30 January 2011

Stats and More Stats

Google's Blogger.com, the blog authoring service that stands behind the blogs hosted on Blogspot.com, recently released an interface to statistics about the blog. This includes details like most popular posts, traffic sources, and audience, all of which can be examined over various time frames like the last day, week, or month (*). The base data only goes back to July 2010, so the most interesting numbers are for 'All Time', meaning the last seven months.

Let there be no misunderstanding here. As I pointed out in a post titled Apples to Apples on my main blog, this chess960 blog is the least popular of the chess resources I maintain and I doubt that the situation has changed much since I wrote that post in April 2010. Keeping that in mind, let's peek at some of the info revealed by the stats. First, here's a graphical overview showing where this blog's visitors are located.


A darker green means more page views and, while I'm not surprised to see English speaking countries with darker shades, I am surprised to see south of Brazil the dark patch identifying Uruguay. Not too long ago I received an email from a correspondent in Uruguay who flagged an online play site that was new to me, so I'll take a closer look at that site in a future post.

As for past posts, what most interests the blog's visitors? Of the top-10 posts by page view, three posts received considerably more attention than the others:-

I'm at a loss to explain why those posts should be more popular than others. A more recent post that also shows higher than average interest is:-

After that, most posts receive approximately the same number of visits. Moving on to traffic sources, i.e. sites that send visitors to this blog, the number one source is my main blog Chess for All Ages. Number two is listed as www.google.com/search?q=blogger, which must be a Google blog search on 'chess960'. I haven't looked at that resource in a long time and it's due another visit.

Also in the top-10 sources are a number of Chess.com forums, something called the Pingy Web Application ('some Blogs you might want to visit while waiting', where I spotted this chess960 blog), and Chess Quotes (aka Rotten Tomatoes). The tomatoes link has a Bobby Fischer audio clip where he says a lot of the same things found in the video clip that I recently covered in 'Me and Bobby Fischer' and Chess960.

The Blogger page on traffic sources also lists the top search keywords used to find this blog. It informs that the phrase 'chess 960' is used even more than the single word 'chess960'. The most unusual keyword is 'rkrnbbnq' -- if you try searching on it, Google first tries to show you results for 'krn bbq', which it interprets to be 'Korean barbecue'?! Rounding out the Blogger stats are the usual summaries of visitor profiles given by all log analyzers:-

Pageviews by Browsers:-
33% Firefox
26% Internet Explorer
22% Safari

and

Pageviews by Operating Systems:-
66% Windows
26% Macintosh

A long time ago I learned not to place too much importance on web stats. Their most practical use is as a source of ideas for future posts, just like here, where I came up with two.

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(*) In case anyone is concerned about privacy (aren't we all?), there is no raw data log available to the blog owner, meaning no information about specific visitors.

1 comment:

HarryO said...

Don't forget the Alaskans. They love their Chess960 too!

Hurray to Uruguay! The small countries will show the big countries what is best. Unfortunately most of the traffic to this site in Australia will have been me :)

Three cheers to Nakamura for winning Tata Steel 2011! His round 11 game was essentially Chess960 already! That game is a tantalizing preview of what Chess960 tournaments will be like.

PLEASE NOTE that the top three winners at Tata Steel - Nakamura, Anand and Aronian (excluding Carlsen tied for third) have all played Chess960 at GM tournament level!!!

Chess960 improves your Chess. When will people finally realize that? What do we have to do to wake the chess world from it's dream unreality? (to paraphrase Bobby Fischer). What do we have to do to get these inspirational players to start up their own Chess960 league?

I wish. I pray. One day.

Cheers
Harry