My dear blog readers: who are you?

I wanted to mark the special milestone of the 200th post on my blog with a special "issue", a post about you! Technically, it is my 201th post since I had to publish a race report last week but that's close enough... I still remember passing the 26-post milestone like I was finishing a marathon, I had no idea then that I would more or less keep up with the pace of one post a week for 4 years... (See my post Ultra blogging: passing the cap of the 26.2th blog.)

So, who are you who visit my blog either regularly or occasionally? To answer this "Web 2.0" question, I have a few tools but you will see they are somehow limited. Analytic tools include:

1. StatCounter,
2. Google Analytics,
3. ClustrMaps,
4. Flag Counter,
5. Post comments, either anonymous or not (as Scott Dunlap used to say: "we, bloggers, starve for comments!")
6. FaceBook messages,
7. Email messages,
8. Verbal messages before, during or after the races.

With that, here is the simple taxonomy representing how I see the audience of my blog:

1. Family members, mostly non-runners,
2. Friends, either runners or not, who enjoy the posts because they cannot travel or they cannot run, or others who find inspiration in the posts to run farther and faster
3. Work colleagues,
4. Club mates,
5. Other runners looking at race information, race reports, tips or event pictures, from the Bay Area, California, the US or many other countries,
6. Race directors, organizers
7. Spectators, volunteers, relatives of event participants.

Surprisingly, apart from my Mom, my family doesn't represent the most active audience, mostly because of the language barrier. One of my sisters and my Dad have recently discovered the online and automatic translation offered by Google and they are using it more consistently now, albeit having some fun with some weird translations...

I started blogging in March 2007 but I only tracked traffic from late 2007 on, with StatCounter which has logged 106,000 hits to date. Although I'm quite impressed with this number, I realize that it must be very far from what super blogger Scott Dunlap got on his web site. For one thing though, Scott has initiated the blogging wave in our Trail Running sport in particular and writes on many very popular and diverse topics which draw a lot of traffic. On my side, I'm keeping the theme of the blog around my personal running experiences only, my personal journey toward sustainable running and my personal crazy quest to run either faster or farther... My most popular article has been by far Born to Run: the Tarahumara secret which I wrote after meeting Chris McDougall at Zombie Runner in Palo Alto, before his book became a best-seller.

Other things I know about you? You have visited from 134 countries with the US leading most of the traffic (72%) followed by France (8%) despite the language barrier, then UK, Canada, Japan, Germany, Australia, Austria and Italy. The presence of non-English speaking countries in the top 10 attests for the strong development of ultra and trail running in these countries.

You spend an average of 1 minute and 26 seconds per page and look at 1.58 pages per visit which I feel show a genuine interest although I do spend much more time actually writing these posts! ;-) 75% of you use Windows as Operating System with either Internet Explorer or Firefox as web browser (that's a pretty much worthless statistics, isn't it?). See below for more detailed statistics and charts.

Bottom line, you see, I don't know much about you but I would love to know more through the feedback you can leave at the bottom of the posts. Looking forward to hearing from you then!

With that, at least for the majority of you who live in the US, Happy Halloween and enjoy the Trick-or-Treat tradition either by opening your door or going door to door in your neighborhood. Either on the receiving or giving side, this is a very nice tradition of making our neighborhoods more friendly. Before we get to Trick-or-Treat on the web...

-------------- More detailed analysis of blog traffic (click on the images to enlarge)

Geographical coverage by ClustrMaps:

 

Geographical statistics from Flag Counter:

 List of countries from Flag Counter:

Worldwide map with flags, from Flag Counter:

Geographical coverage from Google Analytics:

Visits from California:

Visits from Australia:

Total number of hits and visits from StatCounter:

Most popular pages (Google Analytics):

In-Page Analytics showing that you do use the blog archives by year and month, as well as the list of tags and topics in the right margin: