Blogging about Blogs
Familygreenberg.com Health Check – June Edition
Monday, July 2nd, 2007| Metric | May | June | % Change |
| Visits | 1,441 | 945 | -34.42% |
| Pageviews | 2,563 | 1,416 | -33.58% |
| Pages/Visit | 1.48 | 1.50 | +1.28% |
| Avg Time on Site | 46 sec. | 53 sec. | +15.22% |
| Bounce Rate | 78.42% | 78.94% | +0.67% |
| % New Visitors | 88.48% | 84.87% | -4.08% |
On the whole, a rather depressing month. Once again, I’ll blame Billy Joel’s drop in Google appeal. Roughly 350 of the 500 pageviews I lost came from posts about him. Add to that another ~120 drop in pageviews of my monthly archive files, and you’ve explained most of the change. The rest involve topical posts (e.g., Steven Wright’s jokes, politics, Al Gore’s movie, etc.) that got some interest right away and then faded. Clearly, I have three options: 1) find another “Google bomb” like Billy Joel, 2) consistently write witty, compelling topical posts all throughout the month, or 3) get over myself. I’ll let you know what I decide…
On the (very small) upside, the viewers I did get stayed longer and viewed slightly more pages on each visit. So at least there’s that…
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 3 Comments »
Twelve Year Olds – Avert your Eyes!
Thursday, June 28th, 2007Hey, good news! I’ve been upgraded:
Interestingly, though, it wasn’t my use of an expletive in my previous post on this topic, it was the use of the Vice President’s name, “Dick,” in this post about his latest legal foibles.
So there you have it, kids: Curse all you want, but try not to discuss the Vice President in public. OK?
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This Blog Has Been Approved for All Audiences
Monday, June 25th, 2007OK, one more from Jason Bennion. My blog rating:
A “G” Rating? FUCK!!!
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 1 Comment »
How People Found Me – May Edition
Friday, June 1st, 2007The second of my two monthly features is the familiar How People Found Me, because when it’s not about the pageviews, it’s all about the keywords.
I’ve chosen to do this in two sections – categories and keywords.
The Categories
| Category | Count |
| Billy Joel | 163 |
| Technology | 140 |
| Celebrity Look Alikes | 80 |
| Overrated Films | 21 |
| DSL | 20 |
| Al Gore | 18 |
| Steven Wright | 17 |
My four posts on Billy Joel’s latest tour and single release (the playlist, the concert review, the song review, and the song lyrics) have been a HUGE Google magnet. In the month of May, 163 different search queries brought people to one of these four posts. That’s more than five unique queries per day!
Similarly, my various posts about technology issues (specifically Blogger, Google, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, my new Dell PC and HP Laptop, and my Tech Guide reviews) have caught the attention of 140 unique queries. And a couple of posts I made on a lark about a site that does face recognition and suggests celebrity look alikes has garnered 80 unique queries.
The others on this list are smaller, but they surprised me in terms of how many people would think to search on them. A post on some random Top 20 Over-rated Films of All Time list generated 21 queries. A Ramblings article I wrote in December of 2004 about DSL installation brought in 20 queries. My review of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth yielded 18, and a couple of jokes I heard Steven Wright tell on Letterman one night brought on 17 (many of which, by the way, were flawed attempts to quote the actual text of Wright’s jokes).
