitor is probably a human! Most robots don't bother to load stylesheets. Doing a reverse-lookup on their IP address gets a blahblah.socal.res.rr.com address, so this is probably a RoadRunner customer in southern California. You might wonder what page they were reading, what Google search brought them there. There, I could have made a good (and in this case, correct) guess based on the fact that this was a human visitor. Lately, about 80% of them have been showing up for the same page.

You might remember about a year and a half ago, I put together a list of puzzlehunt team names. I was putting together the web app that, after several changes, would become octothorpean.org and wanted to see what "funny characters" people might try to use in their team names. I shared the list up on teh internets because I'm not the only one writing these puzzlehunt web apps, and thought other folks might want to use them for a similar purpose. Hey, if you don't put some sanity checks on your web app's input forms, someone might do something silly like using the entire text of Atlas Shrugged as their team name.

The page sat around for a few months and then, uhm, something changed. I don't know what changed, I wasn't paying attention when it happened. Maybe suddenly more people were interested in team names. Maybe some Google machine-learning-driven algorithm shifted weight such that my page ranked higher. But at some point, I realized that the page was getting a lot of visits. People from around the world were Googling "team names" (or some variation thereon), clicking, and arriving at my page. Here are the top Google searches that resulted in clicks to my site for January 2013:

Query	Impr	Clicks	CTR	Avg Position
team names	40,000	8000	20%	3.4
team name	5,500	900	16%	4.1
team names list	1,300	700	54%	1.2
team names for work	2,500	700	28%	2.0
team name ideas	3,500	400	11%	6.4
group names list	600	200	33%	1.9
work team names	700	170	24%	2.0
team names ideas	1,600	170	11%	6.2
team names for games	500	170	34%	2.6
list of team names	400	170	42%	1.3

I guess a lot of people are using the page, though not for what I originally had in mind. And take heart: if you had a hard time figuring out the name for your team, you are not alone. Plenty of other folks are scouring the internet for inspiration. Thousands of people a month, apparently.

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Human flesh search engine comes to San Francisco. I am impressed; it helps when the target posts to Facebook. ...