What People Search For

Playing with Google Analytics you can find all kinds of useless info about your site. The most read blog topics from whatpeopleknow are:

1. Knowledge vs. Emotion
2. Recall vs. Recognition
3. Son of Recall vs. Recognition
4. What Happened in 1066
5. Objective vs. Subjective Knowledge

Other top finishers were blogs on chronic know-nothings, negative advertising, communicating science, and my personal favorite -- titular colonicity.

I should put links on each of these to their respective blogs on whatpeopleknow, but it's Sunday and I don't have that much motivation (except that I'm supposed to be finishing my grading, so this beats that). The individual blogs above were the best read of all my posts in 2008. Obviously the first three and maybe the last popped up on Google searches by people doing research in, or writing papers about, kinds of knowledge. That's cool. Hoped I helped.

Google was my top traffic source, with 43 percent coming via a search from that site. Twenty-seven percent came from my own web page. About 13 percent of traffic came directly here. Odds and ends make up the rest.

Nearly all my visits are from the U.S. Second is the U.K., followed by Canada, Vietnam, China, Singapore, and a bunch of others at just a few hits each. Georgia obviously dominates among the states, followed by California, New York, Texas, Florida, etc., no doubt a function of population since those are the biggest states. Not a single visit from my home state of Tennessee, despite me being fairly sure they have Internet there.

October 19 was my single biggest audience day, and the pre-election time saw my highest consistent traffic.

I've had interesting visits and comments, one by an author unhappy with my trashing of his book, another by a conservative documentarian unhappy about others commenting on his Obama film, and at least one by an hold friend of mine from elementary school.

And that wraps up 2008 in blogging about what people know.