Posts from January 06, 2007

The year end always sees lots of people post meaningless stats about blog traffic. Unfortunately, I only have tracking data since my move to Bluehost in late September but I am not going to let that stop me. Google Analytics reports:-

• 4,709 visits
• 8,036 page views
• 1.71 pages per visit
• 3,902 unique visitors

[ Note the almost linear growth in visitors over the three months. It took me ages to get that perfect straight line ] Of course, these traffic numbers are bitterly disappointing so, to cheer myself up, I analyze the AwStats reports for the same period. This makes me feel much better.

• 13,738 visits
• 54,266 page views
• 68,858 hits (even better !)
• 3.95 pages per visit
• 6,002 unique visitors

AwStats includes robots, spiders, crawlers and spam automatons whereas Google Analytics only counts human beings (and cats). Worse, Google Analytics filters out my own visits and referrals from the WordPress dashboard (which accounts for 97% of traffic) ! Oh no. What's this ? Feedburner are now offering even more blog tracking statistics and reports.

I have experimented with many different RSS readers in the past. However, in recent months, nothing has managed to dislodge NetVibes as my preferred feed reader.

However, I still occasionally use Google Reader and like the recent addition of detailed statistics about your RSS subscriptions and reading habits.

Matt Cutts posts an example of his own data and Robert Scoble also likes the new features.

Occasionally, I have been tempted to experiment with Google Adsense on this blog. Not because I think I will get rich and be able to retire but I am curious to see how the technology works. Thankfully, to date, laziness, inertia and minimalist tendencies have prevailed.

So I was very interested to read Guy Kawasaki's 12 month review of his popular blog. 'How To Change The World' received 2.5 million page views (slightly more than my humble blog), 7,000 comments (again, slightly more than my statistics) and 2,000 trackbacks (1,999 more than me) in 2006.

For all this effort, I was staggered to learn that this blog, with 4,217 inbound links, 21,000 subscribers and which consistently features in the Technorati Top 100, earned Guy Kawasaki the princely sum of $3,350.

My. How times change. In my day, the philosophy was simple:

• Always be sick in your own time.
• Ensure a newspaper is safely cached behind the toilet cistern.
• Arrive and leave the office 30 seconds before/after your manager.
• Get an urgent pager alert whenever your round is imminent.
• Be quick to claim credit and divert blame.

But no. I have now finally discovered the true Oracle Contractors Philosophy.