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24/04/08 The Whirring Sound of GMT+0
SINGAPORE - Have you ever stood in a large financial data-centre in between the towering racks on the aisles that do real-time share transactions? If you go there at 1359hrs in London you can wait in anticipation amongst the humming fans for the big red server clock to click to 1400hrs. It’s at 1400hrs GMT+0 that the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) opens for business and thousands of overnight trades and position changes get processed in real-time. Everything begins whirring around you, walls of red, amber & green flashing LEDs light up and the low hum turns into a vast orchestra of clicking of hard-disk read/write operations. Seeing it the first time was really exciting.
As people look for the work/blog balance they discover auto-pilot mode (I came across it via Damien). It’s something I use a lot to write a set of posts and then automatically publish them off one-by-one throughout the week by setting the post-date into the future.
One of my biggest questions to answer has been around timing (and I’ve been experimenting by off-setting all mine and looking at click-through rates). When people have 1000’s of subscriptions (I’ve 490 still unread from just last night) and a [Mark All As Read] button, how do you get seen? What is the optimum posting time? Morning? Just before Lunch? Just After Lunch? End of Day? Evening? Friday Afternoon? Who knows…
What I do know is people like auto-posting at 7am. Just 22 minutes ago, it clicked 0700hrs GMT+0 and I was watching my Google-Reader window. The left-frame went solid yellow (implying a new update arrived) and the count of unread posts leapt up. While I’m sure Google feed-fetcher isn’t real-time, I’d swear you could see the difference in the servers clocks as each clicked onto 7am and publishing within 20 seconds of each other.
For a tiny second, it was like watching the opening bell on my very own NYSE.
(Image Credit: Standing with the guards of the Traditional Arts & Culture Museum in Yilan, Taiwan last weekend. By Author.)
Tags: Blogging, General, gmt, stock exchange, time, timezones
2 Comments
I think the argument for posting early is quite straight-forward:
* The older the post, the less likely people are to interact with it (leave a comment, write a post about it, add it to social bookmarking site, e-mail it). Obviously, this is a generalisation, but often a post it most relevant at the moment it’s published.
* Given this, you want people to see it as close to the publish time as possible. A lot of folks will do their reading first thing in the morning (the spike here for my reading is at 10am: http://skitch.com/eoghanmccabe/krs2/google-reader-1000, the spike for a sample from contrast.ie is at 10am: http://skitch.com/eoghanmccabe/krs9/visits-for-all-visitors-google-analytics), so if your post is not ready by then, you have to wait another 24 hours for them to see it, by which time they are less likely to interact.
I post at about 7am which I’ve guessed is the latest time I can publish while still getting most (you can see in the Analytics picture, traffic starts to build after 7am) morning readers in GMT+0.
But what to do if you’ve a perfectly geographically-distributed reader-base?
Actually, Google Reader gets Blogger and Feedburner-ed posts pretty much instantly now.
