Interesting stats on accesses to my web site

greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread

I switched to a new ISP back in July, and it has taken them months to fix a problem with their statistics-reporting package. First report finally showed up yesterday, and I took a quick look at some of the things it told me about the month of November.

To put things in perspective, I get about 3,000 visits a day to my web site -- certainly not in the league of Yahoo or Microsoft, and probably less than Gary North and various others.

In any case, one part of the report shows traffic by state. The most popular state accessing my site was Virginia, with 26.32% of the total. The next most popular state was California, with 4.19%, followed by Florida with 1.77% ...

Inquiring minds might ask: who on earth is in Virginia that cares so much about my web site? Could there be any government agencies located there? Could it be that folks in Washington are accessing my site via an ISP located in Virginia?

Hmmmm... I think I'll go back to reading the rest of the report....

-- Ed Yourdon (ed@yourdon.com), December 28, 1999

Answers

Duh... I completely forgot about AOL. Thanks for pointing that out, everyone.

-- Ed Yourdon (ed@yourdon.com), December 28, 1999.

Snowleopard,

Yeah, there is a breakdown by continent and by country -- but the by- continent figures don't add up to 100%, so I'm not sure if they're accurate. For Europe, the most popular country is England, least popular is Poland (tied, actually, with Hungary, Estonia, and Slovenia).

For Asia, most popular country is Japan, least popular are Indonesia and Pakistand (tied).

Lots of accesses through Tonga -- I assume that's through Jim Lord's site ...

-- Ed Yourdon (ed@yourdon.com), December 28, 1999.


Lot's of smart people in Virginia.

Howdy ya'll.

-- snooze button (alarmclock_2000@yahoo.com), December 28, 1999.


So now I know what all those Pentagon employees are reading on the bus...

;-)

-- cgbg jr (cgbgjr@webtv.net), December 28, 1999.


Very very interesting Ed. Numbers don't lie and I believe it definitely points to what you're thinking. That's a heads up if I ever saw one.

-- Cary Mc from Tx (Caretha@compuserve.com), December 28, 1999.


Ed,

On some long ago thread, someone once gave us all a peek at their stats. Quite heavy on the dot mil and dot gov.

;-D

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), December 28, 1999.


Interesting info Ed. Wish there was a way to compare notes with the other Y2K sites. I'm on the California "hit" list, by the way. Sure thought we could do better than 4.19% :-).

-- Uncle Bob (UNCLB0B@AOL.COM), December 28, 1999.

Isn't AOL in Virginia?

-- Online2Much (ready_for_y2k@mindspring.com), December 28, 1999.

Ed, The largest ISP provider in the country is located in Virginia. I'm routed through there and live on the other side of the country. :) No big mystery.

-- (Here@today.com), December 28, 1999.

Mr. Yourdon, the answer is obvious. People in the Government, Military, newsmedia, and general public know that they can not get reliable information from the government or the press so they go to your website to find out what is really happening so that they will know how to spin the story and how to prepare for the upcoming disaster. Lets see now, as I recall, the Pentagon and the CIA are both in Virginia. What will be the big trigger? As I see it, it will be fuel shortages caused by embedded system problems. This will disrupt transportation, food, power, and communications which will result in unemployment and a stock market crash. You sir, are one of my heros for trying to warn the public about what to expect and for making this forum available so that people can report what is happening without worrying about being quoted, fired or ridiculed.

-- Moe (Moe@3stooges.gom), December 28, 1999.


What about MD? What about DC itself?

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), December 28, 1999.

Ed:

You have many fans in Virginia. We actually had a picnic in June. Many of us keep in touch.

Sally

-- Sally Strackbein (sally@y2kkitchen.com), December 28, 1999.


Langely. VA. Spooky town. Probably have a dedicated machine downloading everything, refreshing every 5 minutes, 24/7.

-- lisa (lisa@work.now), December 28, 1999.

Hi Ed,

I think the AOL/Virginia thing makes sense. The stats for the Sanger and Shannon's Review site show that AOL is by far the largest domain that hits the site. The second largest is uu.net, but interestingly, the third is a .mil domain. After that, the next 10 or 12 are big service providers, then there are lots of state, .mil and .gov, fortune 500, university and foreign domains mixed in with the smaller ISP's. We get about 2000 hits a day, and the mailing list is about 2000. Looking through the list, it looks about the same, except there are far fewer AOL users subscribed. About the same proportions of other domains, though.

The point is that, no matter what the DeBunkers may think, the information and opinions that we all put out there is being monitored by someone to some degree. Besides, you should see some of the mail that I get!

