robwoolford.com

According to Alexa.com (Google’s website that ranks websites and traffic): robwoolford.com is the 5,175,754th most popular website on the internet.

3 months ago it was 6,803,483rd.

That’s over 1.5 million places climbed in 3 months. Oh yeah! It also says that this here website has had a 209% increase in traffic over the past 3 months, and that was already a considerable improvement on what I was doing this time last month.

Aim: to get in the top 3,000,000 by the end of the year. Then top 1,000,000 by 2010.

You may think that’s nothing, but type in ‘the’ into Google and it returns 14,420,000,000 websites. Yeah, 14.5 billion. So I don’t think I’m doing too bad ;).

In yesterday’s Observer Review, Robert McCrum was trying to evaluate the effect that the last decade has had on the world of books. Whether broadcast media and new forms of technology have hindered the progression of literature, or whether they have improved the written word.

Of course, the internet has to be at the heart of this discussion. And an apparently true statistic that I have seen banded around numerous times is that 175,000 new ‘blogs’ are launched everyday – which equates to around two new blogs per second.

In the time I write this post there will be hundreds of new blogs scattered across the internet. Whether they will be any good or beneficial to our children and our children’s children, well that’s another matter.

While many will point to the deteriorating grammar that now litters the internet (the endless LOLz!!! and text speak) as a detrimental effect on the written word, this new age of self-expression is something that I find very exciting.

This ‘blog’ is something I do in my spare time for around 10 minutes a day because throughout any given day there are thoughts that you want to share with the world. And ideas that you don’t want to lose. In ten years time I don’t suppose anybody is going to care about my commentary on culture, books, film, music or sports or any of that jazz, nor should they, but self-expression is important for every one of us – and for me blogs help me from talking shit in every day life.

It’s been a pretty strange experience at times having this website. I say this because whenever I write I don’t think about anybody reading this. I don’t expect any feedback and, to be honest, I don’t write for other people (that might sound weird seeing as I publish it all on the internet). I’m always writing for myself.

Recently I’ve had people talk to me in public about the things I’ve wrote on here, and I’m always taken back at first like “you actually read that?” or “how do you find it?” when in actual fact I know that anybody googling my name is likely to land here. More recently than that my girlfriend told me that her mum was on here have a mosey around.

This month alone I have had 1,206 visitors here on the website. That’s 1,206 unique people who have found their way here. And it’s been consistently over 1,000 per month since the turn of the year. It’s bizarre to think that that many people ending up here reading about my every day commentary on pop culture, or my uni experience, or family, or whatever it is I’m writing about. Why they should care I don’t know, but I guess whatever form of self-expression you want to pursue there are always going to be people around who will be interested in it.

I’ve kind of lost focus on what I wanted to say with this, but I guess it goes along the lines of ‘blogs are brilliant’. While the internet came around as a communications medium, what has developed has been a gold mine of educational and personal development. Whether people sift through wikipedia and google aimlessly, or whether they try to find themselves once a week by publishing their own thoughts, its something that is hugely beneficial to the human race.

But I guess the next generation of young adults will be best suited to comment in a decade or so’s time.

Today is the 1 year anniversary of robwoolford.com. The posts track back before 7th Jan 2007, but they’re ones from an old blog, so today my little website is one year old.

I’ve just had a look at my traffic/stats for the first time in six months. The people who look after my website give me a little report when I log in, but this is the first time I’ve checked for bloody ages. So, a year on, lets look at some stats:

Total unique visitors to the site - 6,346 (it says <= 6,346 which suggests there might have been more, but I doubt it, I’m rather impressed with 6,000 to be honest)
Number of visits - 9,940 (1.5 visits per visitor)
Pages read - 36,973 (3.71 pages per visit)
Hits - 155,470
Bandwidth - 4.10gb (432kb per visit)

November 2007 seemed to be the busiest month, despite only 3 posts, there were 884 unique visitors and 1,254 visits… although in June 2007 there were 25,353 hits to the website whereas any average month there is 10,000ish. The site started off slowly in January 2007 with only 52 unique visitors but now there’s anywhere between 600 to nearly 900, which is quite flattering really.

According to the stats, most people visit the website on a Thursday and Friday, with the least people visiting on Tuesdays and Saturdays. And the most popular hours for reading this here blog is 7-8am, 12-1pm or 5-6pm GMT.

Visitors from the United States make up for over half my visitors (90,000 hits out of my 155,000). Then people from Great Britian (41,000 hits), Sweden (2,750), Canada (1,975) and Australia (1,894).

