Word-whore. I write 'em. I talk 'em. Information, politics, media, and the cybers. I drink. I use bad words. All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris! Vive les poissons rouges sauvages!
Traffic related to The Heath Ledger Experiment continues to decline across the long weekend, the exact opposite of my admittedly ill-informed speculation. From a peak of 1,970 unique human visitors daily, it’s dropped to 1,227.
However that’s still well above the typical figure of around 500 unique humans daily which prevailed before this Experiment and The Madness of Corey Worthington Delaney.
Hmmm… I predicted yesterday that traffic would increase again across the weekend, but it hasn’t so far. Saturday’s traffic was actually the lowest of the four days since I started The Heath Ledger Experiment.
No theories yet. Let’s look again tomorrow and see what happens with the Sunday traffic (which will include hits from Saturday in the US, thanks to the Earth being round). A sunny Sunday isn’t right for numerical analysis.
As before, the figure for the last day only includes traffic from midnight to about 4am. And the number in the top-left corner of the graph isn’t relevant, as it’s “hits” — which includes all the pieces on a page as well as the page itself.
Website traffic is starting to decline again although, as the graph shows, yesterday’s traffic was still the second-highest this month and the decline was relatively small.
Two things this morning. One, a look back at how much time this has taken so far, in response to a less-than-polite comment from Todd and a sensible question from Crispin. Two, some speculation about how the traffic might go from here.
OK, I clearly know nothing about the Internet. Website traffic has actually gone up since yesterday!
Don’t worry about that number in the corner of the graph. That’s “hits” which includes all the images and little bits of JavaScript in each page.
Using another analysis tool, the number of unique visitors to the site each day (once search robots and hack attempts are filtered out) has risen from around 500 a day before Corey Worthington Delaney to more than 900 after Mr Socialite graced the world with his presence, to 1402 on Heath Ledger Day 1, to 1807 yesterday.
So what’s going on here?
Further to this morning’s post about The Heath Ledger Experiment, here’s a graph of my website traffic so far this month.
As you can see, traffic roughly tripled yesterday after my little game. The data for today is only for midnight to roughly 4am, so that’s why it’s so low.
The increase in traffic from 15 January is due to Corey Worthington Delaney. Most of that is to the page Corey Delaney, freedom fighter (for the right to party), even though I’m much happier with Arrest of “teen party host†highlights stupidity of law.
[Update 30 January 2008: More analysis of this has been posted since this article was written. Look for items tagged “heath ledger”.]
Just 24 hours ago, actor Heath Ledger died. Before most people even knew he was dead, I’d set up a web page asking for jokes about his death and I placed an advertisement (pictured) on Google. Tasteless. But there was a porpoise. This was Science!
Here’s what I’ve learned so far. If you have any questions as you read this, please ask them. I’ll be exploring the data more deeply over the next few days.
Continue reading “Lessons from tacky Heath Ledger jokes, Day 1”