Bruce On Games » Housekeeping

My new blog. Bruce on shaving

Bruce — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:53:13 +0000

http://www.bruceonshaving.com/

I have started an completely new blog and it has absolutely nothing to do with video games. It is Bruceonshaving.com.

More and more people are joining the real shaving revolution. Using a traditional double edged razor and a lather generated with a brush, shaving becomes a daily ceremony to look forward to instead of being a bothersome chore. Not only that, you can luxuriate in the finest quality shaving products at a cost per shave that is less than using multibladed system razors with aerosol gels and foams. All the components of a real shave, the razor, blade, lather and brush are made by many different manufacturers with an absolute profusion of choice, this allows you to tailor your shaving experience every day to your exact requirements. And whilst real shaving is easy to do, developing a good technique will reward you with progressively more perfect shaves.

Bruceongames, an update

Bruce — Thu, 13 May 2010 11:06:52 +0000

I am sorry about not posting for so long without keeping you informed. Basically the Evony thing caused a huge backlog of normal stuff that needed doing. So we visited my mother in law in Latvia, then I went to Menorca to visit my mother, then we went to France for a well earned driving holiday. Now I am back.

I have two fundamental problems with Bruceongames going forward.

The first is that libel laws are being abused to suppress free speech by those who have things to hide. Great swathes of the internet are now censored by London libel lawyers sending out threatening letters to protect often nefarious characters. You may live in America, but this effects you, the internet is being censored for the whole world.

Our libel law was designed to protect the landed gentry from the tittle tattle of their servants. So it is incredibly difficult and expensive to defend against, no matter how truthful your words are, cases are typically over a million pounds now. And you are guilty till you prove yourself innocent, which goes right against natural justice and gives a massive advantage to those who are abusing the law. So the only option when threatened is to give in, as happens many thousands of times. We really, really don’t have free speech. Those with money control what is said about them.

I have been acted against four times in the last year for telling the truth. This occupies a huge amount of time and is an immense pressure. If anything goes wrong it would destroy my life. Is it worth telling you my opinions with this weight hanging over me?

Most other countries have far less repressive libel laws and it causes no problems, society still works. The only people who lose out are the solicitors and the nefarious characters with something to hide. The English libel laws are a total disgrace and do not reflect well on us as a nation and as a democracy.

You can do something about this. Write to your politicians, whatever country you are in. Support organisations like The Libel Reform Campaign. It is your freedoms and rights that are being taken away and only you can fix it.

The second problem is that with Bruceongames I am giving away immense value with no benefit to myself. This site was a long way ahead of the curve on a huge range of subjects: iPod as gaming device, the demise of high street retail, convergence between social networking and gaming, free online gaming, gesture interfaces, Android etc etc. And I have written a lot of “how to” articles that distil three decades of experience. My reader benefit, I don’t. Nobody pays me to write this and the Google ads only bring in pennies. So why should I do it?

I started this blog as a sort of marketing exercise for myself. Give me a job. And it has become much more, growing to a hundred thousand visitors a month. But I still don’t have the job I want. Lots and lots of requests for my help, which I have given, mostly for free. But still no job. So now I think my time would be better spent sending out my CV, ringing around, going to interviews.

I haven’t given up completely. You can expect the occasional article when I have some free time, there is a worthwhile issue and the likelihood of being sued is low. But I am not going to put anything like the previous effort into this.

Thank you for coming here and reading this.

A big thank you

Bruce — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:03:47 +0000

In the world there are over 100 million blogs and they are monitored by a service called Technorati. So you can imagine how pleased I was two year ago when this blog made it to number 52,589 in their ranking. This with an “authority” of 121, which is a measure of how often it had been referred to by other blogs in the previous six months.

Fast forward to today and Bruceongames.com is now ranked as blog number 7,139 in the world. And the “authority” is now at 464. Not too shabby when you consider that it is targeted at a fairly narrow audience, game industry professionals, that there is only one person writing here and that there is no marketing budget.

So a big thank you to everyone who has made this possible. You the readers and also the many other bloggers who have chosen to refer to what is written here.

So this is Christmas

Bruce — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:46:57 +0000

Have a good one. I am giving myself a bit of a rest from this till the new year. Related stories A true measure of Microsoft Xbox 360 success A British Christmas tradition Bruceongames, an update

Bruceongames November performance

Bruce — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 10:31:19 +0000

So in November the site had 98,120 visits which resulted in 182,537 page views.

Visitors came from 165 separate countries or territories with USA providing more than half the traffic with 52,784. The UK was well behind with 12,134 then Canada 7,842.

Further down we have 733 from Singapore yet only 168 from Hong Kong. There were 42 from the Palestinian Territories, 13 from Sudan and 9 each from Azerbaijan and Moldova.

It is pretty obvious that the main factors for the geographical spread are use of the English language, population size and wealth (the ability to access a PC).

