Why Website Speed is Important - SixRevisions

Let’s do some back-of-the-napkin calculations.

Last year alone, Amazon’s estimated revenue totaled $74.5 billion.

Based on Linden’s disclosure, increasing page loading times by just a fraction of a second would cost Amazon $745 million a year in lost revenue!

I'm no analytics guy, but it sounds like we in the business of building websites need to make them load faster.

Except for the AOL case study on the bottom of the page, the article doesn't really mention connection speed, though. I bring that up to say that this seems like a pretty strong argument for improving broadband speeds in America, like the telecoms are supposed to be doing anyway, but are dragging their feet on, because why should they; they already got their National  Broadband Plan money.

Let Me Explain Why Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance Was Our Top Story This Morning | The Onion →

So, as managing editor of CNN.com, I want our readers to know this: All you are to us, and all you will ever be to us, are eyeballs. The more eyeballs on our content, the more cash we can ask for. Period. And if we’re able to get more eyeballs, that means I’ve done my job, which gets me congratulations from my bosses, which encourages me to put up even more stupid bullshit on the homepage.

I don’t hesitate to call it stupid bullshit because we all know it’s stupid bullshit. We know it and you know it. We also know that you are probably dumb enough, or bored enough, or both, to click on the stupid bullshit anyway, and that you will continue to do so as long as we keep putting it in front of your big, idiot faces.

So good. And by the way, I'm excited to see what my pageviews look like, just for linking to a story mocking CNN for putting Miley Cyrus in the spot usually reserved for the most important news in the world.

Is the GOP stealing Ohio?

Funny business going on in Ohio, beginning suspiciously close to the 2012 Presidential Election. At the behest of Secretary of State Jon Husted (R), an unverified software patch was installed on electronic voting tabulation machines in 39 counties to "assist counties and to help them simplify the process by which they report the results to our system."

Re. a sketchy election result from Georgia in 2002:

No one will likely ever be able to prove that the November 2002 election was rigged, but that infamous software “patch,” along with the anomalous election results from 100 percent unverifiable voting systems (which are still in use today across the state of Georgia and in many other states) has cast an everlasting cloud of suspicion over that election.

The more I read, the more this is making me queasy. Even assuming there's nothing nefarious going on here, it's still highly suspect that they waited to install this uncertified patch on these machines only days before the 2012 election.

Al Capone →

​Fascinating historical photos of Al Capone, dug up from glass-plate negatives found in the Chicago Tribune's basement.

[via the loop]​