A week ago today, I installed SiteMeter on this blog, to get a sense of who's visiting. I put a counter on a couple of months ago, and I've been somewhat astonished at the numbers it's telling me (which are supposedly individual IP addresses, not page clicks). I mean, really: more than 14,600 people reading NOVA Geoblog? How can that possibly be right?

So I installed SiteMeter to get a better handle on the data. This might be some pretty indulgent navel-gazing, but it's also astonishingly rich data. There is a huge amount of information that a service like SiteMeter collects about you every time you visit a website, and this experience has been eye-opening for me...

In the week since I installed SiteMeter, I've had 647 visits (unique hits, but some of these represent repeated visits by single individuals), and some of those people visited more than one page during their time on the site (a total of 1,097 page views in total over 7 days). The average number of visits per day is 91, but the average time people spend on the blog is only 1 minute and 30 seconds!

Check out a couple of World Maps of visitors to this blog in the past week. I can only display 100 visitors at a time, so here's Monday morning's map:

The red dot was the last visitor at the time this map was generated, and the green dots are the nine previous visitors before that. The white dots are the remaining 90 to sum up to 100 total.

Here's today's map (again, "just" the last 100 visitors):

Overall, in the past week, NOVA Geoblog has had visitors from Panama, Hong Kong, Korea, the Philippines, Austria, Spain, Iran, Switzerland, Mexico, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, France, Argentina, Canada, Malaysia, Japan, Australia, Norway, France, the U.K., Sweden, South Africa, Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, Russia, Finland, Portugal, Romania, India, Germany, Belgium, Israel, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, New Zealand, and Egypt. Whoa! Including the U.S., where most NOVA Geoblog visitors visit from, that's 40 countries in a week... I'm somewhat astonished.

SiteMeter generated a pie chart to show the relative proportions of these different locations:

SiteMeter gives you all kinds of crazy data. Here, for instance, are the last 20 visitors' entry pages (the first page they hit on visiting this blog):

1 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/labels/geology.html
2 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/labels/geology.html
3 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/02/biofuels-cartoon.html
4 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/02/totem-pole-tasmania.html
5 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/08/promoted.html
6 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/05/perspectives-on-coastal-tectonics.html
7 http://www.nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/
8 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/05/perspectives-on-coastal-tectonics.html
9 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/02/riddle-of-cake-revealed.html
10 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/08/is-georgia-in-europe-or-asia.html
11 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/08/unconformities-of-grand-canyon-part.html
12 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/labels/geology.html
13 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/05/perspectives-on-coastal-tectonics.html
14 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/05/perspectives-on-coastal-tectonics.html
15 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/08/is-georgia-in-europe-or-asia.html
16 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/01/columnar-jointing-and-weathering.html
17 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008_02_01_archive.html
18 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008_02_01_archive.html
19 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/01/life-during-anthropocene-time.html
20 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/05/perspectives-on-coastal-tectonics.html

There are some trends here, but you don't need to puzzle them out on your own, because SiteMeter will do it for you. Here are the most popular pages over the past week that initially lured visitors to the blog (black number on left is the number of times visitors hit that page first):

13 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/05/perspectives-on-coastal-tectonics.html
11 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/08/beer-is-bad-for-science.html
8 http://www.nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/
7 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/labels/geology.html
5 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/08/is-georgia-in-europe-or-asia.html
5 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008_02_01_archive.html
5 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/labels/fossils.html
3 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/
2 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/05/scary-map-du-jour.html
2 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/08/accretionary-wedge-call-for-posts.html
2 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/08/unconformities-of-grand-canyon-part.html
2 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/labels/msse.html
2 http://www.nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/05/chaiten-update.html
2 http://www.nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/05/shenandoah-np-corbin-cabin-area.html
1 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/01/asteroid-news.html
1 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/01/brrr.html
1 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/01/columnar-jointing-and-weathering.html
1 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/2008/01/fault-photo.html
1 http://nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/...-during-anthropocene-time.html

Wondering about what browsers these visitors are using to access these pages? Turns out SiteMeter keeps track of that too (as well as what kind of monitor you're using, your internet service provider, and what you ate for breakfast!):

Where are these people coming from? What's the referring page that links them to NOVA Geoblog? Turns out SiteMeter can tell me that too! A lot of visitors were brought here by web searches, including a lot of image searches. People searched on Google or Yahoo for "biofuels cartoon," "totem pole tasmania," "unconformities in the grand canyon," "geoblog," and many more. Others were linked to my site from other geology blogs, and a few came from my NOVA website and my Blackboard courseware platform.

If this sort of stuff interests you (and I can't imagine why it should), you can explore details of each of these searches on the SiteMeter's "NOVA Geoblog" page (click on the SiteMeter icon below the counter in the right column, or click here).

Labels: blogs