BlogCadre - statistics

YouTube's April Fools gag gives us a user count

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:33:49 -0500

For an April Fools gag, YouTube RickRoll'D their user base, sending all the homepage's promoted video clicks straight to that heinous Rick Astley "Never Gonna Give You Up" video. While I appreciated the joke, the information that it contained was a bit more interesting.

As far as I can tell, the video has been on the home page for about 24 hours now, give or take a few hours. In that time, it's racked up over 5.9 million views, almost 41 thousand comments, and 17 thousand ratings.

I'd assume a non-trivial portion of this traffic is from referrer links and multiple page views. That said, it gives you a rough snapshot of the upper limit on the typical volume of visitors and active (logged-in, commenting or rating) users that visit the YouTube homepage on a Tuesday.

Back in August 2006, YouTube had announced that over 100 million videos were watched per day. This figure is probably higher now, but it puts the homepage count into perspective, suggesting that perhaps 95% of YouTube's video views are from deep links to the site and offsite, embedded views.

Worldmapper, a new way to look at the world

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 13:51:39 -0600

Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest.

Here is the world based on Total Population (2000):

and compare it to a map based on Carbon Emissions (2000):

Neighboroo

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 10:12:40 -0500

Neighboroo is an interesting too in which it maps such statistics as 'political affiliation', 'air quality', and 'crime' across the United States. You can zoom and scroll to specific locations or just view the entire map to just get an overview. Check it out.

Previously:
Hack Google Maps, Google Moon, zipdecode, Gallery and google maps meet, Google Maps and WiFi used for traffic court evidence, Another cool google maps hack

Digging Alexa - how the geek demographic doubled overnight

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 22:52:03 -0500

It seems to have passed without huge fanfare, but on April 20th 2006, the Alexa rankings for tech sites around the globe suddenly doubled, literally overnight.

The Day The World Got Geeky

Ian Clarke writes, "Did the world get geekier around April 20th?"

Some kind of change to how Alexa calculates traffic – or did something happen to so dramatically affect these four websites? Perhaps a bunch of geeks suddenly decided to become Alexa users.

Alex Walker noticed the phenomenon as early as the 27th, titling it "The Great Internet Spike of 2006." Alex noticed that only tech sites seemed to benefit from the Alexa bump:

sites with no notable ‘tech-skew’ (i.e. CNN.com, EBAY.com, etc) have either held firm or been shuffled backwards by the sites bubbling up around them.

Have Alexa changed their statistical algorithms?
Is this a temporary anomoly?
Which sites lost out the worst?

Even Digg users have been speculating:

hayseed: also possible that a crapload of people installed the alexa toolbar at that time as a result of some sort of promotion ...

hottuna: Alexa is so incredible unreliably its strange that the site hasn't been shut down.

jarcoal: exactly. there have been several articles reporting major traffic boosts in the last few months. i'll bet this is all some stupid glitch.

When Elephants Fight

I've been looking at this a bit, and I'm convinced it's no Alexa glitch. Rather, the Alexa population did, in fact, change overnight.

Here's the funny part: Digg users were the scalawags who did it!

Weighing the Internet - Slashdot Update

Fri, 15 Jul 2005 00:18:46 -0500

Kaorimoch writes, "Perhaps a better term would be "Counting the people on the internet"? That weighing stuff is for things with, well, MASS."

Hobotron also makes this point: "Bad sample population, low sample size with ONE DAY, NO inclusion of error propagation across statistical barriers. When you multiply estimates, you multiply error as well."

These and other great comments from the slashdot crowd really got me to thinking that my thouroughly researched scienterrific study really missed the boat.

Not typically one to miss the opportunity to futher the advancement of literal interpretation of analogy and armchair statistics, I leave you with the following thought.

Weighing the Internet

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 03:37:35 -0500

In 1798 Henry Cavendish, known for his scientific brilliance and terrible fear of women, developed a system for calculating the gravitational constant (G) by measuring the gravitational attraction between two small spheres. In essence, he was able to "weigh the earth" by comparing the relationship between two known objects.

This got to thinking about weighing the internet -- calculating the number of users online. Since I am by no means a brilliant scientist and am horribly attracted to women everywhere, there were obviously roadblocks in my path that Henry did not have to deal with.

Want to know how many internet users there are? Curious about how many people read a site like Slashdot every day? Read on!