BrainFuel

Google just launched the filtered version of Google for the folks in China. Check it out and see if your favorite site is filtered. One thing I’m not sure about is whether the filtering happens on the site or on Chinese turf.

Whether that’s the case or not I am here to report that BrainFuel is currently NOT, I repeat that, NOT being filtered by the Chinese Government. Should this status change you’ll be the first to hear (or maybe you won’t)… insert evil laugh.

P.S. Note that beautiful Beta stamp next to our name. Google must know something we don’t know.

Update: Did anybody notice how this was released late on a Friday? That’s a signal that Google wants to keep this low profile. Because half as many people use computers on weekends as they do on weekdays and once Monday roles around this will be old news. Translation: Less blogs will talk about it.

Further update: Someone else found a way to see the dramatic difference in Google China vs Google Rest of the Free Planet. Pretty striking. In one way I can see some hope in what Google is doing. The spread of information does help facilitate freedom and quite possibly 5 years, or 10 years down the road there will be a revolt in China. Information is power.

It’s FRIDAY! Today’s caption photo is a little bit on the tame side and I think there’s enough here to be interesting. Usually pictures without a lot of people visible are hard to pull off. We’ll see what happens.

Cingular has just announced their new Push-to-Talk features and we knew you would have questions so we’ve created a simple guide to help you understand how this works. We hope you find it handy!

Think of this post as a BrainFuel annual report.

When we joined 9rules we joked internally that our little “quality content” slogan that we had pasted on the site had fooled the powers that be. It was more of an inside joke about the apparent lack of care we took in keeping this site to any specific focus. I think it’s interesting how in the last six month or so since joining 9rules we’ve had a chance to experiment with what exactly constitutes quality. Posts used to be about any topic under the sun. At least today we try to focus on web design. Well, at least some of the time.

Check out some stats from the last few months. You can see what day the Digg happened and notice the slight increase since then. A very small number of those visitors must have thought the site was worth bookmarking.

We joined 9rules on July 7th and our traffic has increased significantly as a result. I think it is safe to say that in the last 12 months our traffic has increased by 200% and more than half of that is singularily due to 9rules. You could maybe say that 9rules spurred growth in other areas building our number of incoming links. If you don’t believe me, look at this chart showing all of 2005 traffic. Note the sudden increase in July.

It’s useful to compare 2004.

What to attribute this growth to?

1. Membership in 9rules brings a lot of steady traffic — and good traffic
2. Tom’s recent Digg post which brought 20,000+ unique visits – BAM!
3. Several very high keyword rankings which bring constant traffic
4. Adding more than 900 posts to BrainFuel in 2005
5. increased from 468 average daily visitors in 2004 to 1,705 in 2005 and so far in 2006 an impressive 3,406 average daily visitor count — Let’s see if we can hold this number!
6. Number 1 current search term: 2006 Camaro

If you’re a BrainFuel stats lover go check out my April 2005 post on this topic.

Goals for 2006: I’d like to continue to increase our readership and community at BrainFuel. Over the last few months I’ve been excited to see new faces on the site and it’s great to chat with many of you. Here’s to a great rest of 2006!

I think Delta has a great web site. It’s all on one page (the search for flights stuff) and has bright use of imagery.

I’m not sure what to think of the Heinz web site. It’s nice and flashy and maybe some people like that but the characters on the site just don’t grab me because they’re far too cartoony.

Let’s hypothetically say you were a superhero and you could pause time for everyone except yourself.

Would you use this power to:

1. Rob banks and helpless victims blind
2. Catch up on your projects and work
3. Tour interesting yet innaccessible landmarks (for example, the Oval office in the middle of the day)
4. Or something else?

Leave a comment and let me know!! I also have a question: If you stop time would airplanes fall to the ground? I think they would.

You can tell someone spent a lot of time working on The Buddy Group’s site. It’s a great site but seriously lacks written content but makes up for it in visuals and stuff to play with.