Lies, Damned Lies and Weblog Statistics

Sorry for another list, but I seem to have run out of semi-profound thoughts for this week about Web 2.0 and social media. Instead, the old standby of weird and interesting things I found from my site statistics this morning. I don’t have an enormous amount of faith in these programs. My host runs two, awstats and Webalizer, which manage to provide totally different results from the same raw data. Be interesting to hear how these observations compare to others’ experiences, though.

  1. The joint number three single search term that has led people to this site from Google is “funny”. I am so, so sorry about that. Sort it out, Sergey.
  2. AskJeeves is lazy; it’s downloaded 3.87MB from this site, as opposed to Google’s 43MB. Or is Google just greedy?
  3. The interview that I did with Paul Graham when the site first launched in June is still one of my top in-bound links. The spooky thing about that is that the interview is on Pauls’ site, not mine.
  4. Google searches provide four times more traffic than all the other search engines combined.
  5. My reddit links draw in a lot more traffic than digg links. Perhaps because it’s slower moving?
  6. The US (or .com domains) accounts for more than half of my traffic. Elsewhere, China is already bigger than Japan; India is already bigger than the Russian Federation.
  7. I currently have twice as many Dutch readers as British ones. Dank u.
  8. Even a semi-thoughtful comment on another blog makes people come and see who you are.
  9. More than half (57%) of my visits are from Firefox users.
  10. 10 page views per visit this month, apparently. That’s incredibly high for a blog, I think, and a bit mystifying. I guess it reflects the fact that this is still a new site. Also, some will have been unrecognised bots which would bump up the average a lot.

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10 Comments

sounds like my numbers, too.

i am alway surprised at the high proportion of Firefox users.

are you tracking RSS feeds separately?

I am always amazed at the HUGE amt of indexing done by MSN — and the paltry number of searches it generates (as opposed to Google, of course)

You know what Twain also said?

Reddit traffic numbers are more spread out because links actually rise and fall on the hot page, whereas they just appear at the top of a queue on other sites.

OK, I can’t quite prove that Mark ever said that… but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

:-P

Mark Twain was such a genius. I never realised the extent of that until now.

This is a semi-thoughtful comment I’ve written on your blog. Thanks for all the readers you’ll be sending me!

;)

I meant a bit more thoughtful than that! But I had a look anyway, so that proves I’m right. ;)

Hey I got zero visitors from my Choo Choo Twain comment!

I resent that!

LOL

:)

Yeah, but Marc. I’ve read your blog before and, well…

Only joking. When are you going to spill the beans about your new stealth venture?

I got two visitors from here. It works :) Thanks TP.

Spill what beans?

I am hoping the three beans I have in my pocket are real magic beans. My own organic stairway to heaven.

:)

I’ll make it to London in the near future. I’m still going thru my east-coast/west-coast move.


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