Getting a boost from Marginal Revolution, or into the weeds with stats [#EmergentVentures #WorldWideWall]

Last Thursday, October 25, 2018, I ran up a post entitled, Is this the beginning of the #WorldWideWall ?. The post consisted of five tweets from Leonard Bogdonoff, who had gotten a grant from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures “to create a genealogy of street art, using machine learning.” That got my attention for two reasons: 1) I’m interested in Emergent Ventures, and 2) I’m interested in both graffiti and machine learning.

When I looked Bogdonoff’s tweets that morning I realized that, for all practical purposes, he’d begun work assembling what I have been calling the World-Wide Wall, all of the world’s outward facing graffiti and street art assembled into one gigantic and searchable object in cyberspace via photographs on the web. So I assembled that post and then emailed a link to Tyler Cowen in which I congratulated him on a shrewd first pick. I came this > < close to saying “the eagle has landed.” Tyler emailed me back, indicating that he’d post a link on Saturday. Saturday roles around and there it is, the link:

 

That shows web traffic to New Savanna for the previous week. That spike is the effect of Cowen’s link on my web traffic.

This chart shows the top 10 posts for the preceding week, measured starting the 27th:

At 854, the #WorldWideWall post is first. Most, though not all, of those hits are traffic from Cowen’s blog, Marginal Revolution, which he runs with Alex Tabarrok. The next two posts, Sex, Power, and Purity in Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll, and “Secrets of Pink Elephants Revealed”, are the most popular posts here, and have been up for several years.

Here’s shot of the previous week’s posts that I took on Sunday, the 28th:

The effects of Cowen’s link are still quite visible.

And again, earlier this morning:

Cowen’s spike is still prominent, but another spike has appeared. I haven’t got the foggiest idea what’s driving it. The increase in traffic is probably distributed across many posts.

This post shows the top 10 posts for the immediate week, measured backward from this morning:

Again, “WorldWideWall is tops, Ninja Scroll is second, but Pink Elephants has slipped into fourth behind “The toke that took World Wide Web and smoked the #MSM”, about Elon Musk. That post is related to graffiti and Bogdonoff and so may have benefited indirectly from Cowen’s link, but not, I feel, enough to account for that new spike. If I had more information I might be able to figure this out. But I don’t.

Finally, this chart shows New Savanna’s traffic over the span of its life from April 2010 to present:

Notice that there’s a huge increase in traffic for roughly 2016. I have no idea why that happened. At one time or another I thought it might be centered on my photographs, but I really don’t know.

More later.

Addendum: I found the source of today’s spike: Oman. Here’s a chart of today’s traffic grouped by country of origin:

Oman is at the top with 558 hits, followed by the United States, which generates by far the largest fraction of my traffic, and then Ukraine, which also provides a fair but of traffic. I have no idea about the source of that traffic from Oman; it could be just one or a half-dozen curious people. Who knows? The fact that no single post shows an unusual uptick in traffic suggests a small number of people each browsing a bunch of posts.