Annual review 2010 - who's been reading this blog!?

Last year's Annual Review of the Digital Directions blog looked at the statistics available through Google Analytics and the Feedburner RSS feed for this blog.  As usual, the full Analytics Report is available here, but I'll make some comments in this post, and add some extra graphs and images not in the automatically generated report.

Visitors

Over the year 1 Aug 09 - 31 Jul 10 (with comparisons to last year in brackets) there has been 2,078 visits (+10.01%) with 3,264 page views (+2.64%) coming from 80 different countries (77 last year), the bulk of which being from the UK, but still representing all of the continent and sub-continent regions and a vast array of legal systems:

 

Our overall increase in visitors comes from the international readership:

Continent             Change  Main Reasons
Northern Europe    -11.05%  A UK drop, but an Ireland increase
Northern America   45.29%  Large increase for both USA and Canada
Southern Asia       110.91%  Significant increase for India and Pakistan
Western Europe      63.08%  Increase from Netherlands, Austria, France and Switzerland
Australia & NZ        27.63%  A drop in New Zealand, but an increase in Australia
Southern Europe     13.16%  A drop from Greece but increases for Spain, Portugal and Italy
Eastern Asia           95.45%  A drop from Japan but large increases elsewhere (Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, China and Mongolia)
South America        59.09%  A big increase for Brazil
South-Eastern Asia 24.00%  A drop from Malaysia but increases elsewhere (Thailand, Phillipines, Singapore, Indonesia and Cambodia)
Eastern Europe      -10.34%  A drop in Romania, but an increase in Poland

Although UK traffic in general has gone down(-12.57%), the number of cities remains more or less the same at 140 (-2.78%), although I'm still suspicious that not every visit is recorded accurately as Analytics uses the visitor IP address, which may well be registered in England, even though the user is in Wales or Northern Ireland etc.  The top 20 cities are:

Traffic Sources

Search engine arrivals are still overwhelmingly from Google, and from people using Windows, Internet Explorer, with a T1 or DSL connection.  Unsurprisingly over 90% are java supported, yet with a variety of flash versions installed.

Our top referring sites for visitors arriving at Digital Directions are UKCLE, GoogleBlogSpot, home.comcast.net/~richards1000/, learningcircuits.blogspot.com, and lilac10.wetpaint.com.  Less frequently used links come from a variety of other sites such blogs (cearta.ie, Terranova, and BPP college), other websites including Twitter (all from @HEA_UKCLE or @m_bro) and for the first time, FaceBook!

The top keywords are mainly names, however Digital Directions does review a number of conference presentations, blog posts by other authors and reports/papers etc from individuals, so that is not surprising.  Other common terms are BILETA, Ardcalloch, GIKII, UKCLE, Second Life, LILAC etc, which pretty much represent the blog posts over the year.

Pages

The most popular postings viewed during the year are listed below.  They were all, apart from number 8, written within the review period: as were last years (bar 2) which shows that blogs are treated more like news than archived information sources.

1    20 Aug 09 The 'Hype Cycle' for education, 2009 *
2    11 Nov 09 Free US caselaw... just google it! *
3    29 Jan 10 LILAC10 - Student Feedback, E-bay style *
4    03 Nov 09 The value of social media
5    26 Nov 09 LILACnet - wiki and social networking site for LILAC 2010 Conference
6    29 Mar 10 BILETA 2010 - Re-entering the e-conveyancing Matrix
7    11 Aug 09 22 Tweets! Interviews with practicing lawyers who tweet...
8    23 Jan 09 LILAC09: Project Panacea – Yes Minister meets Fantasy Football!(previous year) *
9    12 Nov 09 Pro Bono Week, Strathclyde's Law Clinic and Legal Education
10  07 Oct 09 Blawg Review: On blogs and 'accidental' legal education (teach your children well...)

However, only 4 of these entries are in the all-time top-10 posts made since the blog started in May 2008 (shown with *).

RSS Feed

Elsewhere, Feedburner tells me that 56 people subscribe to the RSS feed, mainly using Google Reader:

 
Let's see how, or if, things change in the coming year.