More Analytic Fun

As I've mentioned before, I really enjoy looking over the Google Analytics analysis of this website's traffic. I check it every day to see how many visitors I've had, what pages were the most read, and where people are visiting from.

Google Analytics offers a really neat feature called Map Overlay. It shows a map of the world with countries from which people have visited the site shaded in green. The darker the shade, the more visitors I've had from that country. I can then zoom in to get more specific, right down to the level of what city people are visiting from (or at least where their ISP / the last proxy they hopped through is located), but the world map is the one that I find most interesting.

This is what I love most about the Internet. In the last month, I've had visitors from 20 different countries. I don't think we really appreciate what an amazing communications tool is available to us. This inconsequential website, composed of jokes, rants, sermons, and comic book reviews, is a platform for my personal views that has been read by residents of 20 different nations. Think about how staggering that would have seemed only a generation ago.

Over 80% of my visitors are from Canada, of course. A depressingly large percentage of my readers live in my house. The U.S. of A comes in second, with the United Kingdom coming in a distant third.

No great surprises there, but I wouldn't have expected what comes next: Australia, in a close fourth. I guess it's not that odd that they're in fourth; I'm more surprised by how close the margin is. Maybe Australians really enjoy their zombies. After that we get into many-way ties with very few visitors each, but I'm impressed by the diversity on display. I've had visitors from (among others) Guam, Vietnam, Hungary, Greece, Sudan, Brazil, Mexico, New Zealand, and India. I think that's pretty cool.

I'm even more interested in what brings people here. Google records what terms people punched into the search engine to land here. Lots and lots of them are variations on Walking Dead # 48 reviews; that may give you an idea what I'll be writing about when Walking Dead # 49 comes out.

I also got quite a few hits from the article about Demonoid, mostly apparently from people worried about whether it's a setup to catch filesharers, which I discussed (most of the searches include combinations of "Demonoid", "RIAA", "honeypot" and / or "trap").

Other hits have come from people searching for "zirbert", "irritable saint", or variations thereof. These are folks who have been here before but can't remember the exact address, I'd guess.

Some other notable searches that have brought people here include:

• "Cassy Fiano"
• "Jeff Healey" (including several variations)
• "Kodak printer" (and variations)
• "Jeopardy tryout"
• "lightning bolt Blogspot" (not sure I want to know)
• "persuasive essay on wearing seatbelts" (sorry; I'm sure you didn't find what you were looking for)
• "American Life League"
• "tipping servers"
• "irritable stomach and tightening"
• "quick & snow" (Huh?)
• "when seconds count the police are minutes away" (always worth remembering)

My bar-none favourite search, though, was this:

• "i need to put the word bureaucracy in a sentence for homework help"

Heh. Here's why you shouldn't let Google do your homework, kids. If this unfortunate individual actually copied a sentence from this blog that used the word bureaucracy, I'm guessing his or her (let's face it, probably his) teacher wasn't impressed with its content. At least I have the consolation of knowing that the sentence was probably grammatically sound.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my kitchen curtain and the apartment building beyond.