Google Analytics

The internet and specifically--the blogosphere, may be the last free market frontier, an electronic ecosystem still largely unfettered by taxes, regulation, and government meddling (well, unless you're in China and a few other countries). Let's hope our government doesn't try to attack one of the few free market-driven industries left, where the little guy has as much chance to engage in content and commerce as the big corporate behemonths.

And Google Analytics can enhance the organizing, planning and marketing of that content. Based on their metrics, I can decipher the following information for this blog:

1) readers come from many countries: the US, Brazil, Canada, United Kingdom, South Korea, Australia, (not set)--could this be China?, Faroe Islands, Venezuela, Poland, Spain, India, Qatar, Bahrain, in order of frequency.
2) the pages per visit is 1.88
3) average time on site is 3:53 minutes
4) % of new visits is 37.30%

The data is carved up into geographic locations, referring site sources, bounce rate, search engines, direct traffic, visits, visitors, page views, etc.

Bottom line: you can never predict with accuracy who your audience is, and where they come from. But Google helps uncover some of the mysteries of the online world. If I was running a commerce website, I would definitely monitor these data sets more seriously, because it can reveal helpful data on content demand.