Navel Gazing, 2008

This post is for my own notes – a bunch of stats about traffic on the blog and the social networks to serve as a reference point for next year.

top post of the year – Barack Obama’s Speechwriter is 26 consistently did well because of it’s high search results ranking. Coming up second was a short story about the origins of Led Zeppelin’s name thanks to a StumbleUpon link.

biggest traffic day of the year – I usually bump along at around 100 visitors/day but back in September a post on “information overload” got my first top-level link on Techmeme which sent me 4x my normal traffic.

source of readership – Google organic search sent 51.72% of my traffic with “barack obama speech writer” being the leading referral phrase where everwas.com ranks 4th. The top referring site was StumbleUpon with MyBlogLog a close second.

comment spam – i only have data back July but Akismet on WordPress has caught a ton of spam and basically removed it as an issue for me. A graph of what has been caught automatically is below – for some reason mid-November was a heavy time for me.

browsers – 43.99% of my readers were on IE while 43.31% were on Firefox. 1.25% were on Google Chrome.

rss subscriptions – subscribers to my feedburner feed have held steady around 500 readers for 2008.

twitter – since I started tracking my follower count in June, I’ve added 357 followers and now sit at 1,142 . I follow 343 back. Graphic below from my TweetStats profile.

friendfeed – 807 folks follow me over on friendfeed.com, I think a lot of that has to do with my being featured on Alltop’s frienderati page. I follow 435 but have to admit, can’t really keep up with it all.

mybloglog – 1,148 people are following me on MyBlogLog. I follow 298. I am a member of 254 communities and 343 people are a member of everwas’ community page.

top track of the year – According to my last.fm chart, Tennessee Jed by the Grateful Dead was the most popular track which is easy to understand because I must have several versions of that song in my archive. Second place track, Boomerang by Sengalese rapper Daara J is more interesting, it was the default start track on my iPod for weeks.

top photo of the year – flickr added stats but they don’t let me filter by date. Yes you can is the all time most interesting photo from my collection and has been since I took the photo in 2005. I uploaded over 1,250 photos to flickr in 2008. The all time most popular photo is Jaws (3,256 views) which enjoys a healthy ranking in image search, as well another photo which ranks #2  for “pot lights”

del.icio.us – my top tag of all time is my employer up until October, yahoo I’ve used this tag 107 times. The others in descending order are, advertising (79), google (68), and socialnetworks (56).

google reader – my most read feeds are a search for Nokia, my current employer, TechCrunch, GigaOM, ReadWriteWeb, The Boy Genius Report, and Alamedans, an aggregated feed of blogs from where I live.

dopplr -my raumzeitgeist for 2008 is below. No major travels save for a trip to Helsinki and then Tokyo in November. Also spent some time in Hawaii.