The Keywords
All told, over 700 queries resulted in hits to Familygreenberg.com in May. Here are some that I found the most interesting:
| Query | Rank / # of Results | Comments |
| current event on tapeworms | 1 / 217,000 | That’s me – worldwide authority on tapeworm news! |
| upsilon sigma alpha | 3 / 745,000 | It was just a joke! Upsilon Sigma Alpha = USA |
| oprah face recognition software | 4 / 249,000 | People really need software to recognize Oprah’s face? |
| how to spell “”google”” as a verb | 7 / 258,000 | Err…G-O-O-G-L-E?!? |
| jerry seinfeld phil mickelson | 7 / 13,800 | Funniest golf game ever… |
| taylor hicks is sleeping in bed | 8 / 168,000 | As opposed to sleeping . . . where, exactly? |
| cartoon technophobe mother | 8 / 715 | Sounds like a rather arcane cartoon… |
| miraculous recoveries from female online liars | 12 / 44,800 | Those female online liars – they sure know how to bounce back! |
| whats the point in sleeping | 13 (and 14!) / 8,560,000 | I ask myself this all the time… |
| pronounce water philadelphia | 19 / 269,000 | Must have been some out-of-towner who couldn’t get water in Philly & turned to Google… |
| will you give me some information about what happens to an underwater ecosystem after an earthquake? | 35 / 45,500 | This isn’t that strange a query, I was just ammused at how the person spoke to Google like it was a person… |
| hasselhoff eating pizza | 41 / 125,000 | Obviously a slow news day… |
| elton john”” and “”tired of singing”” | 105 / 243,000 | Maybe he should write the words & let that other guy sing, then… |
| working out porten | 180 / 115,000 | Now here’s one of the few Google searches where I actually feel like I deserve a higher score! |
| atlantic city escorts | 350 / 1,320,000 | Speaking of working out Porten…(ok, that was a cheap shot…) |
| how much money would have ralph kramden have saved nasa | 0 / 233 | Pow! Zoom! Right to the moon!! |
| famous people out of marlboro hs / marlboro nj | >500 / 122,000 | Really? 122,000 webpages about this? Must be short web pages… |
| all important people born in oh. | >500 / 2,470,000 | A slightly longer list (but only slightly…) |
| greenberg puppy | >500 / 122,000 | Not in my house… |
| mac consultants +erode | >500 / 102,000 | What are they implying here?!? |
| pun of the year | >500 / 1,450,000 | To all who knew me growing up – yeah, that’s right – someone googled “pun of the year” and wound up at MY site… |
| should couples sleep separate at their first wedding night | >500 / 1,060,000 | Maybe that’s what led to the second wedding night… |
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 1 Comment »
Familygreenberg.com Health Check – May Edition
Friday, June 1st, 2007I may be falling behind on my ISBS Tech Guide (I’ll start again soon, I swear!), but Google Analytics has provided me the tools to create two monthly features. This is the first of the two – the site health check. Rather than explain it, I’ll just show it to you:
| Metric | April | May | % Change |
| Visits | 1,792 | 1,441 | -19.59% |
| Pageviews | 2,132 | 2,563 | -16.82% |
| Pages/Visit | 1.43 | 1.48 | +3.45% |
| Avg Time on Site | 40 sec. | 46 sec. | +15.00% |
| Bounce Rate | 80.75% | 78.42% | -2.89% |
| % New Visitors | 91.63% | 88.48% | -3.44% |
Digging into the data a bit more (I won’t bore you with details), it seems that overall visits and pageviews on the site dropped in May because Billy Joel’s touring wrapped up (in April, roughly 900 of the 2,563 pageviews were Billy Joel related; in May, that number was roughly 450, which accounts for the net difference in pageviews on its own).
On the upside, people are staying longer, leaving after one page (“bouncing”) less often, and returning more often. So all in all, things are going pretty well.
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Letting down millions. OK, Dozens. OK, Almost No one.
Wednesday, May 16th, 2007My trip to the University of Pennsylvania this weekend, combined with an ensuing business trip, conspired to prevent me from posting my promised weekly ISBS Tech Guide entry for the week. Given that I promised to post every week, I’ve been feeling badly about it. Then again, I don’t think anyone’s rushing to their browser to check the blog on Monday morning and read the next, exciting installment of the ISBS Tech Guide. At best, I hope it’s a good reference for folks in the coming months or years, as it begins to weave itself into the World Wide Web via Google’s massive index.
Since I began publishing the entries back on April 15th, they’ve received 44 pageviews (about 1.5 views per day). The most recent two are averaging more than 3 minutes of viewing time per page, which strikes me as quite high (certainly higher than my site’s average, anyway), suggesting that the entries are useful to those who find them. CNET.com it is not, but in the world of micro-bloggers, I’m pretty happy with those results.
So, I’ll pick up again next weekend. Until then, the suspense will just have to build. And if you are eagerly awaiting the next entry, I apologize – both for your disappointment and the obvious lack of excitement in your life. Seriously, you gotta get out more…
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Indexed!
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007Wil Wheaton points us to a very cool blog, which I plan to check out semi-regularly. It’s called Indexed, and it consists of graphs & charts drawn on index cards in order to comment on social issues, pop culture, or life in general. Here’s the one that Wil chose to highlight.
He’s right – it’s one of the best, but the others are very cool too. Check it out…
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New from Google: WebMaster Tools
Thursday, February 8th, 2007As long as I’m blogging about Billy Joel and technology, check out this new service from Google – Webmaster Tools.
First of all, I didn’t realize that the “link:” parameter in Google returned only “a sub-sampled list of backlinks.” According to the linked article, this is done intentionally to prevent search engine manipulation. I can only assume this means they don’t want spammers using the information to target specific sites, or other search engines to reverse engineer their search algorithms and compete with them more effectively.
At any rate, this new tool gives you a much larger list of sites that link to pages on your own site. Sign-up is easy: you have to verify you are the site owner in one of two ways: FTP’ing an HTML file to your site’s domain (they give you a convoluted name to use), or putting a harmless META tag in your site’s index file. The thought here is that if you have permission to upload files and/or edit files in the domain, then you must be the site owner.
