- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Letters posted here are associated with the following article:
The letters thread is now closed.
There are at least two fairly good free online services that track web site usage, alexa.com and quantcast.com. Alexa runs about 2 or 3 days in the past, QuantCast runs about 1 month behind unless the webmaster uses their analytics. Alexa for Barack Obama shows a strong increase in January (you want to look at "reach," which is the audience per million. If you compare his site with Hillary Clinton's (which is easy to do on the Alexa site) you see that his traffic is now several times the Clinton site's. The Quantcast is not as up to date but has a lot of interesting audience statistics.
This sort of tracking is the basis for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which I do a lot of for my site. You can see a cool plot for Barack Obama here
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/barackobama.com
... You're a *reporter.* You can *ask for the stats.* If the web operations of the candidates are remotely on the ball, they can *get them for you in real time.*
You're worrying me, Walter.
In response to this posting, you can check out different trends in web searches at Google Trends (www.google.com/trends) and filter it down by date and region (USA) and subregion (New Hampshire or Iowa for instance) and check if there was a big surge in that area. I'm not sure if you can get the raw numbers, but it may be helpful to determine a trend.
