Analyze This!

I installed Google Analytics on datajanitor in early 2008 because I thought it would be fun to see how many people were reading this blog, where they were coming from, and how they were getting here. Now that I have close to a year's worth of data, here are the results for 2008.

2,641 Visitors
3,797 Visits
5,378 Page Views

Most of the people who visited probably wound up here by accident, as the 80.35% bounce rate indicates. 77.93% of the visits came from the US, the remaining 22.07% of the visits were spread across 74 foreign countries. The UK came in second with 172 visits (4.53%). The most frequent non-English speaking country was Germany, who finished fourth overall with 111 visits (2.92%). 23 of the 74 foreign countries had only a single visit. Not surprisingly, Australia was the most frequent visitor in Oceania, finishing in 6th place overall with 35 visits (0.92%). The top visitor in Asia was The Philippines, who came in 8th overall with 14 visits (0.37%). In South America, Brazil was tops with 10 visits (0.26%), good enough for 14th overall. In another big shocker, South Africa was the top visitor in Africa, finishing in 32nd place overall with 4 visits (0.11%).

I had visitors from every state in the union. Three states only made a single visit (MT, MS, and WY). Excluding my home state of RI, CO was responsible for the most visits (thanks, Dusty). Once again excluding myself, the city of Boulder, CO had the most visits for any city and London, England was tops among all foreign cities.

The most viewed page in 2008 was this little gem that I posted way back in 2005, which was visited an astonishing 296 times. The most visited page that was posted in 2008 was this one, which was visited 157 times.

As far as search engine traffic goes, the top search term that brought people to this blog was alice at night, with 63 hits. A close second was joann sklarski, with 60 hits. 7 of the top 25 search terms are somehow related to the Sklarski sisters, Kirk Gibson, or Dave Rozema. It's pretty amazing that my blog has become something of a clearinghouse for information on the Sklarski sisters, seeing as I never actually wrote anything about them - all of the information about them is contained in comments on Honeymoon('s Over) in Vegas, my most viewed post.

Reservoir Dogs

On my flight back from San Francisco, we flew over the Quabbin Reservoir on the approach into Boston. The sun had just risen and it gave the reservoir a really eerie look. The view of it on Google Maps doesn't really do it justice. It made me think about reservoirs, and led me to conclude, correctly, that the Quabbin and Scituate Reservoirs are the largest inland bodies of water in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, respectively. I thought it was strange that I couldn't name a reservoir in any other place that I've lived until I realized that most of the other places I've lived have been near large and/or Great Lakes. From what I read on Wikipedia, the stories of the creation of these reservoirs sounds fascinating, since they were both constructed in the early part of the 20th century over land that was already settled and populated.

The 'S' is for super and the 'U' is for unique...

I've been a geography geek for most of my life. I attribute at least some of it to my interest in sports. I learned where most of the major cities in the US were located by following the sports teams that played in them. Baseball was my first love and the only sport I really cared about until I was in the fourth or fifth grade. I had a baseball dice game that I used to spend hours playing as a kid. When I got really ambitious/bored, I would create my own baseball league. I'd create a handful of teams, give them names, and even design logos that I would draw on a map of the US. I'm pretty sure that my suburban Detroit hometown always had a franchise. In general, I liked to give franchises to places that didn't have big league ball teams. The only one of my expansion teams that I can remember are the Idaho Potatoes. Where am I going with this story? As most sports fans probably know by now, in all likelihood, the Seattle Sonics are going to be moving to Oklahoma City. For a number of reasons, this whole thing reminds me of the obscure baseball expansion franchises I created as a kid. They'll be the first major pro sports teams in Oklahoma and one of the few between the Mississippi River and the west coast (outside of Texas, Denver, and Phoenix). In terms of population, the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Statistical Area has about 1.2M people, which is not huge but it's larger than several other MSAs that have major professional sports teams. It's also much larger than Boise, the presumptive home of the Idaho Potatoes.

While OKC is about to join the ranks of medium-sized cities with major professional sports teams, in my opinion, Seattle is about to join an even more interesting club. Once the Sonics leave town, Seattle will have only two major professional sports teams despite being the 15th largest MSA in the country (and one of the few large non-sunbelt MSAs growing at an appreciable rate). Eventually, taxpayers somewhere are going to get sick of subsidizing sports arenas for billionaire sports owners. From what I know about the situation in Seattle, I don't think that's what happened here, but I could see it happening in a place like Seattle. Now that you can follow your favorite teams from anywhere on earth, hometown allegiences are not as important as they once were. Take an MSA that is full of transplants who didn't grow up following the local team and add an especially shameless owner who is trying to extort taxpayer dollars for a underachieving team in a sport other than football and possibly, baseball, and I think that a city just might be willing to give said team the heave ho.