Once you’re past sign-up, the tool is very rudimentary. This actually surprised me, since most of Google’s tools are very slick looking and extremely user friendly. This one is a simple tab & menu interface, the lists it returns only allow viewing of (max) 100 items at a time, and each page comes up with a “Do you want to display secure and non-secure items on this page?” message every time I click a link (yes, I know I can turn this off, but I shouldn’t have to adjust browser settings to use one of their tools!). There is a spreadsheet download option, though, which puts all the data into Excel for easy manipulation, so if the interface really bugs you, at least there’s a workaround.
All of that said, the information is very interesting, both in terms of what sites are linking to mine and also the most popular search terms that bring back pages from my site (including their average position in the result set).
Links to my site were mostly from Jeff Porten’s blog, The Vast Jeff Wing Conspiracy or from Jason Bennion’s blog, Simple Tricks and Nonsense, or from a comment thread on John Scalzi’s blog, The Whatever (note that most blogs make your name in a comment entry a link back to your site – lest you think I spent all of my time self-pimping my blog in Scalzi’s comment threads). There are a couple of other sites that link back to me, and I knew about most of them through Technorati searches, through comments on my blog by the site’s author, or just through word of mouth. The only one that was truly new to me was this review of a Billy Joel concert in Johannesburg, which quotes (and links to) my review of his Madison Square Garden concert, calling it a “good well informed review.” So hey, that’s cool – a positive review of a review inside of someone else’s positive review. You don’t see that everyday.
On the search term side, Google Analytics provides a ton of great data on the search terms people used to get to my site, but this is a little bit different: this list includes search terms that return pages from my site, even if no one has clicked on my page as a result. The results are somewhat illuminating. Here are some samples:
brian greenberg (average rank in results: 6)
tables in blogger (average rank: 1)
i should be sleeping instead of dreaming about you lyrics (avg. rank: 8)
how to get hair like emmy rossum (avg. rank: 9)
lee teabing da vinci (avg. rank: 18)
“550 permission” blogger (avg. rank: 1)
country song “i should be sleeping” (avg. rank: 3)
“sleeping positions” “what they mean” (avg. rank: 7)
aladdin and jasmin (avg. rank: 12)
There’s also a Page Analysis tab, which tells you the keywords Google has indexed in your domain, as well as the keywords most often used in links to your site (which Google also indexes, improving it’s search results).
All in all, a nice tool for the toolbox. Check it out yourself, why don’tcha?
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How People Found Me – January, 2007
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007My sudden need to switch tracking mechanisms here at I Should Be Sleeping put this monthly feature on hold for a while, but now it’s back and better than ever. Google Analytics is giving me more data about my site than GeoCities Site Statistics ever did. So, you see, I’m late, but the quality of the product is higher. Microsoft, are you listening? Anyway, on to the fun:
Visits and Pageviews
Familygreenberg.com received 1,723 pageviews from 968 unique visitors in January (actually from 1/8 through 1/31, since I started capturing data on 1/8). I’d call this an amazing new record (the highest total GeoCities ever gave me was ~1,500 pageviews), but there is some variance in what different tools call a unique visitor and/or a pageview, so for now, I’ll just call it a successful month and compare it to subsequent months to determine its record status.
Top Pages
The top 10:
/2006/01/concert-review-billy-joel-at-madison.html (261 pageviews)
/disney/characters.htm (111 pageviews)
/blog.htm (98 pageviews)
/2006/07/celebrity-look-alike.html (82 pageviews)
/2006/01/billy-joel-plays-oldies.html (74 pageviews)
/disney/2006/index.htm (65 pageviews)
/2006/12/blogger-550-permission-denied-bug.html (52 pageviews)
/2006/11/isbs-review-internet-explorer-7.html (52 pageviews)
/sherry.htm (44 pageviews)
/avery.htm (41 pageviews)
Referrers
The vast majority of my hits come from the big search engines, with Google generating more than 70% of them. There are several international Google sites (.de, .es, .co.uk, .ca) which is fascinating in a “Wow, Americans are fascinated by anything international” kind of way. Other notable referrers are jasonbennion.com (5 of the 968 visits), jeffporten.com (2 of the 968), scalzi.com (1 / 968), and washingtonpost.com (1 / 968). That last one coming from some bot they put together that decided a post I had written on one of their articles warranted linking to from the article itself.
I also had links from some interesting domains, including the Air Force (af.mil) and the Army (army.mil), nineteen different universities, and eight state government domains. And then there are the ones that just make you wonder, like videotron.ca, bredbandsbolaget.se, calibercollision.com, and club-internet.fr (ooh la la!)
