Simpy Chichimichi

The regular Simpy Chichimichi readers may remember that my Web 2.0 Study series included the analysis of web usage activity observed at Simpy. I have recently done some more work in that area, and will present relevant charts and geek tips in one of the future posts.

Remember "Web 1.0"? Remember what your web log reports looked like? I do! They look something like this (look at the very first picture). In this post, I'll show you several charts that show how different the web usage patterns are in the "new Web 2.0 world". In the old world, say 5 years ago, you'd analyze your web logs and see your typical "during-work-makes-your-wonder-usage-hump" - an increased web usage during the working hours, at least if you were in the U.S. With Web 2.0 this has changed. What's Web 2.0? Ha ha ha...well, I won't get into that now, others have already beaten that dead horse enough, but I think we can all agree that with what we are calling Web 2.0 RSS and its younger cousin Atom climbed the tech charts (hm, no pun intended, really, but here is a pretty little chart). They climbed the charts despite not being new, just like....what else? (hint: shares the name with a detergent I used for washing a bathtub when I was a kid) How about another trend chart. Did I mention I love trends and their visualizations?

Back to the main topic... Because feeds gained so much in popularity, web sites nowadays see a whole lot of new type of activity, and this activity happens in non-work hours.

The following heatmap-like picture represents the recent Simpy web usage. Lighter colors represents increased web activity. To get this chart I excluded various robots/spiders/crawlers, as well as news/feed aggregators/readers, in order to derive usage by only (us) humans. Can you see that "during-work-makes-your-wonder-usage-hump"? Of course you can, I marked it up! But you can also see some increased activity right after midnight. What's that? That's me not excluding quite all non-human activity.

Here is another display of the same activity, but as a more familiar bar chart, with the same day periods marked up.

Clearly, Monday to Wednesday, and 07^h-17^h EST are peak usage periods. This is the type of activity we were used to seeing in pre-feed, pre-Web 2.0 era. What about now? Well, it's a very different story. The following charts show the web usage of this particular blog.

As you can see, the bulk of activity occurs right after midnight. It's not that no human reads this blog, and it's not that people 2.0 changed their reading schedules, it's just that now we no longer have only the web search engine robots/spiders/crawlers visiting us. The web user agent crowd was expanded by numerous feed/news aggregators that seem to prefer the 00:00-01:00 EST period to any other. Why? Oh, and have you noticed Argus visiting your site? Argus is a busy bot, I'll introduce him some other time.