I'm not a big fan of lies, or damned lies, but boy do I love me some statistics. If I can quietly keep track of what's going on and then get numbers and percentages and graphs (especially the graphs), I will be happy.
Last.fm is a perfect example of a site that is doing it right. For all that iTunes records play counts and dates added and whatnot, all of that becomes useless as soon as a hard drive dies without the iTunes database being backed up properly, or when I use it on different machines that aren't synchronised.1 Last.fm, though, provides me with not only proof of my listening habits (with graphs!), but also a whole lot of data about other people's! Combining statistics, music, and spying on people using the internet - could any site be more perfect? The Last.fm staff would probably call this "community-building" rather than "stalker-enabling", but to each their own.
To tell the truth, the social aspect of Last.fm has never really taken off for me (I can only keep up with so many social-networking-web-2.0-buzzword sites) but sometimes it's just what I need to save me from myself. Witness what I have been listening to for the last seven days:
In tangentially-related statistical news, I love all the intriguing information (and graphs!) that Google Analytics gives me for this blog. The vast majority of the search keywords bringing people here are, unsurprisingly, Mountain Goats related; this has also been bringing in the spam-bots, with a good 25% of spam comments since the blog's inception coming in the last week or so. There have been a few surprises, though, such as:
cack handed anathem
Not sure why two people were searching for this. I also don't know how they got to me using this search; I can manage it using "cack handed" +anathem, but the keywords on their own generate pages of results for "anthem" and "anathema". One of the internet's great mysteries, I guess.
exceptional skeleton price is
No idea why anyone was searching for this. Did they really expect the internet to tell them what an exceptional skeleton price is? And is that the price for an exceptional skeleton, or an exceptional price for a skeleton? Why did they even include "is" in the search?
gene wolfe john darnielle
I'm sorry, what? I don't even know who Gene Wolfe is. At least, I didn't until I looked him up just now.
Also, a map overlay showing what country visitors came from - and then what city, if I ask nicely - is just plain cool. So are graphs showing visitors vs. pageviews per visit, visitors vs. new visitors, and almost any useful or useless thing I might want to see. Nom nom nom.
- Or when I finally find something to replace iTunes to my satisfaction and leave it forever. Any day now. Any day. [↩]
"exceptional skeleton price is"
That sounds like something I'd search for, but I can't remember ever conducting that one in particular...