Locations
The site was accessed from 628 unique locations (see map, click to enlarge) in 45 countries. A full 28% of the traffic came from outside the US, with the big contributors being Canada (7%), UK (4%), and Netherlands, Germany and India (just over 1% each). Some exotic/far away locations: Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Pakistan, Aruba, UAE, Moldova, Bangladesh, and Uganda (just to name a few).
Keywords
Ah yes, the old standby – things people typed into search engines that prompted them to click over to my site. This month there were three groups:
Billy Joel
“billy joel concert reviews” (1 / 1,050,000)
(ED NOTE: 13 months old, and this post is still at the top of Google’s list. I don’t understand why, but it’s generated over 4,500 pageviews and more than 50 comments from all around the world, making it the most read thing I’ve ever written, so I’m genuinely thrilled.)
Interestingly, “billy joel concert review” (without the “s”) doesn’t show that post at all, even though 44 people got there with this query in January. Strange…
Celebrity Look Alikes
I posted a couple of times about a celebrity look-alike site someone sent me, and it has also become a Google darling, though not to the extent of the Billy Joel post:
“celebrity look-alike” (106 / 786,000)
“face recognition celebrity look alike” (7 / 490,000)
“celebrity look alike face recognition” (8 / 490,000)
“jake gyllenhaal look alike” (3 / 86,700)
“emmy rossum lookalike” (1 / 10,000) (ED NOTE: Don’t ask…)
Technical / Internet Stuff
Several of my posts about Blogger, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, and Internet Explorer have been big search engine favorites:
“tables in blogger” (1 / 1,260,000) (ED NOTE: Blogger’s post is #2. Sweet!!!)
“save as not responding” (9 / 1,920,000)
“550 permission denied” (9 / 863,000)
“verizon dsl wall filter” (1 / 277,000)
“ie7 keeps scrolling” (73 / 113,000)
“outlook 2003 0x800ccc90” (10 / 14,800)
And the Rest…
As always, there are the ones that make you say, “Hmmm….”
“you know what’s wrong with the world today?” (2 / 18,200,000)
(ED NOTE: A report on Rumsfeld’s farewell address is #6. <Snicker…>)
“evidence “in favor of” idea global warming real process occurring “right now”” (8 / 96,600)
(ED NOTE: Kos is #7…)
“why does asparagus arrive in early spring” (5 / 165,000)
“pelosi smoking october stock market” (99 / 219,000)
“lawn ornament + crane” (36 / 156,000)
“fred flintstone global warming pictures” (14 / 56,600)
“qaeda 1998 ofac” (9 / 13,500)
“gold flamingos leominster ma” (2 / 9,460)
“”governor’s mansion” “new jersey” “superbowl”” (4 / 229)
“comparsion creats jealousy” (4 / 120) (ED NOTE: Still a big hit among those who can’t spell)
“elvis presley “go quakers”” (1 / 5)
“”gentlemen start your ovens”” (13 / 105)
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 1 Comment »
How People Found Me – September Edition
Sunday, October 8th, 2006Here are the most interesting Google searches that caused people to link to my site. I think I forgot to do this last month, so to make it up to everyone, this one has categories. Don’t get used to this kind of service…
Politics:
clinton bashes bush (1 / 2,620,000)
[My blog post is result #1. gop.com’s is result #2, and FOXNews.com is result #3. Gotta love the Google…]
Random Queries:
serious hoopage (1 / 150)
bill maher kids drawings (1 / 291,000)
the great pizza challenge (5 / 5,970,000)
semantic dating (5 / 4,360,000)
why was 2005 hurricane season so bad (6 / 4,440,000)
[Because clearly, I’m the one you’d ask, right?]
liberty de vito no longer with billy joel (10 / 21,100)
billy joel disc reviews (16 / 900,000)
john stewart musharraf blog (40 / 233,000)
People Actually Looking for Me:
brian greenberg bank of america (1 / 774,000)
brian greenberg lehman (1 / 227,000)
[Good to see my new employer draws more hits than my old employer, even if most of them still aren’t me…]
brian greenberg vice president and senior technology manager global markets back office technology bank of america (1 / 88,500)
[OK, this guy REALLY wanted to find me. Actually, to be fair, it looks like he typed in everything on my business card]
Celebrity Look-Alike Queries:
jim carrey look alike (14 / 114,000)
jake gyllenhaal look alike (18 / 79,300)
jay leno frontal face image (1 / 35,200)
selma hayek look alike (19 / 72,200)
[No, not me – my wife]
emmy rossum look alike (1 / 19,900)
[Sadly, not my wife – me…]
hindi celeb look alike (1 / 66,200)
[Unbelievably, still me…]
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