Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Big surprise today as I look at my Feedburner reported blog statistics: Overnight the number of reported subscribers has jumped from about 300 total to over 50,000 in one day.

For some reason, the Netvibes aggregator seems to be severely skewing my reported blog subscriber numbers. Something fishy is going on….. This next graphic shows an average for the past 7 days, with 6 days around 260 and one day over 50,000. The graphic indicates that Netvibes is the culprit:

Not surprisingly, this same problem is plaguing others. David Carrero wrote about this in his post today, Feedburner está “loco”.

My Webalizer generated site statistics indicate a lot more people visit my blog than are actually subscribed to my feedburner feed, but the numbers are not nearly this high. The following graph shows usage from January through May 2006. (The months of December 2005 and June 2006 include incomplete stats):

Access numbers have increased steadily, but one cannot conclude all these are visits by human beings: Unfortunately my blog receives a large amount of comment spams, and these numbers are also reflected here. The following table shows summary usage statistics, the column most interesting to me is “visits” (in yellow at the top) which shows the numbers of unique IP addresses that have accessed my blog:

According to these statistics, the number of IP addresses accessing my blog has grown from over 20,000 in January 2006 to over 60,000 last month. This would be something to be really excited about if it wasn’t for comment spam. I have no way to know how many of these “visits” were by spambots! At the suggestion of Doug Noon and others I have implemented the “Bad Behavior” Wordpress plugin as well as Spam Karma 2– thankfully this eliminates virtually 100% of comment spams from actually showing up on my blog, but I still do have to periodically delete many (hundreds per week) that are “caught” by Spam Karma. This isn’t a major pain, the entire process takes around 30 seconds, but it is still an irritation. I will likely upgrade to Wordpress 2.0 (for free of course!) this summer, and am guessing the anti-comment spam features included with it will further assist in this struggle.

The most inspiring blog access measure I have seen and used to date is still ClustrMaps. (One of many read/write web tools I’ve learned about from Cheryl Oakes!) The image below is my current ClustrMap, showing a geographic representation of my blog visitors since early March 2006:

This Flickr set shows the progressive growth of red dots around the globe as more folks (and unfortunately blog spam bots) have been accessing my blog! Choose to “view the set as a slideshow” to see the growth in motion. A couple questions inspired by this latest ClustrMap:

1. There are a large number of new access dots in Iran. Who are these folks?
2. What is that island in the deep south Pacific, west of South America and way south of Hawaii in the southern hemisphere, where folks are accessing my blog?
3. Is there any Internet access in Siberia?
4. Who is reading my blog in the heart of the Amazon jungle, in the middle of Brazil?!

My final analysis: Guttenberg, Luther, Paine, MLK, and many, many other folks would be quite amazed at the potential global reach of blogosphere contributors today!

On this day..

• Geocaching across Kansas! - 2008
• links for 2008-06-01 - 2008
• For my first guest.... - 2007
• Star Wars Clone Wars - 2006
• Thoughts on DOPA - 2006
• One-to-One Computing in Education - 2006
• Email blog and podcast subscriptions - 2006
• Help with the USCOTW - 2006
• Podcast59: Interactive Podcasting-- Asynchronous Online Audio Discussions - 2006
• Back with margin! - 2006

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 1st, 2006 at 11:30 am and is filed under blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.