Every once in a while I like to show some analytics about this blog.

I get the sense that the sources of traffic to this blog have been changing recently. Let's start by comparing the high level sources of traffic to this blog in the first quarter of 2007 vs the first quarter of 2008:

First Quarter 2007

First Quarter 2008

The total page views didn't change that much from the first quarter of last year to this quarter, growing from 400,000 page views to 450,000 page views. But the sources of traffic changed for sure. Search traffic was down from 50% to 40%, and direct and referring traffic both grew by 5%, and referring sites now drive as much traffic to this blog as search. That's a big deal. And I expect that trend will continue.

So what are the top referring sites and how did that change in the past year?

Q1 2007

Q1 2008

As you can see, the sources have changed a lot. First, Google in this context (at least the Google that is number one in both charts) is Google Reader - the king of RSS readers (at least for my readers). The other RSS readers on the lists include MyYahoo, which went from number 2 to number 9 over the past year, Bloglines, which went from number 3 to number 7 in the past year, and netvibes, which was number 8 in the first quarter of 2007 and is no longer in the top ten.

This post should be called "the rise of the smart aggregators" because the new big sources of traffic to this blog are techmeme, reddit, twitter, and delicious. Both techmeme and delicious were on the list in 2007, but techmeme jumped from number four to number two and tripled the number of visits it generated. Delicious stayed at number six but grew the number of visits it generated. Reddit is the real eye-opener for me. It wasn't in the top 10 in 2007 and is currently the number four referring site. Likewise, Twitter was not on the list in 2007 and now is the number five referring site. And check out Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com), it brought this blog more traffic than my.yahoo this quarter. Thanks Paul and everyone at ycombinator.

Some things don't change. Stumbleupon remains an important source of traffic and there's always some big source of traffic that is probably a link to a single post. In Q1 2007 it was a cnet link to a post I wrote about not being able to buy an iSight. This quarter is a google images link that I can't track through to the post.

There's an important new "smart aggregator" out there, FriendFeed, that doesn't show up in the Q1 numbers, but this month to date it is the number seven source of traffic to this blog.

March 2007 (to date)

You'll also note that in March, the ycombinator connection is even more pronounced with reddit ahead of techmeme and hacker news in the number five slot. It's also nice to see my tumblog being used as a way to follow what's happening on this blog.

Finally, I should say something about the direct visits. With a blog URL like avc.blogs.com, I've always felt that direct visits are most likely driven by browser bookmarks. And it's also true that a good deal of the search traffic is a proxy for a direct visit.

Google sent almost 120,000 visits to this blog in the first quarter from almost 50,000 search terms, so it's a very long tail. But the top ten search terms are shown below: