Next month sees the annual roll-over of sponsors to the online edition of Oil IT Journal—www.oilit.com. For 2007-2008 we have support from the following companies ...
We thank the eleven companies who renewed their support for another year and extend a special welcome our new sponsor
Paroxismal
Eleven out of twelve renewals is a pretty good showing and reflects the steady rise of oilit.com’s popularity and effectiveness as a vehicle for getting the message out to the oil and gas software community. Activity on the www.oilit.com website reached positively paroxysmal levels in June with an average 2,550 ‘visitors’ per day (3,350 max—see graphic below) and around 15,000 hits per day. This is a pretty good traffic for a website that only gets updated once a month. In fact the visitor count is actually pretty constant throughout the month.
Ten years free!
This reflects the fact that there are now ten years worth (up to June 2006) of Oil IT Journal freely available online—along with headlines for the current year. There is a lot of useful information in these back issues for marketing departments, researchers and other knowledge workers. We have it on good authority that the online edition of Oil IT Journal is de rigeur for ‘onboarding’ new hires—especially those who, as is increasingly the case in the oil and gas sector, are brought in from other industries and who are expected to get up to speed in oil and gas terminology and folklore in short order.
Urchin
These numbers are as reported by our ISP’s Urchin (now Google Analytics) tracking software and while they should be taken with a pinch of salt, they show very considerable year on year growth. In fact this time last year I was reporting, with some satisfaction, that we were getting 1,600 visitors per day. And already, in 2005, a survey for POSC (now Energistics) by Houston-based Spur Digital described www.OilIT.com as ‘the top website for energy professionals.’
Robots
A degree of over counting is inevitable as, since we added RSS feeds to the website we get a considerable number of visitors of the robotic variety. But that in itself is no bad thing as the robots are no doubt going forth and carrying the oilit.com message to the more remote parts of Cyberspace. Or perhaps that should read the Blogosphere because the robots translate Oil IT Journal into a blog format. We now have a hundred or so ‘subscribers’ from the blog community.
PageRank
Another measure of a website’s popularity is given by its Google PageRank—a rather confusing reference to Google founder Larry Page’s ranking algorithm. Imagine the confusion though if Larry’s parents had called him Webster—but I digress. We had a bit of a fright earlier this year as our PageRank went down from five (where it had been for a couple of years) to zero. But this is proved to be an artifact as Google algorithms beavered away on our voluminous logs. They finally came back with a new rank of seven, which I think is pretty respectable. This is the same PageRank as the AAPG and the SEG and bests the EAGE (PageRank 6).
PNEC
Well that’s more own-trumpet blowing than we have indulged in for a while—so it behooves me to offer you some pithy editorializing in the way of a reward for having read this far. How about some fascinating facts? In his keynote address to the 2007 PNEC conference in Houston this month (a report of which will appear in the July-August issue of Oil IT Journal) Information Week editor John Soat spoke about data management at large. First fascinating fact is that, according to an IDC study, there will 988 billion gigabytes online by 2010. Perhaps this fact is more fascinating for its spurious precision than the number itself. OK, well try this one instead. Would you believe that programmed trading (buying and selling shares by computer) is now so prevalent that the speed of light is the limiting factor. According to Soat, banks and trading houses now co-locate their hardware inside NASDAQ’s computer facility. The shortened electronic pathways gives them considerably more than a microsecond advantage over the poor day trader watching the ticker jump around on his screen at home checking for ‘momentum.’ Not sure how you interpret that, but I can’t see this as anything more than a twenty-first century version of insider trading! Can somebody explain please?
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