Thursday, May 19th, 2011

Newspaper web sites! Why have one clickthrough when 10 will do?

Spotted on the Telegraph web site – an increasingly desperate attempt to get users to click on more pages. Is there any particular reason to turn a simple statistics-backed list items – “Top 10 jobs graduates want” – into a picture story? especially a picture story that requires you to click 10 times to get to […]

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

Blogging lessons from last year’s Google Analytics

Warning: intense web stats geekery ahead . It’s been a long time coming from the last stats outing – so much so that it’s not exactly an annual round-up, as I’m several months late. But here, for your geeky pleasure, is a run-through of what I’ve learned from Google Analytics about the past 12 months’ […]

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

Web traffic: what goes up must come down

Readers may remember the run-in I had with the Clinique press office a little while ago, and the flood of visitors that were drawn here by a repost at US journalism college web site the Poynter Institute. It was very exciting – my readership spiked tenfold, and I had loads of comments. So – I’m on […]

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

My tangled web of analytics

Warning: intense WordPress stats geekery ahead We’re coming up to the annual WordPress geekery blowout that is my full year web stats report. Freelance Unbound’s half-yearly web stats geekery report came when the site was hosted on WordPress.com. This had its ups and downs. The upside was that it was simple to understand – WordPress […]

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

Blog stats geekery: interim update

Here’s a teaser for those WordPress stats geeks who simply can’t wait until March to read the full-year update on this blog’s web analytics. Moving to self-hosted WordPress away from the coziness of WordPress.com has caused a certain amount of stats upheaval. Primarily this is because I now have Google Analytics installed. WP stats Up until […]

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Half-yearly blog stats geekery

In the spirit of full disclosure and transparency, and because such things may be of interest to new and student bloggers (and hopeless WordPress geeks), here’s the first installment of what should become a regular series of half-yearly posts on the statistics behind Freelance Unbound. First off – Freelance Unbound is not a hugely visited […]

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

The future of digital publishing – a conversation

Today I’ve invited another blogger to join me in a discussion about the future of web journalism and the economics of publishing in a rapidly digitising world. Blogging about the world of amateur horticulture under the name Soilman (well, it’s nice to have a hobby), he also has wide experience in journalism and editorial training. […]

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

The power of social bookmarking

With one bound, this blog has gone viral. (Well, kind of). I’ve always been curious about social bookmarking, but never really explored it very much. Aside from signing up to StumbleUpon to see how it worked, I haven’t really used sites such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us to steer or filter my web use. […]

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

I soar up the Technorati rankings

Out of curiosity, I just went back to Technorati for the first time, probably, since I registered there.  Kind of gratifyingly, I find I am now ranked at 2,476,024 in the universe of blogs. Well, in the universe of Technorati-registered or otherwise noted blogs. I don’t actually know the difference, strictly speaking.  Eagle-eyed readers with a […]

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

Unlocking the mysteries of Technorati

I’ve just registered with Technorati [no idea how it works, but I think it’s one of the rules of blogging]. I find I have a ranking of 4,770,814. As the great David St Hubbins might have said, that’s a bit too much flaming perspective…