2.6% of visitors in 2007 stayed for in excess of an hour, and 2.9% stayed between 30 minutes and an hour. Around 85% of people only stayed for up to two minutes at a time, which doesn’t fill me with pride! I’d like to kid myself and say they just log on for their quick fix and return the next day, but I don’t think that’s the case. To put the %’s into perspective, 266 people/visitors read the website for over an hour, and almost 600 people stayed for between 15 minutes and an hour. On the other hand, 8,500 people stayed for less than 2 minutes. Whatever.

50% of my bandwith (2.06gb) was because of image files.

87% of people visiting this website used Windows, whereas only 3.5% used Macs. 0.5% used Linux and the rest were unknown (so I’m guessing Windows). 45.5% of people logged onto the website using Firefox (70,688) whereas 43.9% used Internet Explorer (68,329). Why this is interesting I don’t know, I’m just telling you.

25% of people found their way here through search engines, most noteably Google, whereas only 16% came from links from other websites. A surprising 58% of people got here either through bookmarks or typing the website address in themselves. That’s a nice stat. It also estimates that 3,081 of my supposed 6,346 visitors bookmarked an area of the site at some point during the year… that’s 48.5%… but I don’t know how it worked that out.

OK, now for the more amusing stuff. My stats also gives me a list of key phrases that people used in search engines to find my site. For instance, if you type in ‘news’ you get BBC News, etc. etc…. here’s my top 10:
1. paige davis wedding (139 searchs)
2. elk (129 searchs)
3. virtually date ariane (124 searchs)
4. kylie minogue album (115 searchs)
5. sexydrownwatch (71 searchs)
6. jeff stelling drinking game (70 searchs)
7. heroes quicksharing (19 searchs)
8. jeff stelling drinking game rules (14 searchs)
9. dating ariane game (14 searchs)
10. lupe fiasco (13 searchs)

Hmmm… I’m surprised there aren’t more websites about elk’s because there obviously aren’t enough if people are landing here? I don’t ever remember using the word elk in the last year, let alone writing about them. I don’t know what the hell ‘paige davis wedding’ refers to either, a quick wikipedia searchs tells me that shes a 38 year old American actress who is a host of a reality TV show called ‘Trading Spaces’. Whatever. It seems my posts about The Jeff Stelling Drinking Game and the Virtually Dating Ariane game were successful… so I appeal to both the football drinkers and the nerdy guys who want to chat up a computer. I’m also very confused as to how ‘kylie minogue album’ featured so highly, I think I’ve mentioned the little Ozzie even less than I’ve mentioned elks.

Other interesting searchs include ‘listen to arab music’, ‘lost her top’, ‘nelly furtado naked’, ‘fabulous cupcakes’, ‘hulk hogan’, ‘arabic sex movies’, ‘bakery sex’, ‘fuck’, and ‘will young and john o’shea’. There were also naked searchs for Jennifer Tisdale, Lil Kim, Christina Milian, Kate Nash, ‘Cheetah Girls’ (who?), Keri Hilson, Nicole Richie, Hilary Duff, Tiffany Thornton, Jessica Alba, Sophie Ellis Bextor (why?), Beyonce Knowles, Raven Symone, Rihanna and a whole host more. In fact, there were a lot of searchs for sex - to all those who found their way here hoping for soft porn, I’m sorry to disappoint. Get yourselves back on Google and good luck.

There were 227 posts throughout the course of 2007, and a piss poor 15 comments from my readers. The 227 posts were spread out over 76 categories. The two most popular categories were Music (68 posts) and Sports (62, with 43 being football related). The most read post was ‘The Jeff Stelling Drinking Game’, which was viewed 479 times, followed by my ‘Guide to Stealing/Saving Videos from Youtube’ which was read 214 times. In fact, that guide is one of the most linked to parts of the site, I’ve seen it crop up in quite a few places. ‘Sexydrownwatch’, ‘Music for 2007′ and ‘Judge sues dry cleaners over lost trousers’ were the other most popular posts with around 150 views each. I feel I should point out that these don’t take into account when they were on the front page, which is where most people will have read them, so it is likely that each and every post was read many more times than 100…

My personal favourite posts/entries were, in no particular order:
- “Ladies and Gentlemen… Carlos Tevez!”
- “We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to…”
- “Words fail me…”
- “Rob goes on Safari”
- “The Hillsborough disaster”
- “Knicks murmurings”
- “Jessica Alba + GQ = Heaven”
- “Best video game memories?”
- “Anniversary antics”
- “I love myself, apparently”
- “Here today, gone tomorrow”
- “Barcelona”
- “Boxing Day @ The Stadium of Light”

I also really enjoyed pretty much every blog I wrote about football or basketball, too. And I’m really chuffed with the ‘Guides’ I wrote. They were clearly useful for some people if they’re being linked to by other sites.