45% of the traffic came from referring sites, 44% from Google and 10% direct. What is interesting is that traffic came from 919 different sources and mediums which shows just how embedded Bruceongames is into the internet. The biggest referrer was Stumbleupon, but even FeministLawProfessors.com was sending traffic this way.

How popular is Bruceongames?

Bruce — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:30:59 +0000

It is a little interesting that both Gamesindustry.biz and MCV have recently released traffic details. Gamesindustry.biz at over 340K monthly uniques, MCV at over 240K monthly uniques. Now both these sites publish multiple articles every day written by multiple professional journalists. So my whimsical opinion pieces can hardly be expected to compete.

Here are the numbers that analytics are telling me for the last month of Bruceongames: Visitors 100,869, Uniques 91,014, Page views 185,954.

Imagine what they would be if I had a bit more content and a marketing budget!

I have gone away on holiday

Bruce — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:00:46 +0000

I am going away on a big holiday to strange and exotic lands.
A lot of time I will be travelling, a lot of time I will be where there is no easy interweb access and a lot of time I will be enjoying my holiday.
So I will have little, if any, time to look after Bruceongames. Which means comments may stack up for a while before being approved, but please still make them. Normal service should resume after 14 September.

To keep you happy I have written a whole pile of articles which should auto publish themselves to a schedule whilst I am away.

28 August: Some free advice for Michael Grade
31 August: About good management
2 September: Gran Turismo 5 (GT5) Vs Forza Motorsport 3 (FM3)
4 September: What do game publishers do and is there any need for them?
7 September: Will video gaming become the main form of human exercise?
9 September: How to manage fansites
11 September: The Great Flu
14 September: Microdigital in Liverpool

Obviously none of these can be news related. They are more industry background pieces. I hope you enjoy them.

Bruceongames is two years old

Bruce — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 05:00:35 +0000

The site is copied and mirrored in lots of places and people use RSS feeds, so most article are seen far more times elsewhere.

However here are some facts and figures for the site itself:

639 posts.
Over 2,700 comments on those posts.
Just coming up to half a million visits. Over 400,000 absolute unique visitors.
Over 49,000 visitors in the last month.
Busiest day Feb 18th 2008, 13,426 visitors.
Top 4 articles. How to pirate Microsoft Xbox 360 games 30,296, Don’t play Evony 27,734, Fanboys 27,169, Is the GPU holding the PS3 back? 21,177.
Visitor nationality. USA 212,046, UK 96,567, Canada 36,099, Australia 16,563.
62% of traffic comes from links, 25% from search engines, 13% direct.
Traffic came from 2,522 sources.
7,155 internet links to Bruceongames.com

Nominate/vote for this blog

Bruce — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:00:58 +0000

MCV are inviting nominations/votes for their annual media awards. One of the awards is for games blog and Bruceongames is precisely that. So if you think this site is worth a mention please email MCV at gma@intentmedia.co.uk

Don’t play Evony

Bruce — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:35:08 +0000

Evony is a new, free, browser MMO. And their marketing consists of spamming up the internet like crazy. This blog is receiving a huge number of spam “comments” from them. Fortunately Akismet anti spam puts them automatically into the bin. Here are some of the email addresses they are using for this spam:

tsenseless.evony.com/bx8s07@naplesnews.net

tsenseless.evony.com/4cdtyg0fv@hotmail.com

tsenseless.evony.com/m36fqptkw2@naplesnews.net

tsenseless.evony.com/sfhwrv@live.com

tsenseless.evony.com/fhgpzdbk80@naplesnews.net

tsenseless.evony.com/w85@darkhorsefan.net

tsenseless.evony.com/xycw5vd@student.com

tsenseless.evony.com/ndh4pr1@bolt.com

tsenseless.evony.com/f3ypkg6@postmark.net

tsenseless.evony.com/ftcs@usa.com

tsenseless.evony.com/6n8ck@naplesnews.net

tsenseless.evony.com/rjd@email.com

And so on. They are doing this from the IP address 63.223.110.211

Whois Record

OrgName:    Beyond The Network America, Inc.
OrgID:      BNA-42
Address:    450 Springpark PL
Address:    Suite 100
City:       Herdon
StateProv:  VA
PostalCode: 20170
Country:    US

NetRange:   63.216.0.0 - 63.223.255.255
CIDR:       63.216.0.0/13
NetName:    BTN-CIDR5
NetHandle:  NET-63-216-0-0-1
Parent:     NET-63-0-0-0-0
NetType:    Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS.CAIS.COM
NameServer: NS2.CAIS.COM
Comment:    ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE
RegDate:    1999-12-09
Updated:    2004-11-12

OrgAbuseHandle: PAD13-ARIN
OrgAbuseName:   PCCW AUP Department
OrgAbusePhone:  +1-703-621-1637
OrgAbuseEmail:

Edit: I have written a second Evony article giving an overview and background.

Is Evony Malware?

Evony advert ridiculed by PopCap.

Queen of Evony competition.