Saturday, July 12, 2008

ZigZag Stats

Ok, I admit it: I'm a statistics geek. How can you willingly sign up for more than the required course in economics and not have a little bit of the numbers geek in you?

So starting this blog has resulted in some intriguing and very satisfying "instant gratification" statistics thanks to Google Analytics. The economist in me thinks there is already some interesting supply and demand elements at work in the "consumption" and "production" of the site. At the risk of putting some of you to sleep:

  • readers from 26 different countries have visited
  • return visitors are predominantly from the U.S. and largely from California (no surprise here)
  • Wednesday and Saturdays have been the most popular nights
  • the number of page views increased by 100 just today
  • the number of "absolute" visitors almost doubled just today

Students of statistics know correlation is not causation (however if you read Chris Anderson's piece or Kevin Kelley's piece in the newest edition of Wired http://www.wired.com/ he might persuade you that is all about to change with the power of our data worldwide), still this struck me as noteworthy!

One of my doctor friends says that diagnosis is mostly ruling out things in a patient and/or explaining symptoms by common sense. With this in mind, the recent increase in views and new visitors could be do to:

  • my good friends viewing the blog from their parents' computers while on holiday for the weekend
  • my husband telling all his pilot friends to sign on (at the same time tonight) wherever they are in the world
  • there's a new drink called a ZigZag and everyone was googling it to get the ingredients
  • lost souls with nothing better to do thought they'd really get crazy and do a blog search starting with the Zs first

No matter; whatever the cause, the numbers tell a story and will continue to amuse me for days and weeks to follow. Stay tuned for more progress on the iDen over the weekend.

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