Scripting News: Every picture tells a story

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Every picture tells a story

Yesterday, I showed some graphs produced by Google Analytics that tell a story about the readers of Scripting News. Perhaps I didn't provide enough detail to support one conclusion I drew: We don't get a lot of new readers here.

I know that for a couple of reasons, and it's supported by Ian, who works at Coremetrics, a company that is in the business of analyzing web traffic.

1. Even though it shows that 46 percent of the traffic are first timers, that's based on a four day sample, of which two days were weekend days. Traffic patterns change on the weekend, esp for a business oriented site like Scripting News.

2. I could compare it to the graphs for the XML-RPC site, which I also host, a relatively high flow site. Its traffic is almost entirely new people. It's not a blog, it's a reference site, with several popular specs that are widely pointed to.

Over time the graph for Scripting News will likely skew even more toward repeat business.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this, I'm just sharing something I've learned. I've deleted some personal comments about this, which are completely ridiculous. These no doubt are the people who edit my Wikipedia bio. ";->"

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:29 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.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"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.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Jan Mar