piksels

It’s been far too long since the last time I’ve written a post, my apologies. But I’ll be back on track writing posts on a regular basis soon as I get some important work out of the way. But until then I’m leaving you all with something to think about:

enjoy =)

[ to the tune of the Hokey Pokey ]
Put your turtleneck on,
take your turtleneck off,
Put your turtleneck on,
and shake it all about,
You do your hokey pokey and you leave us all in doubt,
Thats what it’s always about.

————

For some reason Apple news seems to travel on average 1.5-2x faster than other news.
To put things into perspective:

1. Speed of light
2. Speed of sound
3. Speed of Paris Hilton News
4. Speed of High School Gossip
5. Speed of Apple News
….etc
9. Speed of News

So chances are you already know that on Tuesday Steve Jobs held a keynote where he released the all new iMacs, iLife ‘08, iWork ‘08, refreshed the MacMini and the .mac services. Mr Jobs took the stage, razzled and dazzled us , but for some every keynote always ends up feeling like the opening lines of Tale of Two Cities.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness”

The Good:
New iMac is beautiful
iLife ‘08 looks great

The Bad:
.mac service still sucks

I would tip my hat to Jobs for being one of the most successful people in the industry, but I just can’t help from feeling cheated on. Every keynote, together with millions of Apple fans, we cross our fingers with hope that Apple will turn rumors into reality, and fulfill our dreams

For me (and for most people) Google Analytics is mainly just a tool to see how many hits we are getting, where they are coming from, etc. It is a shame because if anyone takes a couple extra minutes to really look at what its telling us, we can actually learn something about our visitors.

Here’s a chart showing where Piksel’s visitors are coming from.

It’s no surprise that they majority of users are coming from the social news network Digg. Being ‘dugg’ can send a site tens of thousands of visitors within a matter of hours, but to no surprise, the page hits won’t last for long, and after 2-3 days the typical digg users will be long gone. From the thousands of digg visitors, you would be lucky to even have 1% return to your site. If someone were to ask whether I preferred 10,000 digg visitors or 1,000 StumbleUpon visitors, I would have to go with the StumbleUpon. And here’s why:

Above is a chart showing the time the users spent on the site, and how many of them stayed on the site and viewed more pages. Although digg users come in large volumes, they clearly spend the least amount of time on the site. While in complete contrast, StumbleUpon users spend noticeably more time on the site, and are more likely to browse more than one page of your site.

Don’t get me wrong, the being ‘dugg’ is great (as long as your server stays up). It gives you exposure, it gets you out there, and everyone knows that with such a large amount of traffic there are bound to be visitors which will come back. But in the end it is a question of quality vs quantity. Do you want your visitors to take their time to read it, or do you want to get as many advertisement clicks as possible?

I will be posting more about visitor culture, and interesting ways on how to use Google Analytics soon.

-joel