The 40 most-visited-by-me sites of 2013

How much time do I spend on the internet when I'm at home, and what am I looking at? A few years ago I decided to set myself that very question, and to answer it I stuck a clock on my browser. Unfortunately, I forgot to collate the first couple of years' stats. But I've since tweaked the counter a few times, and this year I've actually remembered to crunch the stats therein. The list consists of my 50 most-visited domains, some of which I've combined because they amount to the same site, and one of which I've removed because it is buggy (I did not spend five days watching Channel 4, and the suggestion that I did seems to have stemmed from some corrupt data left in the file from the previous year, but their website should probably be in this list somewhere). Another note before I show you the list: for the first half of the year it was clocking stats from all open tabs, and in the second half it was limited to the active tab. Also omitted is browsing from any other platform except Opera (so my brief flirtation with Netflix is not listed as it took place in Firefox owing to compatibility issues).

Here, then, are my 40 most-visited sites (caveats already noted). For more information about a site, hover over the name.

		Total (h:m)	Total (d:h)	Daily av. (m:s)	%
	OVERALL	1254:00	52d 6h	3h 26:00
1	Tweetdeck	382:57	15d 23h	62:57	31
2	Wikipedia	72:02	3d	11:50	5.7
3	Old Reader	71:54	3d	11:49	5.7
4	Blogger (my 'blogs)	59:37	2d 12h	9:48	4.8
5	YouTube	57:19	2d 9h	9:25	4.6
6	Facebook	52:41	2d 12h	8:40	4.2
7	BBC	41:36	1d 18h	6:50	3.3
8	Google	37:18	1d 33h	6:08	3
9	Google Maps	28:51	1d 12h	4:45	2.3
10	Twitter	18:15		3:00	1.5
11	(Local Host)	17:02		2:48	1.4
12	Historic Digimap	9:26		1:33	0.8
13	Splendid Chaps	8:03		1:19	0.6
14	A/V Woman	7:49		1:17	0.6
15	Alveley Historical Society	7:11		1:11	0.6
16	The Guardian	6:24		1:03	0.5
17	jobs.york.ac.uk	5:25		53s	0.4
18	TVCatchup	5:08		51s	0.4
19	Bing Maps	4:34		45s	0.4
20	Sporcle	4:25		44s	0.4
21	RightMove	4:10		41s	0.3
22	(Router)	3:38		36s	0.3
23	subjectguides.york.ac.uk	3:20		33s	0.3
24	Lawrence Miles ('blogs)	3:17		32s	0.3
25	Sheffield Planning Applications	3:08		31s	0.2
26	NRK	2:50		28s	0.2
27	Lady V London	2:48		28s	0.2
28	BBC Good Food	2:47		27s	0.2
29	Know Your Meme	2:30		25s	0.2
30	Pinterest	2:27		24s	0.2
31	Amazon	2:21		23s	0.2
32	Flickr	1:52		18s	0.1
33	Out Of This World ('blog)	1:47		18s	0.1
34	The Golden Era of GP Racing	1:43		17s	0.1
35	Tattuinardoelasaga	1:41		17s	0.1
36	thetrainline.com	1:40		16s	0.1
37	IMDb	1:39		16s	0.1
38	Gizoogle	1:36		16s	0.1
39	University of York	1:28		14s	0.1
40	Doctor Macro	1:27		14s	0.1

So there you go. The above list accounts for about 85% of my browsing (a stat that includes the otherwise omitted Channel 4 entry for necessary mathematical reasons). The colour-banding groups things together semi-thematically. What do we learn from all of this? That I like maps? We already knew that (or I did anyway). 

To get an idea of what this is telling us, we need another data-set. My other data-set is anecdotal. It is me remembering what sites I used most about a decade ago. About a decade ago I mainly used Google, Wikipedia, BBC and The Guardian. Those sites constituted a Big Four, with my own content probably filling in a fifth slot. The rest of my internet activity can be discovered from the array of bookmarks I still have in my browser from Them Days: home-made websites (largely replaced by 'blogs now, and consumed via my feed reader). Gone now are the days when I sat grazing the news at The Grauniad and the Beeb (International Version). Twitter feeds now deliver that news to me. But the difference is not as radical as if we roll back the clock another five years, when my most-used sites would've been Alta-Vista and Yahoo! We've come a long way since the Web Ring. We've gone full-circle and found ourselves back in Usenet, but with a 140 character limit.

