Dita Always Higher

Web statistics are an amusing and instructive game. I often stop and watch the tables full of figures saying how many people come to my web site and which pages they visit, and the bulleted maps showing from which part of the world visitors arrive. Sometimes I find strange and unexpected things, for example a particular visit concentration from South Korea, from Turkey or Mexico.
One of the most interesting is the search statistics page offered by Google Sitemaps, showing which keywords visitors use to reach the website from the search engine. Many arrive on the web site simply searching “stylettos” and that's normal, but, apart from this, the most loved and most clicked is always her, Dita. Few months ago I published a blog about Dita Von Teese, and since then the fans of the famous pin-up, wife of rockstar Marilyn Manson, come everyday numerous.
Then I say: Do you want Dita? I'll give you Dita! Here's the YouTube video of a long television interview on French channel Antenne 2, where the Queen of the Burlesque appears in all her splendor, shot from several angles, absolutely elegant and well heeled.

There Is Something About YouTube

The recent purchase of extremely popular video web site YouTube by Google for $1.65 billion in stock is probably one of the biggest news to date in the internet world. The site, which was started by three 20-somethings last year, is a free video warehouse that allows users (something like 100 million a day) to upload or download movies. Rumors emerged that Yahoo was in the bidding war until very close to the end. Sequoia Capital, which funded YouTube with $11.5 million, earned more than 40 times what was invested in a company founded in February 2005. Other news report of CBS, Vivendi-Universal and Sony BMG joining a new branded channel on YouTube to deliver featured content.
On the other hand News Corp-Fox, which owns MySpace, the first YouTube competitor in the web video market, didn't hide sort of unease about Google's move, given the recent agreement for hosting Google ads on the famous social networking community. Last weekend, subtle changes occurred on MySpace’s homepage and user pages to make MySpace videos much more prominent and accessible. The default user profile page now has a video section that automatically displays a video if the user has one uploaded.
In other words the web video world is exploding, and the "viral" video technology invented by YouTube is the engine of this explosion. What's this "viral" stuff? It's the ability of embedding any YouTube video in a blog or web site just as simply as this...

The Way We Were

I discovered a web service which is useful and impressively big. It's the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, a sort of time machine allowing to see how the web was in the past, going back until 1996. The service is also linked with the great Library of Alexandria, Egypt, and contains the time archives of whichever web site, for a total of 55 billion pages.
If you are interested in the history of STYLETTOS Italy you will find that, since the amateur beginnings in 2002, many new contents were developed but the style of the site, essential and a little severe, didn't change much.

Why This Site, Why This Blog

From now on, also STYLETTOS Italy has its own blog. I began to attend the blogosphere, and I realised that interesting and innovative things are emerging between all the blah-blah. What is impressing in the first place is the size of the phenomenon, nearly 27 million blogs online and about 2 billion links (Technorati data), 700,000 posts and 70,000 new blogs every day, and who knows how much more underground stuff.

This site could not remain outside from such a lively and continuously evolving reality. By now the blog is only a substantial reply of the old "Why this site" page, supplying information and clarifications about the development and the history of STYLETTOS Italy, but it is obvious that this section will have to take its independent route, still to be invented.

I'm eagerly waiting for comments and suggestions, otherwise what a blog is it?

Original 3D Models

As I said before, these wonderful shoes are not for sale. This is the text that is normally sent to people asking directions about ordering: "STYLETTOS Italy is still mostly a graphic design project. Only a few sample series were produced till now, but they are sold out at the moment. Further production is not planned in the short term. Thank you anyway for your interest and appreciation, always welcome, and stay tuned with this web site for new models and features." Eventual collaboration or development proposals are always carefully considered, but at the moment I'm more inclined to take advantage of this web site and three-dimensional software potentialities, rather than to face the problems implied in footwear production and commerce.

Before somebody asks, I'll give a few technical details about my digital models. They've been developed using only AutoCAD and a few custom made Visual Basic routines. Neither 3DS or Maya, nor any post-editing with Photo Shop or other similar programs, just rendered images taken from my models. I never published the software I invented, but some of the digital models are on sale through Viewpoint catalog, now Digimation catalog.

An important feature, allowing to fully appreciate models' tridimensional nature, is the Experience! section, that can be reached from the home page. It's about impressive interactive animations that can be activated installing Viewpoint Media Player plug-in. You will be able to zoom and rotate models ad libitum observing them in smallest details and even diving into them, try and see (a broadband connection works better).

Google AdSense and STYLETTOS Italy

But now a good piece of news: I finally found the way to monetise this web site adequately. I don't even remember where I got the idea, I tried to place Google Ads on the site and I discovered that IT WORKS! I can make in one week more than I earned in three years with other affiliate programs. And this I believe without weighing too much on this site's character, but on the contrary adding useful and interesting contents and features.

It is to be admitted that whoever invented this is a genius, those Google guys found the Columbus' egg, or if you prefer the chicken with the golden eggs. The idea is simple and brilliant at the same time: after creating a search engine which everybody must pass, and setting up a system that displays ads that are relevant with the search, they extended this system to third parties, addressing to every single web page and blog that signs-up with the program the most appropriate ads in a completely automated way. Doing so Google encourages web sites development, redistributing to the publishers part of the revenues, which are paid by the advertisers with an auction system that is quite complex and fully automated as well.

It's a milestone of a new age: somebody perfectly understood Internet's nature, which is not one-to-many but many-to-many communication, and found the way to intercept this traffic for commercial purposes with efficient services and a sophisticated artificial intelligence technology. Try and see, just browse the pages of this site to realise that the addressing can get on every page the most relevant ads, even if there is still some weird combination. The system is pay-per-click and these ads are very likely to be visited and so to bring revenues, because they just comply with what visitors are looking for. In my opinion the main advantage of Google AdSense, compared with usual affiliate programs, is that you don't need that the visitor buys something to get the commission. It's more or less as being paid just to bring people window-shopping.