Here is my profile on Kickstarter.

Today I was reading on WordPress.com’s blog about “Two New Stats Things”, written by the always fantastic and multi-talented Andy Skelton, and since I use WordPress’ free stats plugin as my primary means of tracking statistics here on First initial, last name I figured I’d show my appreciation to Andy and team for the upgrades being very welcomed.

When I scrolled to the bottom of the page (there were over 175 comments when I was going to post my own) the normal comment form you’d expect to see was not there. What was there was a message stating that I have to log in to post a comment. I did that. Then, I went back to the page and it said this:

“You must set a WordPress.com blog as your URL to post a comment. Please update Your Profile.”

I realize that WordPress.com is, in and of itself, its own community. It is a “service” built on top of WordPress. But I found this, as I said, odd and also a bit disappointing that I couldn’t leave a comment to say thanks. Oh, the reason I can’t just update my profile and leave a comment? I don’t have a WordPress.com blog but I do have an account there so that I can use the API key for both Akismet and Stats (two products I am extremely thankful to the Automattic team for). Otherwise I’d have just bit the bullet and left a comment with an ‘inaccurate’ URL. But I couldn’t.

So I’ll thank Andy and his team here. Thanks Andy. For my humble little blog your stats plugin has been just what I’ve needed and nothing more to track how people read here on my site. The most recent update of showing the home page stats is very, very welcomed. Thanks.

I’ve done my own, rather simplified version, of sampling some Twitter data. I was primarily trying to determine the number of “real followers” I had as opposed to what Twitter says. I came up with much lower numbers than Clinton did, but then again his sampling was much larger. At current my Twitter account hovers around 1,600 followers. If Clinton’s data is accurate, that puts me at about 350 active followers.

That seems to be right on the money. Either way, it shows that those that have tens of thousands of followers on Twitter really don’t have that kind of pull. But they still have about 30% of that pull.

Source: Sampling Twitter.
Via: Andy Baio.

As of: May 1, 2008

Somewhat recently, according to this graph (pictured), the Apple iPhone has taken over the top spot as Flickr user’s use it more than any other camera phone to publish photos to Flickr.  The Nokia N95 had a demanding lead over every other camera phone, while the iPhone took the lead with an amazing upswing.

This is not suprising to me, giving the ease of uploading from the iPhone to Flickr through email.  For those that have “jail broken” their iPhones there is also an application they can use to upload photos directly to Flickr.  I shutter [sic] to think what this graph will look like once version 2 of the iPhone software comes out, and there is an official application, or many applications, for uploading photos to Flickr.

Source: Flickr: Camera Finder.

Monday’s stats

Take for example this passed Monday night, when the Green Bay Packer game went into overtime. Though short lived due to a long pass by Brett Favre, during the time this game went into overtime my site received hundreds of referral hits from the major search engines. Why? Because I show up on the first page on Google when you search for NFL overtime rules. These types of things happen all the time – and to nearly ever blogger.

Sometimes these trends can be predicted (which is why blogging about niches is so popular). Other times though, trends just appear out of no where.

Take for instance the most popular post on my site; Tolype Velleda. I know what you’re thinking: “How the heck is that the most popular post on your site?” Because the number of visits to this page is skewed by the fact that my photo of this moth comes up on the first page (and sometimes in the first row) for a Google Images search for the word moth. Combine that with the fact that, when clicked, the photo of the moth is only contained in a small frame above my site loaded in a lower frame. This happens, a lot.

It is funny to see where you get traffic from. Some of the searches I end up seeing a lot of referrals from are funny to me because – once and a while – I know people are looking for something completely different then the content on my site. For instance, doing an image search for ‘pot’ on Google will refer you to my post about a gift Eliza gave me. I’ve gotten emails asking: “Did you know your site comes up when I search for pot? Do you have any weed?”. No joke. And to answer those wondering, no I don’t have any weed. Ask Josue, he has some.

I could go on forever about all of the odd ways people end up seeing my site. What are some of the weird ways you’ve seen on your site?