My 10 Coolest Blog Visitors

I've been shocked by how positively some of my blog posts have been received. If We Assume has received over 6K visitors both of the past 2 months! It's been a total blast so far, and made me even more excited to explore ideas/projects and work on new data analysis/visualization techniques.

A recent visitor map from StatCounter.

Everything I've read about growing blog traffic and building readership indicates you need to 1) advertise your content, and 2) thoroughly understand your readership. I've fixed a keen eye on the various analytics tools that are tracking my blog, and the numbers/trends have been enlightening AND entertaining.

Here is a list of the Top 10 Coolest Blog Visitors that have appeared in my analytics feed...

10. You
Oh god, that's cheesy... but it's true! I'm excited people are reading, and I hope they continue to read and send me feedback/comments on my material.

9. Google
It was really cool to see more than just Google robots crawling my blog, but actual people!

8. Royal Caribbean Cruises
A few days ago If We Assume had a visitor, directed from reddit, who was apparently on vacation with the fine folks at Royal Caribbean Cruises (purveyors of Sun, tropical islands, beautiful women...) Looking at RCC's website, internet access onboard is $0.65/minute! This person paid more than $2.40 to visit my website, and I'd just like to say: that is a completely appropriate and sensible use of your vacation.

7. North Dakota
It took like 5 months for someone from ND to visit my website... I have no idea why it bugged me so much, but seeing the analytics map with hits from every other state made my OCD go bananas.

6. US Center for Disease Control
I can dig this, the CDC has to eat and breath big data sets to understand public health on a national (and international) scale. Seems like we've got lots of interests in common, CDC. Let's hang out!


5. US Department of Defense
I'm a bit less excited about this... the DoD certainly has lots of data. If I see DHS/TSA hits showing up, I guess I'll be worried.

4. Tehran, Iran
I got a couple hits from different addresses in Tehran last month, with no referring "came from" address. Either I'm a bigger hit overseas than I suspected, or people in Iran had nothing better to read in April.


3. Macmillan/McGraw-Hill Publishing
Hey, you guys made like half of the textbooks I was required to buy in College! As luck would have it, I have an idea or two for a book... drop me a line! (Hey, a man can dream)


2. Washington State Department of Transportation
My most popular post (so far) has been my analysis of the cost of tolling on SR-520 in Seattle. A few weeks after it was published I received more than 50 visitors from WSDOT. All had no referring URL, came from more than a dozen WSDOT offices around WA, and most showed up within a single 30min burst. My conclusion was that an email got passed around between friends/colleagues at WSDOT, something to the effect of "Hey, look at this fool..."


1. Goldman Sachs
Seriously? Fun fact: huge numbers of my generation, even the highly educated among us, may never be able to afford to buy a home. I see you guys have an office in Seattle... you hiring?


Thank you all for reading and keeping the dream alive!