I’m taking off work this week, and my plan is to make something of it, so hopefully I’ll have some fresh new content to post up. Ideas I’m currently juggling around are: writing a tutorial, writing a facebook game (I bash facebook sometimes, but it is something almost everyone uses), or making a new online app. Or possibly re-doing my color fader. I really don’t like its interface. But I’ll figure all this out later. In the mean time, here are some random bits of news…
Popular with the Ladies
I stumbled upon an interesting internet tracking site called QuantCast. According to its website its “the only open internet ratings service. We provide advertisers with audience profiles for millions of websites and services.” I’m not sure how it tracks websites, and I have never seen this site before today, but I discovered that it had data for my website, you can see it here:
http://www.quantcast.com/patorjk.com
According to the data they provide, this site gets more female visitors than male visitors. Interesting, interesting… hey ladies… j/k, actually, this is all kind of funny because I really doubt that, unless the majority of people who view TAAG are female. Though then again, maybe I just don’t know my audience very well.
The website also says “The site is popular among a 60-100k HH income bracket, more educated audience.” Which I thought was interesting.
As a side note to all of this, way back in the day I had a poll up on my main page that asked the viewer if they were male or female. The results came back 90% male, 10% female (I forget how many votes were cast, but it was a decent amount). So it’d be really interesting if the scales had tipped as much as that site says they have.
Google Trends
If you don’t know about Google Trends, you need to visit this site now:
It’s amazing how much fun that tool is. I can’t believe digg is more popular than reddit, fark and slashdot put together. I was also shocked to learn that Pepsi was more popular than Coke (in terms of google searches). This site [NSFW!] has some more risque suggestions. But anyway, if you’re bored, it’s a fun tool to play around with.
Quantcast’s faq says that they collect their data through advertisers, ISPs and other affiliations (probably search engines). I could definitely see myself using this soon. Thanks for pointing it out!
As a weird side note, Google Webmaster Tools tells me that people 2-3 weeks ago were searching for “patorjk colorspy” and getting my site.
I may set up a quantcast account myself, it’d be interesting to get data for different parts of this site.
> As a weird side note, Google Webmaster Tools tells me that people 2-3 weeks ago were searching for “patorjk colorspy” and getting my site.
Looks like only 2 sites come up for that search term. Maybe I should put the phrase “colorspy” somewhere on my software page. Cool to know there are people searching for it. It’s actually one of my least downloaded programs though (probably because people don’t know what it is – or realize how useful color spies can be). Almost as many people download my Pic to HTML program, and it isn’t even listed anywhere on this site! I just uploaded it to my downloads folder since I noticed I was getting 404 errors for it (it’s linked on one or two different message boards).
How can they tell what sex a browser is?
That’s a good question. They might base off location and do some kind of statistical analysis, but that’d be kind of iffy, looking at their faq they say:
“We observe anonymous records of visits to internet destinations. For a portion of these observations, we have certain information, such as the age, gender or income level of the internet visitor and/or their household. This group is called a panel and forms one aspect of our analysis and reporting methodology.”
So maybe some ISPs provide them with data about the sex of their users. And they use that to try and estimate what everyone else is. That seems kind of strange though (and possibly like an invasion of privacy). Though I don’t know how else they’d get that kind of information.