Annual review 2011 - who's been reading this blog!?

This will be the final review of the Digital Directions blog, as the UKCLE will cease to exist from the 31 Jul 2011, and therefore the review comes slightly earlier than usual!.

Last year's Annual Review of the Digital Directions blog looked at the statistics available through Google Analytics and the Feedburner RSS feed for this blog.  As usual, the full Analytics Report is available here, but as usual I'll make some comments in this post, and add some extra graphs and images not in the automatically generated report.

Visitors

Over the year 1 Aug 10 - 20 Jul 11 (with comparisons to last year in brackets) there has been 3,802 visits (+89.72%) with 5,081 page views (+61.10%) coming from 117 different countries (80 last year), the bulk of which being from the UK, but still representing all of the continent and sub-continent regions and a vast array of legal systems:

Our overall increase in visitors comes from the international readership, with net increases to all sub-continent regions, in comparison to last year which saw drops in both Northern and Eastern Europe:

Continent             Change  Main Reasons
Northern Europe        6.09%  Only a 1.65% UK increase, but a 42.55% Ireland increase
Northern America  107.13%  Significantly large increase for both USA and Canada
Southern Asia         85.59%   Increases for India and Iran, but a 40% drop in Pakistan
Western Europe     202.86%  A drop in Austria, but increases in all other nations
Australia & NZ       107.69%  Increases in both Australia and New Zealand
Southern Europe    340.48%  Increases for all nations, particularly Spain and Italy
Eastern Asia          130.95%  A 40% drop from Hong Kong but large increases for South Korea and China
South America       138.24%  A big increase for both Brazil and Columbia
SE Asia              1,154.84%  A massive 4,560.00% increase from Singapore and elsewhere (Malaysia, Phillipines and Indonesia)
Eastern Europe     260.00%   Large increases for Russia and Ukaraine, with only Bulgaria dropping

Visitors to the blog have come from every American State, apart from South Dakota.  Visits from California were up 218.00% and from Massachusetts by 533.33%.  In Europe, visitors came from 37 countries (all but Montenegro) including all European Union states.

Although UK traffic in general only marginally increased, the number of cities has increased from 140 to 229 (+63%), although I'm still suspicious that not every visit is recorded accurately as Analytics uses the visitor IP address, which may well be registered in England, even though the user is in Wales or Northern Ireland etc.  The top 20 cities worldwide are:

Traffic Sources

Search engine arrivals are still overwhelmingly from Google (but a 42% increase for Bing) and from people using a Windows operating system (drop from 83% to 75%), although Macintosh users have gone up slightly from 11% to 19%.

In relation to browsers, the use of Internet Explorer has dropped from 45% to 34% and Firefox has only slightly increased.  Bigger changes are seen with Chrome and Safari, most likely arising from mobile Internet access.  Connection speeds have also changed, possibly due to mobile computing as last year's predominant DSL (30%) or T1 (28%) connections are knocked into second and third place by an outright majority of 'unknown' connection speeds (56%).  Java supported browsers have also dropped slightly from 89% to 82%, probably another effect of mobile browsing.

Our top referring sites for visitors arriving at Digital Directions are similar to last year, but slightly reordered as Google outranks UKCLE, followed by Netvibes and Twitter which has made a 70% increase with a variety of users re-tweeting our links. FaceBook has a 128% referral increase, and last year was our first referral from Facebook.  Other significant traffic comes from learningcircuits.blogspot.com,
cearta.ie, bestpracticeslegaled.wordpress.com, and a range of other blogs and university sites.

The top 50 keywords used in search engines are not names of people (unlike last year), but the top 5 are:

1. function of reblogging
2. hype cycle for education
3. copyright
4. oscola 2010
5. digital directions

Pages

The most popular postings viewed during the year are listed below.  They were all, apart from number 3, written within the review period: as were last years (bar 1) which shows that blogs are treated more like news than archived information sources.

1    01 Sep 10 Hype Cycle for Education 2010 *1
2    23 Aug 10 Re-Blogging & Re-Tweeting: Copyright Issues? *2
3    20 Aug 09 The 'Hype Cycle' for education, 2009 *3
4    13 Aug 10 Mapping Online Legal Education Communities *4
5    08 Dec 10 New OSCOLA citation guide *5
6    07 Jun 11 New College of Humanities: Legal Education, Science and Ethics *7
7    30 Nov 10 The Yale Visual Law Project
8    01 Dec 10 9th International Journal of Clinical Legal Education Conference
9    02 Aug 10 Annual review 2010 - who's been reading this blog!?
10  06 Dec 10 Using simulation in teaching and learning: Simshare, SIMPLE and the OER approach

However, 6 of these entries are in the all-time top-10 posts made since the blog started in May 2008 (shown with * and their position) compared to 4 last year.

RSS Feed

Elsewhere, Feedburner tells me that 39 people subscribe to the RSS feed, fewer than last year (56) mainly using Google feedfetcher:

The blog will be archived and no longer supported by Typepad, so a further announcement will be made later this week regarding the future of Digital Directions.

Comments

[Annindk]

Copenhagen calling! If the blog is continuing recommend self hosted Wordpress - excellent platform, very flexible for blogs and more (they don't pay me).