Gold farming in China makes the NYT

from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow: Julian Dibbell, author of the stellar Play Money (a book about making real money in virtual worlds), has a great NYT feature up about the life of Chinese gold farmers (a subject I tackle in my story Anda's Game). This story keeps on getting weirder and more interesting.

At the end of each shift, Li reports the night’s haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20. The small commercial space Li and his colleagues work in — two rooms, one for the workers and another for the supervisor — along with a rudimentary workers’ dorm, a half-hour’s bus ride away, are the entire physical plant of this modest $80,000-a-year business. It is estimated that there are thousands of businesses like it all over China, neither owned nor operated by the game companies from which they make their money. Collectively they employ an estimated 100,000 workers, who produce the bulk of all the goods in what has become a $1.8 billion worldwide trade in virtual items. The polite name for these operations is youxi gongzuoshi, or gaming workshops, but to gamers throughout the world, they are better known as gold farms. While the Internet has produced some strange new job descriptions over the years, it is hard to think of any more surreal than that of the Chinese gold farmer.

Link

See also: Avatars, and the carbon-based meatbags behind them (that's us)

Samsung and Seagate finally match Hitachi with 1TB SATA disks

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

Months after Hitachi announced their big 3.5-inch, 1TB drive, Samsung and Seagate have finally matched that capacity by sheepishly launching their own 3Gbps SATA disks. Sammy does it all with efficiency boy, by spinning 3x 334GB platters to Hitachi’s 5x 200GB platters (10 heads) or Seagate’s 4 platters (8 heads) of 250GB each. That little trick should keep the weight, decibels, and power draw of their SpinPoint F1 (pictured) to a minimum. Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K1000 still packs that impressive 32MB buffer which Samsung and Seagate can only aspire to with their 16MBs of respective cache. Expect both of the newcomers to be priced around $400. Cheap, but we’ll be holding our wad for the inevitable head-to-head (to-head) shootout we’re sure somebody is cooking up.

Read — Seagate Barracuda 7200.10
Read — Samsung SpinPoint F1

Track Every Click with Crazy Egg’s “Confetti”

from TechCrunch by Nick Gonzalez

Optimizing your website can be tough business since you can’t “see” your customers online. Analytics packages like Google analytics do a good job letting you see how many visitors are coming and going on your site by tracking every page request. However, another breed of analytics focuses on optimizing how they’re using it, by tracking where visitors click. Crazy Egg, one of these optimization services, now has a new feature “Confetti” that lets you easily see where every visitor clicked on your site and what brought them there. We’ve covered their previous overlay and heatmap features here.

Confetti overlays your site, showing each visitor’s click as a colored dot. The colors stand for the categories you sort the clicks by: operating system, browser, window size, time before clicking, and what search term brought them to the page. It even shows you clicks that weren’t on links, so you know if your users are expecting a link where there isn’t one. You can see the results in aggregate as a bar chart or click on individual dots to find out more information about a particular user. For instance, you can use Confetti to see how users from different referrals behave, and settle the debate over exactly how many of those Digg users click on your ads.

Crazy Egg has been implemented on over 250,000 sites and is free if you just want to track up to 5,000 clicks on 4 pages at a time each month. But if you upgrade to a paid account, you can track more clicks over more pages with real time data. The limited number of clicks tracked may seem restrictive, but analytics from Crazy Egg are meant to run for a short period of time on a specific url to grab a sample of how your users react to design changes.

There are a couple other optimization services out there: Map Surface, ClickTale, and Click Density. Click Density was one of the first services to show each unique click on your site, but Crazy Egg has added a simpler point-and-click interface for drilling into your data.

Crazy Egg is based in Orange County California and has reportedly been in acquisition talks.