Tue 4 Mar 2008
For those interested, below is some discussion of our readers. Previous discussion here.
Things seem fairly stable over the last year or so. As you can see on the right side, we provide direct links to two free web hit measuring services (here and here). We believe in transparency at EphBlog. At some point, we will explore more closely the analytic tools supplied with Wordpress and by Google, but I don’t know how to work that yet.
Big picture, it seems like we get about 1,000 hits from unique computers in a typical weekday. My best guess is that about 1/3 of these are from students/faculty/staff/residents. You can get a sense of that by looking at today’s readership. (Current results here.)
The 24% figure for readers from Williams is a little higher than usual. Monday seems to be a big day for college faculty and staff to catch up on their EphBlog reading. The figure from rr.com, now 2%, used to be higher. I think that this domain used to belong to AT&T Roadrunner, a internet provider that largely disappeared several mergers ago. I think that some of those comcast.com hits are also from the local area.
I think that about another 1/3 are regular readers from outside Williamstown, overwhelming alumni and parents. At some point, I want to get a better handle on this. The best measure of our regular readers would be something like: How many ip addresses check EphBlog on at least 5 different days in a single month? Alas, our current services don’t provide that technology.
The final 1/3 of readers are random web surfers. You can see the latest searches that have brought people to EphBlog here. People looking for “Molly Shattuck,” “Chase Coleman,” “Tracy Mcintosh” or “Brooks Perlin” are probably interested in what they find here. Some of the other surfers go away disappointed. In any event, although we are happy to provide content that visitors find interesting, they are not really part of the EphBlog community.
Of course, all of the above is very rough. Not every visitor from Williams has a Williams IP address, I think. Random visitors probably account for fewer than 1/3 of our readers and alumni/parents from slightly more than 1/3. Yet the above is a fair summary of where EphBlog is now.
March 4th, 2008 at 8:20 am
Big Brother is watching you.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:10 am
David (and tech),
Interesting data, and a good opportunity to bring up a couple of points (albeit from your resident tech-slexic).
*The first time I found EB was by accident. I was googling an article to send to someone and lo! it led me here.
*The first time you posted a link to the tracking system, I was able to pinpoint my own individual number and ‘drop-in’ times…not very difficult, a little bit wierd, but also fascinating. I began to understand the ease with which one could be tracked.
*It is also, at this point, almost easier to track back on an archive post by googling the subject and/or commentator than it is by using the EB archives. Especially lately, because of the ‘crowding’ of all the blog entries or pingbacks or whatever the heck they are. Yesterday alone there were endless numbers of those, which made ‘picking up’ a conversation, or finding a recent thread much more tedious.
By the same token, it has kept me from re-posting a new point on a past thread. (There were some wonderful ‘gender inequality’ points made by Deedee Myers on “Reliable sources” that would have given you pause in your claims …)
And preview? What happened to that? Not that it was working so well because on a mac, you can lose a comment instantly by accidentally clicking on it as if to edit.
Anyway, you are probably planning on addressing all this, so FWIW…