I recently decided I'd try out the Google Analytics service to see if it was any better than StatCounter.com, who I have used for years. Much to my delight, the details were about the same. What did throw me, though, was the key word searches that landed people here on Nerdnology.com.
The #1 item people have come here for was the short review I wrote of the iPhone game "Field Runners" and it seems that "field runners strategy" was the key to people arriving at this .com. So apparently there is a large market for strategies on iPhone games...at least that iPhone game. I think due to the fact that I, too, enjoy iPhone games and there is obviously a market for discussion of said games, I might try to do some more iPhone game review blogging in the future.
The second thing that has really driven traffic to this site lately has been the post I did regarding how to tell programmably how many leap years are between two dates. I don't find this overly surprising, as when I was googling suggested solutions prior to writing my own code, I didn't see very much. It's nice knowing that spending the time to write code to solve my problem and sharing it with the world might be helping out some other programmers out there.
The biggest single day hit came when I posted about how my 4-year-old daughter was going to switch to Linux on her PC, the "orange one" as she refers to Ubuntu. This hit didn't come from Google search terms, though. It came from a posting I did over at www.digg.com, located here, and netted nearly 500 hits in a matter of a few days. It also gained me the most Diggs for any of the 23 posts I've done over there with a whopping grand total of 59! haha. So there is also a blogging market for cute stories about 4-year-old girls preferring one OS to another.
Another interesting tidbit of information relating to traffic and this site is that the video podcast I worked on for a while and eventually published to YouTube, episode 1 of Nerdnology was about the Roku Netflix player, only netted about 550 views on YouTube. Amazingly, though, my 9 minute long no audio, only songs playing in the background, unibody MacBook unboxing has had over 11,000 views on YouTube!
So taking these things into consideration, it appears that there is for sure a market for things written about the iPhone, iPhone games, cute stories of kids and computers, and people love to look at Macs. And it seems that these are all things I enjoy too. Knowing this, I may attempt to refocus this blog into something a little more friendly to people interested in such things and less on my quest for a Wii. It would sure be nice to get traffic here on a variety of topics, though. Perhaps I just need to adjust the way I ping the internet so Google will grab my posts in a more meaningful way.
That's all for now, just sharing...