Interesting Statistical Administrivia

The life of a site is on its statistical pages; but to this day there is not one web metrics or statistic package decent enough to truly be able to measure the influence and reach of a blog.

For one, most metrics programs out there are interested measuring only the number of unique visitors and page views. Visitors and traffic may describe how many people on average visit your site, but it really does not tell the complete picture. How people get to you through the web is as important as the amount of pages being read by a visitor.

I am using some statistical tools created just for Drupal-powered sites. These are still rather unpolished but with them I can see who is linking to us, through which categories or terms people are stumbling upon our site, and even who are the most active members in the site.

Traffic hitting specific users this past week :

1. liza (5030)
2. JJ Ross (2749)
3. sea (329)
4. Wulingren (277)
5. Nance Confer (253)
6. mole333 (253)
7. Tara Parks (240)
8. Lorraine (232)
9. drmmrgirl77 (125)
10. Jeffrey Langstraat (82)
11. LynnS (64)

This is insane. People are googling y'all and hitting your pages here.

You should treat your profile pages here as a calling card or a professional bio/resume page. Any suggestions on how to improve the layout for that page are more than welcomed.

Most active posters (all time) :

1. liza (730)
2. Lorraine (38)
3. JJ Ross (36)
4. Jeffrey Langstraat (29)
5. mole333 (22)
6. M. Loutre (9)
7. Tara Parks (9)
8. sea ( 8 )
9. bitchlab (7)
10. Morgaine Swann (5)

Can you see why do I spend my life looking for contributors Even if 20% the community posted just once a week, that would be just sweet.

Most active commenters

1. JJ Ross (145)
2. liza (125)
3. NanceConfer (28)
4. Jeffrey Langstraat (24)
5. Lorraine (21)
6. Morgaine Swann (21)
7. sea (14)
8. bitchlab (13)
9. Michael Bouldin (12)
10. Zugzwang (5)

First time someone has more points than me. Way to go JJ. Also, given we have 96 registered users, these numbers tell us that more than 10% of the people on the site are active participants --not shabby at all given I've heard from other community site publishers that their ratio is more like 5%.

Most popular categories

1. Feminism 2776
2. Scarlett Johanson 2538
3. Activism 1985
4. George W. Bush 1348
5. Sex 1336
6. Impeach - Remove - Jail 1316
7. Politics 1298
8. Blogs 1240
9. Media 1228
10. Language 1146

Site-wise, though, it's a completely different story. Since the above are only applicable to the new site, the vocabulary stats look completely different when accounting for the old archives (these stats are not internal to Drupal but to the server itself):

1 3261 10.85% pussycat dolls
2 1938 6.90% viggo mortensen
3 994 3.54% pussycatdolls
4 784 2.79% masturbation
5 498 1.77% whore
6 387 1.38% japanese porn
7 331 1.18% corruption
8 314 1.12% scarlett johanson
9 307 1.09% absolut
10 295 1.05% real doll

I thought it could not be done, but the plastic vixens have become the #1 reason for people to stumble upon our site, and not my boyfriend (as in imaginary), Viggo Mortensen. For over a year now Viggo had been the #1 reason people get to our site through Google.

Can you believe it?!?!

Most popular posts for the past week

1. Encuesta / Poll : "Nuestro Himno" 321 reads
2. Picking On and Picking Off Parents 236 reads
3. Why is Brooklyn Burning? Neglect or the Disnification of NYC through Arson? 161 reads
4. Netbacks and compusinos, join the creative commons revolution! 141 reads
5. Lynn has been working her you-know-what-off to get the site running 140 reads
6. Open Thread : The built-up trivial rant edition 130 reads
7. There is always another battle or another issue 111 reads
8. From left to wrong : Two opposing views on "Day without an immigrant" 111 reads
9. What is white supremacy? 106 reads
10. A day withouth an immigrant offline, a day of multilingual dissent online! 106 reads

Last but not least, after Google, the 10 top sites that refer traffic to us :

1. DailyKos
   http://www.dailykos.com

2. DailyTroll
   http://dailytroll.com/?p=765

3. Reddit
   http://www.reddit.com/new

4. Drudge.com
   http://www.drudge.com

5. MyLeftWing
   http://www.myleftwing.com

6. Juan Cole
   http://www.juancole.com

7. Brownstoner
   http://www.brownstoner.com

8. about 5 profile pages at MySpace
   http://www.myspace.com

9. Feministing
   http://www.feministing.com

10. Village Voice
    http://www.villagevoice.com/people/0517,bussel,63339,24.html

In terms of visitors and pageviews, that's a mess with this site. The internal metrics look good but do not account for over three thousand pages we have on the old culturekitchen.
More over, we lost about 50% of our traffic during the 4 months of technical difficulties we were having.

That said, it looks like we are getting daily an average of about 6,000 visitors with over 20,000 page views. That means people are actually hanging out on the site past just one page. And what's interesting about that it looks like almost 90% of them are first time readers.

Not until I get all the old archives ported into the new system will I ever be able to get a good read of our metrics. Still, I think this is a very good start.

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