Use Google Analytics to spy on people reading your blog

As a web designer, I've long been fascinated by site visitor tracking statistics that can tell me all about who's visiting my sites. Up until recently, however, the choices for tracking site stats have been rather lame and not very detailed or even user-friendly. Today I'm here to tell you tricksy hobbitses about a relatively new, free service you might not have known about - Google Analytics. To get started, all you really need is a Gmail account.

Once you log in there, all you need to do is "create a new account" - at which point you'll enter your blog address and then be rewarded with a little nugget of code that should look like this:

</script>

<script type="text/javascript">

_uacct="UA-xxxx-x";

urchinTracker();

</script>

...which you'll then place carefully into your blog template, right before the end tag at the bottom. Then, once it's saved and ready to go, Google will start collecting information about your readers for you to study and exploit.

One of the benefits of having statistics to look at is so you can know how many people are lapping up your daily intellectual masturbation by simply looking at a graph right on the front page Dashboard. This is a major self-esteem killer, depending on how many readers you typically have visiting your blog and whether or not you consider that to be a respectable number. (Note: it takes a couple days to start collecting enough stats to make a pretty graph like this so chill out and be patient).



You can also see what part of the world those users are coming from, via a handy world map that allows you to zoom in to see how many of your rabid followers hail from Hoboken. As you can see, I have precisely one visitor from the continent of South America. Hello there, sir or madam.



And finally, you get to see some comprehensive keyword statistics and source sites that tell you if that erotic fiction you wrote about Santa Claus last year is still attracting new readers. In the picture below, you can see that most folks are finding my blog by searching for random numerical sequences in Google. What you don't see is that I'm also getting a hefty chunk of visitors coming here from Philly Will Do, which must mean that I have my head firmly planted up D-Mac's ass. Wonderful.



Google Analytics has a lot of other features that are useful for web designers (such as goal tracking and how many users still have 640x480 resolution screens) but are pretty useless to bloggers. That means that this lesson has come to an abrupt end. If you enjoyed this brief overview, I may review some other blog-tracking / blog-whoring tools in the future. However, Technorati hasn't worked once since I signed up for it, and you have to crawl behind the wall and crouch underneath the crawlspace to get Digg installed in Blogger -- so then again, maybe I won't.

Link: [Google Analytics]

Get the fuck off my Internets, Pyle!!

This is a tad depressing, yet not surprising in the least:

The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops' online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.

Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the opportunities for the public to personally connect with some of the most effective advocates for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the troops themselves. The secret-keepers have generally won the argument, and the once-permissive atmosphere has slowly grown more tightly regulated. Soldier-bloggers have dropped offline as a result.

The new rules, obtained by Wired News, require a commander be consulted before every blog update.

But then there's this response from the folks living under this new regulation:

The soldiers who will attempt to fly under the radar and post negative items about the military, mission, and commanders will continue to do so under the new regs. The soldiers who've been playing ball the last few years, the vast, VAST, majority will be reduced. In my mind, this reg will accomplish the exact opposite of its intent. The good guys are restricted and the bad continue on... Operational Security is of paramount importance. But we are losing the Information War on all fronts. Fanatic-like adherence to OPSEC will do us little good if we lose the few honest voices that tell the truth about The Long War.

So, I guess it whittles down to this: towards the beginning of the war, military bloggers were viewed by the Pentagon and the White House as being generally good sources of P.R. Now that things are getting dragged out, tours of duty are getting extended indefinitely, and the mighty United States military seems to be losing hearts and minds (literally and figuratively) by the hour, this phenomenon is suddenly something the top brass has to crack down on.



Basically, we're seeing a large portion of the unfiltered first-person reports from Iraq get the muzzle because their stories no longer jell with what the Administration would like the American people to hear. Shitty in theory, but impossible to enforce 100% as has been mentioned. It's like photos of Alycia Lane in a bikini; if the information is out there, it will get onto the internet somehow.

Link via [Crooks & Liars] & [Wired News]