I'm now going to clear the stat counter and hopefully come back in another 12 months to do some proper, more meaningful analysis of my browsing trends. Between those things, I need to do the pots and make some tea. 

6,697 Tweets In : The 2013 Twitter Breakdown

4I last did an analysis of my tweeting back in May 2012, and before that in July 2011. Those posts took a thorough look at the content of my first 100 and first 1,000 tweets from the @SaintEvelin account. My tweet tally now exceeds the 6,700 mark, which is too many to go through by hand. Fortunately, there are ways to crunch the content, and so I will, looking specifically at my twitter activity through the course of 2013.

First of all, let's take a look at the volume of my tweeting this last year: 3787 tweets in all. On average I make ten tweets a day (up four from last year). Rounding as necessary, four of those tweets are @-led conversations, two are retweets, and one contains the word-stem libr*. The numbers round more reliably if we expand to a full week's twitter activity, so here we go:

	2012	2013
Tweets/week	43	73
@s	21 (49%)	29 (39%)
RTs	8 (18%)	17 (24%)
libr*	3 (8%)	4 (6%)

So I'm tweeting more, conversing more, retweeting twice as much as last year, and tweeting without the words libr* about twice as much as last year. My use of the L-word is up by one tweet a week, but as a proportion of my output it is lower than in 2012.

Of course, it's not all about the L-word. If we include info* in the search, things go up by another tweet a week. Adding CILIP has the same effect, putting us at six library-y tweetings in seven days. This by no means tells the whole story, so let's add another one for luck. This puts us a little more honestly at the rounded-up figure of a library tweet a day. Let's call it a tenth of my twitter output. That sounds a fair proportion really. At the 1,000 tweets mark it was about a third, so there may be more to this story. Applying the same criteria to 2012 as to 2013 I'm up by a percent or so.

To get a more accurate view of what I tweet about, we can employ a word cloud. Here's one I made earlier:

The RT is for scale. We already know that that's about a quarter of my twittering. I also say "just" quite a lot, don't I just? Looking around the edges I note that I tweeted about Strictly Come Dancing more than I did about the Great British Bake-Off, which is entirely right and proper. But I think the real story can be found at the top of the nebula, with the inspirational legend: NOW EUROVISION LIBRARY! Nice to note that library is the biggest noun in there. I may mention libraries less than once a day, but I seem to mention them more than I mention other things. I think that's an appropriate balance, really. 

I notice that York is bigger than (pretty) Hull. But cake is bigger than both. The words that appear all seem rather positive, so that's nice (top left, between great and lovely).

To wrap up, here's a chart depicting pretty much all my tweeting ever, including on my other twitter account. It doesn't include my tweets from @HullUni_Library. What it does do is show how @SaintEvelin, an account initially intended as a "professional" networky sort of thing, has become my main account for most of what I have to say, be it about libraries or about Strictly. My original @KingConstance account still trickles along, mainly as a vessel for my angrier tweets, and, when I remember, to continue the pretence of a medieval kingdom in South Yorkshire. But the original reasoning behind the schism: a sort of separation of church and state (social versus professional, if you will) has been disavowed. Tweetdeck, and the raising of the limit on the number of members in a twitter list, allow me to monitor various spheres of interest at once. What is more, the social aspect of tweeting is, I believe, a vital component of the networking aspect: all work and no play makes @Jack a dull tweeter. There's no need to carry on a split personality. Not with librarians at any rate. Cake is an essential part of the job.

My total number of tweets this year from both accounts was 4,369 (582 from @KingConstance). In 2012 it was 2,808 (573 from @KingConstance), so that's roughly a 150% increase in activity. In 2011 (the year I started tweeting as @SaintEvelin) it was 2,853 (2,178 of those from @KingConstance). 

The peak in summer 2012 corresponds with library conferences and unconferences, and with me looking for a full-time job. The near-death of @KingConstance in the last quarter of that year corresponds with me finding a full-time job. There's activity on both accounts in January of this year when I was out of work, then things go quieter when I'm in work again. Funny that. May sees Eurovision, and my biggest spike of activity (127 tweets in one day). This is my third busiest day of tweeting to date (Eurovision 2011 clocked 139, and I made 189 tweets in October 2010 when I "live-tweeted" the historical activities of the Sheffield police force). Since July, my tweet-rate has been fairly constant at around the 12-tweets-a-day mark. BBC television may have some part to play in this.

So that's the twitter analysis for another year. I may have slightly exceeded the 140 character limit. My average tweet length is 92.