Wow, the CafePress coffee mug contest was a difficult thing to judge. I thought that my three statistical services would be enough, but they each gave me wildly different results.
From Blogger’s own stat tracking, I can see a lot of traffic coming to my site from the Ukraine and Russia in general. However, despite the fact that I find CAME FROM links to several Russian language sites, I have yet to be able to locate the actual links to my site from those sites. Not that it hasn’t been fun, because some of the sites are very sexy indeed. In fact, some of the most traffic seems to be coming from a Russian sex toy retail site. I thought maybe someone was playing a joke by setting the link to my site within the URL for a buttplug or something, which would have been very funny. But I didn’t find it. I don’t know how else people were coming to my site from those sites, but I can’t find the links to prove that they were. If you are in Russia, or the surrounding region and you can provide me proof of where the link is, I’ll see what I can do. But right now, I can’t award a mug based on what little I can see.
My second stats service, Podtrac, gives me no useful information at all as to people coming to my site from specific locations. But it’s a service designed to count downloads, so the slight spike I saw there was appreciated.
And my third stat service, Statcounter, gives me different stats from the other two, with no Russian sites detected, but with links coming to my site from some US based blogs and quite a few that seem to come from Twitter or Facebook sites that have URL shortening as part of their baseline. As I said in the intro messages to last month’s podcasts, it’s very difficult if not impossible for me to tell where those links are coming from due to the fact that they’ve been shortened in this manner. If I try and go to the shortened Facebook or Twitter link, it just takes me directly to LiberryCAST.com instead of the site where that link was posted. So I can’t tell who posted the original shortened link.
This being the case, what I propose to do is this…
Barring a Russian or Ukrainian listener providing me with proof of where the link to my site is on their site, I’m going to award two coffee mugs--one for the most hits from a provable blog link and one for my favorite Twitter tweeter.
So the blog mug will go to Margy Rydzynski, at http://blogcollectables.wordpress.com/ , who not only linked to the LiberryCAST site, but also wrote a nice blog entry leading into the link that included a picture of my cat Winston. And I know other people listened to the podcast due to her link because they posted in her comments that they had. Sweet.
And the Twitter Tweeter mug goes to UK resident Anna Brynolf, who has been one of the most faithful of retweeters when I post new episodes and has spoken highly of the blog on multiple occasions. I have no doubt that many of the shortened hits the blog received came from her tweets, so she deserves a mug.
For all future such contests, I’ll be using Google Analytics—which I could have sworn I set up before this mug contest started, but I can’t find any proof of that now. You know what they say about good intentions: they’re all assholes.
So, Margy and Anna, I’ll soon be in touch. Your mugs will soon be on the way.
