On Friday I started using Google Analytics to track flow on this site. Already it's generating useful information, confirming something I believed was true.
Most of the traffic for this site is repeat visitors, and most of it is self-generated.
In other words, some time ago a bunch of people started reading Scripting News through the day, bookmarked in some way, refreshed it periodically.
The site doesn't get a lot of people pointing into it, there aren't a lot of ways to discover it.
Aggregators and feed readers don't generate any traffic because the feed contains the full content.
You can see this in the relatively low (for the traffic) Technorati rank.
Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:28 PM
~About the Author~
Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.