Who are you? - Demographics of a blog

1984 was (and still is) a very remarkable piece of fiction, which is increasingly transforming into a factual piece of text. Big brother, as a concept, has been spread wide and far. It has even gotten its namesake in the contemporary TV schedule at prime time, albeit the show itself seems quite horrid, based on the 15 minutes that I've spent watching it. The internet is also starting to exhibit some Orwellian aspects and whereas theoretically anonymity is still possible, most of the time a governmental entity will be able to order individual ISPs, websites, etc. to give out enough data that the anonymity is questionable, at best.

Individual website owners have also had a longstanding hobby of creating statistics about the visitors of their websites. A few years back Google brought out its own offering called Google Analytics, which allows just about anyone to add a small snippet of text into their own websites and begin to collect information on their visitors. At this point I should note, however, that this information is technical in nature and does not really violate privacy; if I am able to say that someone in the past week has looked at my blog and has had a screen resolution of 1024x786, that doesn't really invade your privacy.

Anyway, I thought that I might share some things that Google has gathered on this blog. And maybe that can tell something about what sort of people are reading this blog (i.e. you)...

Since February 25th, there have been 1620 individual visits to this blog, consisting of 2108 page views. So you are not a person who spends very much time digging deep into the blog. But that's not such a surprise, considering the nature of blogs and how the typical use case consists of a person quickly checking the main page of the blog for new entries. No need to dig deeper. This is also supported by the fact, that out of the 2108 page views, 1482 were of the main page of the site. The second most popular page was my entry on convertible cuffs in shirts with 71 page views. Also, over 86% (1400) of the visits consisted of only a single page view, offering even more support for this interpretation.

But even if the attention span of a reader of this blog only allows 1.3 page views per visit, you are still a very persistent bunch. Out of the 1620 individual visits, 1075 visits were from returning visitors. This is comforting, as it seems that you find the ramblings that I write engaging enough so that you actually bother coming back.



Maybe slightly unsurprising is the fact, that 960 visits originated from Finland. In general Europe was very well represented with 1227 visits in total, followed by the Americas with 342 visits. The other continents were all minute compared to these two. The image of the world map is slightly misleading, as the clustering around North America is due to the large number of one-off visitors, who jumped on the site from search engines and the like. On a national level, two thirds of the visits from Finland (604 out of 960) come out of the greater Helsinki area.

On a more tech-y note, it appears that the readers of this blog, you, are a very educated crowd as nearly three quarters (1198) of visits to this site are made using Firefox. This is in sharp contrast with the historical data which gives Internet Explorer a very solid foothold. IE is, however, in second place and the other browsers make up a thin long tail. So kudos to all you enlightened people.

There are also some other statistics which Google provides, but I don't really think that they are that interesting. So of course it would be very interesting to know who exactly reads this blog, but I guess that's something that I'll never truly get to know. However, that said, I do know individual people who read this blog. It becomes quite apparent when I start discussing some topic with another person or within a group, and I automatically get an answer not so dissimilar to: "Yes, we know, you already blogged about that."