TwitterSpud has been online for over a week now and so far I am learning a lot about storytelling with Twitter.
It’s quite the challenge writing a story without narration, no visuals, not even sound effects. The story is linear but fragmented and is read backwards. Even though the story has only 2 characters, it could be read only from one of them.
Plus, Twitter has been slow, down, or not updating.
At first, I thought I wouldn’t plan out a plot. Just let it take it’s course and see where it goes. A few days later, I started feeling the opposite and began to think up a few minor plots. Nothing yet concrete. More like “over the weekend, Spud will dogsit for a girl but the experience will ruin the relationship. In the meantime, Willomina will be really jealous”.
Willomina has a follower in Australia! I asked Steph to send an e-mail to him to find out what made him to follow. I think it would be interesting to know. In the meantime, I added both characters to my own twitter page.
I’ll also ask Steph to send me her thoughts on what she learned so far from participating in the TwitterSpud project.
Someone I know said she finds the tweets between the 2 hilarious and the 2 podcasters whom I left an audio comment about TwitterSpud said they liked the idea (The Daily Breakfast on SQPN and Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel of Twist Image).
Onto statistics. I use both my webhost’s stats and thought I’d try Google Analytics for learning purposes. I didn’t really promote the site except for the audio comments on the abovementioned podcasts. I also made a post about it to my friends on FaceBook and added it as a bulletin on MySpace. Mind you, Twitter has been having major growing pains preventing my site from displaying properly. So with those 2 things, I am not expecting huge results.
As I write this, I will check stats so what you’ll read will be as I read them. So don’t expect indepth analysis.
On Google Analytics, 17 visits and 27 page views. Not too bad from a simple audio comment on 2 podcasts.
I have a lot to learn about how to interpret the results but Google’s map of geographic locations intrigues me. Lots of hits from various places in Toronto. Dots scattered all over the US with quite a number in Florida! And to my surprise, Europe! A few from the Netherlands and northern Norway! Cool!
I clicked around the results and came up with the following:
– all 17 hits were direct. Meaning they typed in my url
– the most popular pages were About TwitterSpud and the archive (hm… where is the index? How could they get to those pages without going to the index first?)
– I seemed to have most visitors on April 2 (10) and new visitors each day after that (which is good because I’m on that site everyday to make sure it’s working properly and to see if Steph added a new Willomina tweet).
– I have no returning visitors
– I made $0 on Google AdSense (yes, I know have to improve the keywords on the keyword-less site)
According to the stats of my webhost, I received 136 requests. So now you know how unreliable stats are. But it lists the websites where visitors came from. 69 clicks from SQPN, 33 from StumbleUpon, 14 more from SQPN, looks like someone did a whois, 1 from a Google search (wow! that was fast!).
What perplexes me is the most used browser is… other. The rest seem to be various versions of FireFox on both Windows and Mac. Oh, I see, most of them are crawlers and spiders. Interesting: someone’s using WinPodder to get to my site (I didn’t know it listed links. Unless it’s in shownotes maybe?), someone’s used Camino.
[tags]TwitterSpud, Twitter, storytelling[/tags]