SolarWinds Observability SaaS now offers synthetic transaction monitoring

Twitter is a great place to find out what’s going on “right now”, and the Swine Flu situation is no exception. As of this writing, half of the trending topics on Twitter are related to the Swine Flu (or “H1N1” as it’s also called).
With real-time services that facilitate communication in the way Twitter does, are we about to enter an era where we can stay informed to a much higher degree and therefore be able to minimize the ill effects of things such as the Swine Flu?
In short, will Twitter help counter the Swine Flu pandemic?

The other day we were looking at what we’re all looking at – screens – and being nostalgic. Then we realized there isn’t much to be nostalgic about.
Here’s what we remember of the good old Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) screens that used to adorn our desktops.

It’s spring. Love is in the air. So, if you’re a geek, madly in love, and dead set on getting married to your sweetheart, how do you go about it?
Maybe this will give you some inspiration. Here are bunch of marriage proposals, geek style.
(After the big report yesterday, we thought it was time to lighten things up a bit. 🙂 )

Last week we published a report about website uptime for airlines.
We had monitored the uptime of 42 international airline websites during a period of four months. The results were quite surprising so we figured we would share some of our findings here as well.
The full report is available as a free PDF, but below is a brief summary of the main points.

This is a guest post by David Walsh from WebHostingSearch.com.
The best domain names have vanished into the interweb’s vortex. People need to be creative. Using country code top-level domains (ccTLD) to create a unique domain is a great way to play on the domain extension and the name itself, also known as a domain hack. Some ccTLDs have lost its original meaning/purpose as they are now frequently used by international companies rather than by the country’s natives. We found ten sites that have been successful in combining their name with a ccTLD.

As covered earlier in this blog, governments spying on citizens is in vogue right now. What about other actors, do companies spy as well? Probably more than ever.
We took a look at some of the leading companies in Europe and quickly found some fine examples of this art form, using both proven methods (from Stasi – the actual guys) as well as evolving laws and practices of business intelligence and corporate governance.

We’re closing in on 500 articles here in our blog (this is number 498), and a fair share of these have been articles that are useful to webmasters (including bloggers). Therefore, here is a selection of our best and most useful articles written with webmasters in mind.
To help you out we have sorted the articles into groups. The index is at the top of the post.

What do you expect from the biggest, most tech savvy information technology corporations when you enter the world’s fastest growing web member community with 55 million visits every month?
We looked the Twitter presence of some of the world’s 100 biggest IT companies in April, 2009, and we were surprised with the results. While some actors seemed to communicate effectively, a majority of the companies seemed not to control their brands, and ten percent of the company names were unregistered.

We’ve been offering the possibility to monitor DNS servers for a while. So we were glad to see an article about DNS services and Pingdom’s DNS check functionality done by John Philip Green, CTO of Savvica.
Using Pingdom he evaluated the performance of DNS hosting providers to use as a guideline for selecting a new provider.

Today it’s been two weeks since Sweden enacted the IPRED law that makes it much easier for industry organizations to prosecute individuals involved in illegal file sharing and piracy. So at Pingdom we decided to examine the effects so far, looking at broadband traffic and online sales.

Spam. Those pointless, highly annoying junk messages that keep showing up in your inbox. Sadly enough, it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting rid of spam anytime soon, so in the meantime, here are some interesting facts you probably didn’t know about those pesky electronic messages everyone loves to hate.

With Easter comes sweets, and lots of them (at least here in Sweden!). This year we have something extra sweet for all you site owners who don’t have proper uptime monitoring set up for your website yet, something that might come in handy while you’re at home relaxing during Easter.
The above picture is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? 😉

The Conficker virus was supposed to start working its sinister magic on April 1. Were people really worried? Sure looks like it.

When an Internet-enabled device is the first thing you see when you wake up, is your companion all through the day, and the last thing you see when you go back to bed, it might be time to ask yourself – am I a Web addict yet? Or when will I be?
We took a look at current perceptions of the Internet and addiction to put our minds – and yours – to rest on the matter, coming to conclusions more positive than we had hoped.

We have performed a survey of the top 10,000 websites on the Internet to find out not just how many of them are using Google Analytics, but also the division between the legacy urchin.js script and the new ga.js script.
We found out two very interesting things.

Now that the computer industry has delivered what the users wanted – less capacity and less size at a lower price – the popularity of miniature laptops, netbooks, just keeps on growing.
Their minuscule size may actually cause us to regard our laptops as stationary and our netbooks as our main companions. We checked out some nifty new netbook habits (as actually exercised by an IT-professional friend of ours).

You see them over and over again in blogs and news articles. Web buzzwords like The Cloud, Web 2.0, wiki, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, and so on. They have become part of our everyday vocabulary.
Have you ever wondered who actually came up with these words, and when? Where did they first show up?

We live in Sweden, a very organized country when it comes to things like infrastructure, electricity, etc. However, there are some countries that have a more “organic” approach to their cabling…
Here are some of the most insane examples of electrical (and phone?) cabling that we have found. Imagine being the electrician called in to fix a problem with that wiring. You’d get the wonderful opportunity to get both electrocuted AND entangled. 🙂

As you may have noticed, our April Fool’s joke this year was to take irony into overdrive and launch SaveIE6.com. There simply is no other browser that web developers love to complain more about than IE6, so turning the tables on them (no pun intended) and make a whole site dedicated to praising IE6 seemed like a fun idea.
Luckily for us, irony proved to be alive and well on the Internet. The site has been incredibly well received, and was one of the most retweeted links on Twitter yesterday. If you haven’t checked it out already, you might want to take a look!
We have picked out some of the funniest comments people added to the petition page, all explaining why IE6 is a superior browser… 😉

Yesterday, a new anti-piracy law went live in Sweden. The result was an immediate 30% drop in Sweden’s Internet traffic.
The combined traffic passing through Sweden’s Internet Exchange Points usually peaks around 160 Gbit/s, but on Wednesday it peaked at around 110 Gbit/s. That’s a huge drop in traffic, and is presumably a direct result of less file sharing taking place.