Technically Speaking

Tumblr Experiment and Statistics for 2/20 – 2/22/09

February 23rd, 2009 Rex Dixon Comments

I decided to do a fun little experiment of sorts over the weekend. I wanted to see if a tumblr site could actually get traffic. Wondering if people actually would read other people’s opinions on snippets of news stories. Now many of you have tumblr sites, and if you do, you probably are wondering if it’s worth clipping some news you saw and leaving your 2 cents.

Here are some results I thought I’d share from statistics that I am pulling straight from MyBlogLog. Now while your results could vary, I think by looking at the stats below, Tumblr can be a traffic driver or rather your tumbl could very well be read by many.

Date	Rank	Read	Offclick
Friday 2/20/2009	1	208 Sick Dogs	Duff McKagan Seattle Weekly blog post
Friday 2/20/2009	2	Main URL	208 Sick Dogs STLToday Article
Friday 2/20/2009	3	Duff McKagan Blog Post	Video of 208 Dogs
Saturday 2/21/2009	1	$700k House in SF	$700k House
Saturday 2/21/2009	2	$300k Cave House	Inquisitr Cave House post
Saturday 2/21/2009	3	Parents Joining Facebook	Stop Sign Video
Sunday 2/22/2009	1	2nd Life Dying	TC – MS screwup post
Sunday 2/22/2009	2	TC – MS screwup	Death Watch 2nd Life
Sunday 2/22/2009	2	MySpace China	Webster House
Sunday 2/22/2009	3	$100k Blog Job	Above was #3 offclick

Yes, there was a perfect tie for the #2 spot of read posts yesterday. It seemed that people were equally enthralled Microsoft screwing over their fired employees (TechCrunch post), and MySpace China. Think that one was due to Rupert’s daughter’s picture? Not sure, but the offclick’s indicated that even though it was tech dominating the read, somehow the other bay area house snuck in there at the #3 offclick site.

One of the more interesting things I found was articles that I thought (I guess I shouldn’t think!) would be interesting to people, were not. Such human interest stories as the Iraq Veteran getting a gift pulled due to a marijuana conviction in 2005, even though that was re-tweeted by someone – it never seemed to gain much traction as a read story. In fact, you could almost considered it a buried story.

The sad thing is that this is a real person’s true story of having something taken away that he fully deserves, at least in my opinion – all veterans of the Iraq conflict deserve anything America can give back to them. No matter what past violations they may have committed. Sadly enough, the stories that ranked over this one were only interesting for a minute such as the Food Network star that F-Bombed in front of the King and Queen of Spain, that $700k house in SF from the day before – this must be quite a deal or something – and even George W’s visit to a hardware store where he was offered a greeter job.

Two more stories that started to surge and just went flat were the guy that was working 50 jobs in 50 states all in one year’s time, and the 11 year old kid that killed his step mother with a kiddie shotgun. Both of those stories were surging, and somehow at the end of the day, just fell out of contention for the top spots. Very strange how a story can start to take off, and just die.

Technically Speaking, I guess I do not know what people like to read about, or can only guess what might be popular or interesting. So far today – a story about saying good-bye to former employers I found in the LA Times is #1, while the #3 read story is providing the #2 offclick. Interestingly enough it’s a search site(Kosmix) I wrote about here.