I am reminded today about the cold war with next week being the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. But leading up to this unfortunate event were a series of activities during the 1950s and 1960s where we were in a race with the Soviets to produce nuclear weapons, launch manned space vehicles, and create other new technologies. We also were in competition to develop the beginnings of the underlying technology for what would become today’s Internet.

One effort succeeded thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research that worked closely with a centrally planning authority. The other failed largely because of unregulated competition that was stymied by a variety of self-interests. Ironically, we acted like the socialists and the Soviets acted like the capitalists.

While the origins of the American Internet are well documented, until now there has been little published research into those early Soviet efforts. A new book from Benjamin Peters, a professor at the University of Tulsa, called How Not to Network a Nation seeks to rectify this. While a fairly dry read, it nevertheless is fascinating to see how the historical context unfolded and how the Soviets missed out on being at the forefront of Internet developments, despite early leads in rocketry and computer science.

It wasn’t from lack of effort. From the 1950s onward, a small group of Soviet scientists tried to develop a national computer network. They came close on three separate times, but failed each time. Meanwhile, the progenitor of the Internet, ARPANET, was established in late 1959 in the US and that became the basis for the technology we use every day.

Ultimately the Soviet-style “command economy” proved inflexible and eventually imploded. Instead of being a utopian vision of the common man, it gave us quirky cars like the Lada and a space station Mir that looked like something built out of spare parts.

The Soviets had trouble mainly because of a disconnect between their civilian and military economies. The military didn’t understand how to marshall and manage resources for civilian projects. And when it came time to deal with superstar scientists from its army, they faltered when deciding on proposed civilian projects.

Interestingly, those Soviet efforts at constructing the Internet could have become groundbreaking, had they moved forward. One was the precursor to cloud computing, another was an early digital computer. Both of these efforts were ultimately squashed by their bureaucracies, and you know how the story goes from there. What is more remarkable is that this early computer was Europe’s first, built in an old monastery that didn’t even have indoor plumbing.

Almost a year after ARPANET was created, the Soviets had a meeting to approve their own national computing network. Certainly, having the US ahead of them increased their interest. But they tabled the idea from Vicktor Glushkov and it died in committee. It was bad timing: two of the leaders of the Politburo were absent that day they considered the proposal.

Another leading light was Anatoly Kitov, who proposed in 1959 that civilian economists use computers to solve economic problems. For his efforts, he was dismissed from the army and put through a show trial. Yet during the 1950s the Soviet military had long-distance computer networks and in the 1960s they had local area networks. What they didn’t have were standard protocols and interoperable computers. It wasn’t the technology, but the people, that stopped their development of these projects.

What Peters shows is that the lessons from the failed Soviet Internet (he adoringly calls it the ‘InterNyet’) has to do more with the underlying actors and the intended social consequences than any lack of their combined technical skill. Every step along the route he charts in his book shows that some failure of one or more organizations held back the Soviet Internet from flourishing like it did here in the States. Memos got lost in the mail, decisions were deferred, committees fought over jurisdiction, and so forth. These mundane reasons prevented the Soviet Internet from going anywhere.

You can pre-order the book from Amazon here.

I admit it; I have fallen out of the habit of reviewing my various stats on my websites and other content-oriented places. For many years I dutifully kept track of how my posts were doing, who was commenting, where backlinks were coming from, and so forth.

For some reason, I stopped doing this in the past year. Maybe it was just being lazy, maybe because I had gotten very busy with a lot of very interesting assignments. Maybe it was just old age: I have been writing stuff for more than 25 years, after all.

Well, all of those (and others) aren’t valid excuses. You need to check your stats, and check them regularly. There are lots of interesting things hidden in them that you might not realize, and some of these things can help you delivery better content, or target new audiences, or figure out what you are doing right (and do it more often) or wrong (and avoid or improve).

WordPress’ Jetpack delivers an annual email summary of your blog and its posts: this is a very useful reminder that you need to dive in deeper and see what is going on with your blog (or blogs, in my case). And Slideshare.net also has some great analytics. This service is a wonderful place to post PowerPoints of my presentations. Looking at these analytics, I would have found out:

• Influence can be found in odd places. A post that I wrote for SoftwareAdvice.com about real-time retail store tracking was picked up by a blogger for the point-of-sale system Vend.com, that brought a bunch of visitors to my site back in the spring when I was quoted by their blogger. Could have been an opportunity to talk more about the subject.
• Don’t knock the long tail. I am still the leading expert on a very obscure Windows error message: if you were to Google “Windows Media Player error c00d11b1” you will see my post in the first ten or so results. The post has received more than 380,000 views in the more than eight years since I wrote it, and it is still getting comments on my blog and links in the Microsoft forums too. Why is this important? All this traffic on a very specific subject can help raise your Google ranking, and also provide an entry point into your content ecosystem if you manage it properly.
• My influence beyond North American borders is somewhat quirky. The second most-visited place of origin for my Slideshare.net account is Ukraine, with about half the views from the US over the past year. Again attesting to the very long tail, a good chunk of these views came from a presentation that I posted five years ago on how to set up your first blog and business email. (That kind of makes sense.) For my blog, other popular countries of origin for my visitors were India and Brazil. Don’t forget the rest of the world when you are posting your content and widen your perspective to engage more of these readers.
• Twitter and Facebook were both important traffic drivers for my blog over the past year. This emphasizes how critical your own social media accounts are and how you need to cross-link posts among them. Combined the two were equal to the traffic brought in from Google organic searches, which is another important element in referring traffic too. Don’t just post blog entries on your blog: I have begun cross-posting my content on LinkedIn Pulse and Medium and they are getting a fair share of views there too. The analytics for those sites could be better though: for example, Medium only allows you to look at month-long intervals at a time and Pulse will only send you static results in regular email summaries.

There are lots of Twitter analytic tools, and some that are quite pricey. One that I like that has a free version is TwitterCounter, including who unfollowed and followed you over time. For example, I got excited this week to see that the actor Taye Diggs followed me (he has been following my wife’s Tweets for some time) but our local mayor dropped me (oh well). You can see the kind of graphs it produces such as this, which to me indicate a fairly steady stream of new followers replacing the drop-offs with a slow overall growth:

Happy new year and may your stats encourage you to deliver better content in 2015!