Tuesday, October 16: Apple announces that the next release of Mac OS X, "Leopard" (10.5) will ship in 10 days. John Gruber posts the news on Daring Fireball, a leading Mac blog. Plus a request: Pre-Order Leopard Via DF Amazon Affiliate Links.

If you pre-order through these links, Amazon will send me a 7.5 percent kickback.

I.e., you get a good price and free shipping, and I get about $10.

Wednesday, October 24: Gruber posts a status report. 408 single copies + 171 family packs.

Yesterday, Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider does the math: nearly $5,800 in 8 days (based on 7.5%). Not bad for a single blog post followed by 2 links on the top-right of the blog since then. (The links are still there, so the total is surely rising.)

Today, we run a few more numbers. At 914,854 pages views from Oct 1-25, that's roughly 293,000 over 8 days, or an 0.2% purchase rate. Or, using a simple model for unique visitors over the same time period, about 1% of readers bought an upgrade.