Fun with statistics: estimating blog readership (a do-it-yourself recipe)

Posted by Tom Moertel Thu, 23 Aug 2007 01:34:00 GMT

As everybody knows, statistics is fun. Is there anything cooler than crushing a heap of seemingly uninteresting numbers into gleaming jewels of meaning? Of course not! Models, data-visualization plots, and fat data sets are way cool. So, let’s find an excuse to play with them.

Here’s an excuse – I mean, an important and highly relevant question that many of us share: How many people actually read our blogs? To answer the question, we will need to use statistics, data, and cool plots. Further, if you’ve got the raw data for your blog, you can follow along with your own analysis. Even more fun!

We’ll start with a simple inspection of common web-log data, using command-line tools. After developing a rough understanding of what useful information we can extract, we’ll analyze the raw data using a series of successively more sophisticated techniques. In the end, we will derive a simple formula for estimating readership from easily obtainable data.

Sound good? Then let’s get rocking.

But first, a preemptive strike on would-be poo-pooers: I know all about FeedBurner. I know they will track my blog’s subscribers and use their mystical powers to infer the number of “real” subscribers I have. I know it’s all so easy. But easy isn’t the point. I want to understand what’s going on. Just taking somebody’s word for it isn’t nearly as satisfying as figuring it out yourself – nor as fun.

OK. For real this time, let’s get rocking.

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I have written a short novel's worth of content for my blog

Posted by Tom Moertel Fri, 30 Mar 2007 04:34:00 GMT

How much content have I written for my blog? Let’s find out.

My blog runs on Typo, which is built upon Ruby on Rails. Let’s fire up the Rails console and gather a quick word count:

$ cd ~/blog
$ ruby script/console 
Loading development environment.
>> require 'article'
=> true
>> Article.find(:all).inject(0) { |sum,a| sum +=
       (a.body + a.extended.to_s).split(/\s+/).length }
=> 66665

So I have written about 66 kilo-words, which is entering novel territory. Paperback-wise, it’s about 190 pages.

All I need now is a villain and some cool cover art.

;-)

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