-- (pshannon@sangersreview.com), December 28, 1999.


Ed, according to the Census Bureau, the three states you mention are ranked in terms of most populous as follows:

California - 1st

Florida - 4th

Virginia - 12th

(Texas is 2nd and New York 3rd)

Not much to go on, I know, because we don't know which state has the most people on line, but helps to put things in perspective.

-- Old Git (anon@spamproblems.com), December 28, 1999.



Not only AOL - but also UUNet headquarters are in Virginia. Also, it is the location of MAE EAST (along with DC).

Sounds like the stats package your ISP is using is Webtrends. It is a good package but you need to be aware of how certain hits are calculated by the package.

The 'by state' stats are skewed (indeed they are simply inaccurate) because Webtrends looks up the WHOIS db info for the ISP associated with IP address and counts it as a hit from that state, even though it may have come from somewhere else in the US. In some cases, where a CIDR block has been SWIP'd to a regional/local ISP, they may be accurate, but in many cases they are not.

-- Arnie Rimmer (Arnie_Rimmer@usa.net), December 28, 1999.


Ed, I'm in California, but usually access your page via AOL--hence the Virginia point of origin. I use my alternate ISP when AOL is bogged down. Any way to get a look at the .mil, .gov. edu stats versus the rest of us??

-- Nancy (wellsnl@hotmail.com), December 28, 1999.

Ed,

Any breakdown of overseas access by our foreign friends?

-- (snowleopard6@webtv.net), December 28, 1999.


Wonder what the stats would look like for this TB2K Forum. # of hits per day would be interesting, # of hits from .gov .mil would really be interesting. Life in the fishbowl ... ;^)

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), December 28, 1999.

Can't be NSA (at work, at least) - they're almost all in Suitland, MD.

CIA (at work) is in West Virginia (due to pokk-barreliing by our dear departed Democratic Senator Byrd from WV).

Pentagon is VA, rest of Washington offices are ? w/r to "state" registration. At home sites are probably 60-70% VA, rest MD. (Assume relatively few "at home" sites inside DC itself.)

Where is the call center made through? Don't know, good question.

Also - what is difference in attendance between this site (TB2000, your site, and the prep forum?

-- Robert A Cook, PE (Marietta, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), December 28, 1999.


There may be a prep correlation: see the thread preceding this one by 10 or so: MIL AND BOTTLED WATER GONE FROM VIRGINIA SHELVES .....

>"<

-- SH (SQUIRREL@HUNTR.COM), December 28, 1999.


Let's not forget the gov'n PR base is in Virginia. (Rendon Corp., I believe)

Could also be because I'm from Virginia. Can't seem to stay away!

-- Tommy Rogers (Been there@Just a Thought.com), December 28, 1999.


How about the F.B.I? As I understand it, they have their big data bases set up in Virginia.

-- meg davis (meg9999@aol.com), December 28, 1999.

We are guinea pigs in the c4i laboratory.

-- Hawk (flyin@high.again), December 28, 1999.

Diane,

You're thinking of PNG { back in the day, when his site was still up}.

-- flora (***@__._), December 28, 1999.


Ed, sorry I'm skewed the Virginia results while working up there. :>)

Seriously, although the MD, VA, DC area codes are different Bell Atlantic offers toll free dialing for a very small monthly charge. I suspect that you are seeing some routing from all three through ISP's in the 703 area.

Do your stats breakdown .mil and .gov?

-- MoVe Immediate (MVI@yepimhere.com), December 28, 1999.


As somewhat of an aside, #y2k on the undernet has seen an upsurge in apparent interest. Kinda makes me wonder, lots of /join /parts, none the less, kinda interesting...

-- Few (fewbaby@infoave.net), December 28, 1999.

Ed, I'm in central Virginia and I'm one of your fans! Thanks for all you do. Love your website. I take a peek at least once a week. Your articles (especially your latest) are very informative and IMHO you write very well, easy to understand and read. Of course your book was one of the incentives to prep well.

-- Debi (LongTimeLurker@shy.com), December 28, 1999.

Logically, if nothing funny was happening -i.e. if all the Virginian people *were* AOL- then you should be able to subtract the % of hits coming from aol.com from 26.32, and expect to come up with about 1% or so. Is that the case?

What I'd be really interested in seeing is a similar analysis from Phil Greenspun. Is it possible for him to isolate one part of his (admittedly big and very popular) domain, and give numbers on who accesses this board and where they're from?

Leo

-- Leo (lchampion@ozemail.com.au), December 28, 1999.


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