One seminar I sat through at BWE was playing with Google analytics. I spent a couple of hours looking at my numbers and putting together some custom scripts and charts. The results were fascinating.
I have a steady couple of thousand regular readers and a few over 200 subscribers to my RSS feed. These are actually pretty good numbers. When I go through my stats it’s always interesting to see what articles generate the biggest response in both in my stats and in feedback.
Formula-1 is a consistent winner with the people who read what I have to say. Football, a little less popular. Unless it’s a post about England underperforming, when I get comments galore. Politics, especially British politics has some interesting numbers, if I mention David Cameron then it tanks, which is annoying because I find him personally very interesting (if a little slimy). If on the other hand I talk about the Lib-dems, the numbers of casual readers (less than once every 2 weeks) makes a small, but noticeable spike.
The professional posts (Toyota Production System, PM thoughts) generate a more correspondence than any other subject, but overall there are fewer page views.
But the biggest, and I mean far and away biggest, posts are personal ones. This surprised me initially, but upon reflection the bloggers I read at least occasionally post something personal. It’s not necessary to share everything, lets face it a lot of our lives really are that mundane. It’s a cliché, but no one really does care what you had for breakfast, however everyone has something interesting happen to him or her today that is worth sharing.
It’s all rather fascinating and the data needs a lot more mining to make any reasonable decisions on directions and content, if I do decide to make any decisions on them. But it seems I’m doing something right, the growth in page views and readers is steady and I find that a rather nice reward in itself. So for those of you who post, e-mail and read, thank you.
I’m really starting to believe that future of Web 2.0 may belong to Google, they are not seen as the evil empire yet by most but are doing so much to shape the future of the web. It’s difficult to bet against Microsoft, I feel the same way about Google. I think that’s a good thing.