My Family’s Money

The Carnivals
Both the Carnival of Personal Finance and the Festival of Frugality are up and running. The Carnival of Personal Finance #148 is up at Gather Little by Little. My post on outsourcing to your kids was included as an editors pick. In Glblguy’s comments on my article he made a good point that when we outsource tasks to our children it is important that they have a voice in the proceedings. Otherwise it turns into a masked form of slavery, and nobody wants that!

Kyle from Rather be Shopping was also kind enough to include my article about money poetry in the massive Festival of Frugality #121. Thanks!

Website Metrics
Now on to my random website metrics. Today I was playing around with Google Analytics and fell quickly in love with their Map Overlay feature. It tells me how many people have accessed my site from different countries around the world (19 from Germany – w00t!) which can then be broken down further into states and then cities. I decided I wanted to take a look at my U.S. stats since January 1, 2008. I noticed that I have had visitors from every state in the Union. Some states brought me way more traffic than others and this got me thinking, “I wonder if the number of people who have come to my site is equally distributed across the United States given that different states have different population levels?” It was spreadsheet time.

Here is the fruit of my 6 minutes of labor in all its glory:
The far right column is the hits to population rating. A value of 1 in this field would be a completely proportional number of hits for the number of people estimated to live in a given state. The average rating for my data is 0.95, which tells me that on average I have have a fairly disbursed reading public. The median number is .79, indicating that I may have some states that supply me with more visitors per population than other states.

I’m not really sure what this information does for me (very little I think), but it sure seems interesting. I may try do this again someday, but right now I’m just content to save it and store it away somewhere in magical computer information land.