REGULAR READERS WILL KNOW that my personal website occasionally becomes a group blog and that's what is underway at the moment. Behind the scenes, we're evaluating its current function as part academic and part community.
Screencap from Statcounter's tracking of Insideview.ie.
One element of the community dimension is to determine whether the audio clip attached to this blog entry ports across to several different podcatchers that are monitoring this blog. I know Pocketcasts picks up these audio entries but at the moment it appears Downcast doesn't find past entries, just the most current items containing an audio clip.
If this idea evolves nicely, we will have a process to be used with the Youth Media Team during regular events those teens attend and record in the future.
The first screengrab attached to this blog post shows a chart that should be easily accessed and interpreted by Web Analytics students. The colour codes are important because each of the colours suggests a specific interest or audience. The gold areas of the bar charts represent people who have returned to Insideview.ie within the past seven days. They would be people most likely to engage with the blog's content on other social networks. They would be most likely to attend an event highlighted by the blog. People who return often will also be the ones who might buy objects profiled on the web site. They would be more likely to support the site's contributors through donations or subscriptions. By adding the sum total of a week's "returning visitor" count, it's possible to discern the actual size of the total engaged audience attributed to the blog.
Green page views are mostly from search engine queries. They represent the long tail of the blog.
The blue area of the bar graphs represent the deeper traffic on the website. While 116 people might view a single page, 106 people look at more than one page on the site.
This superficial analysis of blog traffic is important when constructing media content in support of key events and when setting up personal brand profiles for discovery. These are the background processes behind the simple Statcounter reviews that I've made part of the third level curriculum when I teach aspiring content developers.
In the future, I might discover more people read the blog's pages after they discover its audio dimension online. So it's back into some research material to determine the best way to enhance the profile of my social audio content. I'm starting with test driving several podcatchers, including how Insideview.ie looks through Pocketcasts (shown below).
Screengrab from Xperia
Thanks in advance for subscribing to my audio collateral.
[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative multimedia and business students at the Limerick Institute of Technology.]