Flicking through those briefly I’m glad that I’ve been writing here, and as soon as my uni work dies down in January I’ll be nattering away on here as much as I ever was. For those that are ‘regular’ readers, in the sense that you come back once in a blue moon, a big thank you for stopping by.

Hopefully more of the same in 2008!

Hey guess what?

My ‘blog’ is now bi-lingual!

When the French aren’t riding bicycles in their stripy black/white tops they can now convert this site into French, and when the Russians are browsing this small section of the interweb because they’ve run out of vodka they can read it in their native Russian too!

Hell, you can now read rw.com in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and a host of European languages too.

Why? Well why the hell not?

Plus it makes me look smart…

Language translations are available on the right hand side menu bar (near the bottom).

Hello! I’ve just upgraded the site. You won’t notice most of the changes because on the most part they’re to do with wordpress rather than the actual look of the site itself. What you should notice though is that every time you refresh the page you get a new banner at the top of the page. Adding plenty as we speak. One of things that needed fixing was browsing in past categories… you couldn’t go back more than 10 posts even though some categories i.e. ’sports’ or ‘music’ had near 50 posts. So that p’d me off off a little. Now it’s fixed though, so you can browse as many as my past musings as you wish. And that’s this boring update over!

- New Arctic Monkeys single, “Brianstorm”, has made its way onto the net. Zane Lowe played it 3 times last night on Radio 1, and thus someone taped it and put it on the web. Therefore the quality is pretty shitty, but better than nothing. Click here to download “Brianstorm”.

- FINALLY a new album to celebrate. Consequence’s “Don’t Quit Your Day Job” is a release from Kanye West’s GOOD music imprint. Consequence follows in the footsteps of Common, John Legend and Rhymefest as Mr. West’s side-projects when he’s not buying Louis Voutton or Gucci. I’ve heard one or two features and songs from Consequence, and all have been fairly promising. Kanye West’s production and handling of Common, J. Legend and Rhymefest have been excellent - I’ve enjoyed all of those releases and when I get back from Uni, I expect I’ll enjoy “Don’t Quit Your Day Job”.

- This past week I’ve come across hyped Detroit producer Black Milk, apparently ‘the next big thing’ in the hip-hop world. So I’ve uploaded “Sound the Alarm” for your listening pleasure, the video featuring Guilty Simpson can be seen here. Black Milk also has an online EP which you can listen to here. I’m yet to form an opinion.

- Whilst we’re talking hip-hop, I urge any fan to watch the new Bone Thugs-N-Harmony video, “I Tried” featuring Akon, which has only just surfaced. I’m not a big Bone Thugs-N-Harmony fan, nor am I the biggest admirer of Akon, but I am a fan of when mainstream rap moves away from guns, cars, bitches and weed. The video is an early contender for video of the year in my opinion, although I don’t expect it to make its way across the atlantic to British TV. Bone Thugs never really have made that transition. Anyway I’m waffling now. Go watch the video.

- And then read this interview with highly underated rap duo Clipse. Well, one half of Clipse.

- Manchester United play away to Liverpool tomorrow afternoon. Should they win, and it’s a very big task (Anfield always is) - they’d stand 12 points ahead of nearest challengers Chelsea. Granted, Chelsea will have two games in hand but even then the most they can register is 6 points and the constant arms-length distance that United have had from Chelsea remains at 6 points. The longer that barrier is kept the harder its going to be for Chelsea to break it. I think they play Portsmouth away this weekend, which won’t be an easy game considering Portsmouth’s season and it will be made more difficult by knowing they could, possibly, be trying to make up a 12 point gap. Come on United!

- I feel compelled to let you know that not only does this duck drink beer, but he also understands chinese. Word to mother.

- New robwoolford.com layout. The last one looked a little generic and like most ‘blogs’, so I felt I had to change it. Granted this one isn’t as individual as it could be but it’s better than before. Besides, orange is great. More orange = more fun.

Yo. So this is my online diary-journal-type thing.

One of my new years resolutions this year was to write more. Another is to lose my beer gut. But lets face it, I don’t want to do that one, so I’ll pursue the writing resolution.

Stick around. I might write something interesting soon.