Ben Best's Blog

Despite my former claim of withdrawal, I made substantial revisions in an attempt to create a clear expression of fact on the Life Extension page (particularly on the subject of cryonics) that would be less open to challenge. Others have participated in revisions to some extent. I now feel more at peace with the current version of the
Wikipedia Life extension page. I can live with some fighting and compromise, but I do have my limits. At the moment, at least, there is some compromise and no fighting, and I feel that the page is conveying a fairly accurate overview of life extension. And I am hopeful that I can help maintain this situation.

Typically the last week of December and the first week of January represent deep dips for the number of sessions visiting my website -- comparable to the lows of the summers. After peaking at around 13,000 PageViews per week in January, PageViews
for my www.benbest.com/history/xmas.html page dropped in the first week of January to 1,768. Even without the otherwise slowness of this period that would represent a significant drop. Of course most schools are not in session during the last week of December and the first week of January in Christian-associated countries. Nonetheless, the "bottom line" figure for the first week of January was 24,169 sessions. That compares very favorably with the peaks of last Spring, which were around 27,000. Typically the weekly number of sessions climbs from the first week of January to a week sometime between late March and early May. So my prediction is that mid-Spring highs in 2006 will approach 50,000 per week.

I have done some more careful analysis of the meaning of session time. I have come to the conclusion that of the 24,169 sessions in the first week of January, approximately 20,000 of those sessions were for less than 10 seconds. About 500 would be for 3−10 minutes, another 500 would be for 10−30 minutes and about 150 would be for more than 30 minutes. Speaking personally, I would rather print a page than look at it on-line for more than 30 minutes. So I would guess that number of people actually looking at my website pages long enough to get meaningful information is in the area of 2,000 to 5,000 per week.

In the past I have paid much attention to the search terms leading to my website (because at least 75% of the PageViews come from search engines), but I am finding this matter less interesting now than previously. I used to be impressed that the search phase "neuron physiology" would return one of my web pages as the top site on all of the search engines. But the fact that I only get 5 PageViews per week for that search phrase indicates that it is not invoked very often. The search terms "neurotransmitters", "ischemia" and "vitrification" return 200, 48 and 13 PageViews per week (respectively) and I am on the first page of searches on those terms with Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines (but not top). I used to be top on all of the search engines for "vitrification", but now have been displaced by Wikipedia -- a bitter irony insofar as I wrote much of the text for the Wikipedia vitrification page.

(I have tried to format these tables nicely, but this Blogger is VERY unfriendly
to HTML, so it looks a mess. And a vast amount of space appears between the tables.)

I get statistics on my website
(www.benbest.com) from two independent sources: Superstats
and Urchin. I get slightly different kinds of information from both sources
(and there are sources of error on both sources), but where there is
agreement I believe that the data is reliable.

There were over a million unique sessions on my website in 2005 and
each session visited an average of one-and-a-half pages -- for a total
of about a million-and-a-half PageViews for 2005. I believe that the
average time spent on a page is between 3−4 minutes, but I also
believe that a very high proportion of PageViews is less than 30 seconds.
Just because a page is loaded does not mean it is being read. It may
stay loaded over lunch or dinner.

A table below shows how many thousands of sessions there were
on my website for the months of 2005. Another table below shows how
many PageViews I got as a result of some of the most common search
phrases on all the search engines giving me more than 100 hits
during December of 2005.
About three quarters of the hits I get on my website come from people
doing searches with search engines -- and the overwhelming majority
of these are combinations of words that produce fewer than 100 
PageViews per month. All of the data may be understated because I have heard
that some ISPs like AOL do caching of websites, so I would not record
many AOL hits (actually I never see AOL as a source in my statistics).

In December 2005 I had 44,000 hits on my

The History of Christmas page, more than a quarter
of all the PageViews on my entire website. I had approximately 175 pages
on my website in December 2005. The number of PageViews on the
Christmas page peaked at nearly 3,000 on December 20 and fell
precipitously thereafter (especially after December 25th). I typically
get less than 200 PageViews per month on the Christmas page during
the summer. Aside from December, November and January, the Christmas
page is not usually very high on my list of pages. During the
beginning of December 2005 I was getting over 40,000 sessions
per week, with nearly 100 pages on my website getting at least
100 weekly PageViews. (Saturday is always the slowest day, whereas
the busiest could be Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday.)

Aside from the Christmas page, my

Death by Murder,

Brain Neurotransmitters
and

Causes of Death webpages get the most hits, but
these are not among my own favorites. I pay most careful attention
to the number of PageViews and the numerical trends in PageViews
of my favorite pages. Pages become my favorites on the basis of
how much work I put into them, on the basis of how pleased I am
with the content and on the basis of how much I would
like them to make an impact on the minds of other people.
Here are my SuperStats comparisons of the
PageViews I got in December 2004 and December 2005 for
some of my favorite pages (you have to look WAY DOWN in this silly Blogger):

December PageViews Webpage 2004 2005 Mechanisms of Aging 1,850 4,105 Alcohol -- Health Benefit or Hazard? 1,142 2,943 Cryonics -- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) 670 973 Vitrification in Cryonics 511 772 Say's Law and Economic Growth 482 568 An Austrian Theory of Business Cycles 329 471 Schemers in the Web 243 416 (Urchin)

Monthly Sessions month thousands January 88 February 99 March 116 April 114 May 114 June 69 July 66 August 75 September 96 October 128 November 140 December 147 2005 (Urchin)

PageViews by Search Phrase phrase PageViews history of Christmas 6,164 christmas history 1,134 neurotransmitters 1,024 diogenes 621 causes of death 222 n-acetylcysteine 201 serotonin 179 bavarian illuminati 159 fixed income securities 125 history christmas 124 essential fatty acids 124 eric fromm 120 ischemia 115 say's law 115 murder 103 December 2005 (Urchin)