Search Engines and All This Is That

By Mona Goldwater, Computing Ed.

Traffic (a/k/a readers) into All This Is That is heavily skewed to Google, mainly, we assume, because Google owns blogger and Blogspot, where this blog is located.  

According to Searchenginewatch, current search engine popularity is :

• 67.6% Google
• Bing 18.7%
• Yahoo 10%
• Ask 2.4%
• AOL 1.3%.  

Wait...that's 100%?? I guess that means that Apple's Safari, Mozilla Firefox, etc. are statistically irrelevant?  We are guessing that, although Bing is at an 18.7% market share, they tend not to refer to Google-oriented sites?  Or maybe it's just us!

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Our last hundred visitors

This map shows the 100 most recent visitors to ATIT.  The green dots represent ten visitors.

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I guess David Beckham is an All This Is That reader?

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All This Is That turns five years old this week

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Can anyone explain why so many people are coming here looking for Jeri Kehn Thompson photos?

There are dozens of photos of Jeri Kehn here, from the 2008 election. Yeah, we admit it became a bit of an obsession. But why, for the last month, are 300-500 people a day coming to All This Is That to look for them? We're utterly stumped. We know we're high on the Google Kehn search results--but that only brought in a couple dozen of people a day...until recently.



When traffic suddenly went up, we figured she'd died, or filed for divorce, or had been somehow plunged back into the headlines. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

If you can, let us know why--and how--you stopped by to see the Jeri Kehn photos. It's a puzzler for us. And, hey, while you're hear, check out the archives, and become a regular, or subscribe to our RSS feeds. . .


By by the way, this posting lists all of the Jeri Kehn photos published here.

Jack Brummet, Editor in Chief
Pablo Fanque, National Affairs Editor
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All This Is That begins its 5th year today

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All This Is That is four years old today. So, I'm just going to ramble about that.

We've been farked five or six times, which is always fun, because 10,000-15,000 people show up. But the interesting thing about http://fark.com is that their readers are always looking for the next weird story. . .none of them become regulars. Once in a while we are someone's blog of the day, or a blog or website notes a--usually bizarre--post here, and between 30 and 500 people turn up.

Most of our readers Google into here. More than half the traffic on All This Is That comes from Google, Yahoo and other search engines; 40% of the visitors are regular readers. Most of our visitors come from the U.S. and Canada, England, Australia, Turkey, Japan, Germany, Croatia, Brazil, and Ireland, in that order.

Even though it's been four years, I still haven't gotten around to writing some stories I've promised (this year, for sure!). The content here, as you may have noticed, is random, and mostly generated by whatever strikes my fancy on any particular day. For the last year and a half a big focus has been the U.S. Presidential race. Six weeks in the last year were extended travelogues as I documented my travels in Mexico, England, Turkey and Greece. If I actually focused on something, we could generate tons of visitors. But I have never found any particular area I'd like to focus on. I'm not a niche kind of guy, I guess.

We've now hit Alien Lore story Number 145. I have published 150 original poems in the last four years. And we have published hundreds of weird stories. Some articles that come up at the top of a Google search: Looking for Nude Condoleezza Rice Photos?; Matt Bevalaqua, the killer; Enumclaw Horse Sex; The Brady Bunch Porn Movie; Clemenza's Godfather spaghetti sauce; and a few others). Every day dozens to hundreds of people come searching for those. A lot of people come looking for images and photos. Since even the early days, we've always published a lot of photos, paintings, and images. I've seen images I've created appear on dozens of other blogs and websites.

I've never written a word about my work (a/k/a "day job") in all this time. I think I'll keep it that way, even though I love my job, co-workers, and the business we're in...this gets too complicated as it is. . .

I still want to write these stories sometime (all are at least half-done):

My Worst Jobs, Part 6: The Fish: My five years working at Carl Fischer Music

Dad, or, John Newton Brummet II

The Kent Bus Depot (almost done!)

The Hook Arm, the Wooden Leg, False teeth, and Girdles - My people. One more hillbilly tale.

Growing Up Hillbilly (they stopped in Seattle because you'd need a boat to go further)

Growing up Kent: The Liquor Store, The Butcher, and The Barber

My life as an orderly

Well, I'll get around to it sometime. In the meantime, I've am enjoying not writing about politics for a while. Our Alien Lore readership has seriously dwindled with a dearth of content (interestingly, when I publish those stories, readership goes way up, but the regulars click away very quickly).

One in a while, I think about pulling the plug. But then I come to my senses. If a few hundred people a day show up, I must be doing something right. If I publish a book of poems--and I probably will sometime soon--it will sell a few hundred copies. If I publish a poem here, that many people will read it in one day. When I publish in a magazine that's good for my literary career, but, let's face it. . .no one reads 'em!

More soon. . .
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All This Is That Farked!

Our article on photographs from Mars yesterday was Farked. What does that mean? Instead of a couple hundred readers all day, a couple hundred a minute show up. It's not like they all become fans and regulars. They don't; Farkers tend to look at the article and then jump back to Fark.com. But just the fact ten thousand people show up is pretty cool. And Fark is an extremely viral site...when you DO get Farked, dozens of other sites (like Reddit, Useless Junk, Digg, etc.) also point their readers to the story, and then some of those readers flag the story). It's happened a couple times before, and it's always welcome. If you own your own domain, you can get hit with some steep charges by your ISP. But if you're on Blogger, no problem...they like all that traffic.


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Map of the last 100 All This Is That visitors

This is sort of interesting (well, to me anyhow). It is a map of the last 200 visitors here. When I looked at this map a year or two ago, the visitors in the U.S. were almost all from the east and west coasts. It appears that we've penetrated the "flyover states," that we're completely sucking in South America, the Arctic and Antarctic, Cuba, and we don't seem to be reaching our brothers and sisters in Canada or Africa either. That red dot you see is the All This Is That offices...

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Where All This Is That readers come from...

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Every once in a while, I check into Site Meter's tracking of people who end up on All This Is That. On Sunday, just under 400 visitors came here. Most were from the USA. A handful hail from Canada, Europe, Australia, and a couple of people arrived from Africa, Asia, and Australia and New Zealand.

The US map is interesting. The west coast has a line of people stretching from Victoria, British Columbia to Tijuana, Mexico. It's fascinating how this line hugs the Pacific Coast, but then there is no one until you get to Denver, and Austin, Texas, and a few other cities sprinkled in the middle of the country. There is a swath of people running down the industrial rust belt, in Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and other cities, and then a cluster around the east coast, mostly in the NYC metro area. Clearly, we're not hitting that middle-west demographic, nor our brothers and sisters in Canada!
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