Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

Last night I was hoping I'd be unveiling the "I'm lighter than I've been in years" Pocket Dragon (it's a "Feed Me") but alas, the needle of the scales is still above that certain point ...

:-) I'm still lighter than I've been in years but haven't dipped below that 13 stone point yet ...

Lies, damned lies and statistics ...

I love stats. It's a form of information given through numbers that should depend on hard fact boiled down into recorded info. It's the core of what I do at work, in terms of output at least. (My actual function is wider than just stats, I apply my engineering knowledge to let me select the right info and to validate it). But stats can be cheated to reflect what the provider wants you to see.

There's two ways I can get stats out of this blog :
The Sitemeter hit counter where readers can see the number but not the info
The Google stats screen which only a blog owner can see

They both read different info too. The sitemeter counter only works off the main template and doesn't work on the mobile template. I could probably fix that but I'm happy with the default mobile template the way it is. It's clean, quick to load and doesn't soak up any more of precious mobile data than it should. It also misses other hits, I suspect due to No-Script additions to browsers. (No-Script mods are intended to prevent adverts loading as well as stopping nasties)

The Google one just flat out lies ... lol. It doesn't admit to the hits that it doesn't think you should know about. Sitemeter is showing 5 hits this morning of which Google shows none. 2 of those are people hitting "Next Blog" (hi and welcome!), 3 are from the Googlebot. Google is showing 3, 2 of which are from that mobile template which Sitemeter can't see.

The sitemeter one also provides more detailed info going back the last 100 hits, the Google one doesn't give anything significant outside of browser, platform and which page got looked at.

The lesson ?

When you get presented with stats, don't necessarily trust what they're telling you. Ask questions about the source of the data and what the presenter is trying to tell you. If you see stats on the news, Don't Trust Them ! Our news agencies believe they can run our lives and one of their weapons is twisted statistics.

(aside - if you get bored easily by stats, skip to the end now !)

And here I go presenting statistics ... I can't get 'em out of Sitemeter but Google gives some interesting info over the "lifetime" (actually May 2009 to now) it's been grabbing info :

38% of my visitors are from the UK, which makes perfect sense as that's where I live
29% come from the USA, home of blogging
And the next highest is Russia with 7% with the rest being fairly split

Browser choice shows a trend to do with how I work but also something encouraging for the general enlightenment of the internet :

40% over the lifetime use Internet Explorer (we're forced to use this at work)
33% are more enlightened and are using Firefox
Next highest is Chrome with 11% and curious to see is 298 (2%) hits from Android and 304 from Mobile Safari. That just happens to be what my phone uses and I suspect at least 290 of those hits are mine - lol.

When you go more recent and just look at the last month, Firefox wins with 29%, IE is second with 22% and newcomers Safari and Chrome in there with 18% and 17%. Browsers are getting more diverse these days, which can never be a bad thing.

Same with the platforms used to browse the web :

78% over the lifetime use Windows, with 7% using Macs. And there I am with my 298ish Android hits too :-)
Going more recent and you see that Windows share drop to 60% (all those desktops) and the iPhone share rise from 4% to 16% and my Android share going from 2% to 10%. Macs stay where they are at 6% and Linux is somewhat forgotten at 5%.

I think that shows the rise of the smartphone, with iPhones being a seriously cool (and popular) device.

Ok, that's enough of boring number stats for now and where they come from. What's the presenter trying to tell you ?

I love seeing the hits come in. It means people are for some reason coming back for even more of those Wall Of Texts (and I've gone above my length limit here ...). It hopefully shows that people are interested in what I ramble on about. It shows they care.

And that last bit is pretty darn awesome :-)

PS Ask questions, send comments, gis a subject to ramble on about :-)