He’s all over the place!

900 feet up to 1300 feet…

As I mentioned on Sunday, I like to check out stats on the web. It’s really interesting to see how I fit in to the web, and to do this I check Google Analytics daily for referrals from search engines and other sites, and also take a look at link data in Webmaster Tools. But enough about the Google products… I get to talk about them at length every day. Let’s take a walk down the street to my neighbors in Sunnyvale… Flickr!

I recently enabled stats in my account, and they became available to me tonight. Since I share my photos pretty liberally with a Creative Commons license, I’ve searched for references to my photos before, using Google searches for phrases like [“Photo by Wysz”] or simply [“Michael Wyszomierski”].*

From this, I’ve found my photos in a few interesting places, which is quite fun. A few examples:
BART
PhotoPermit
LAist

I’ve even made it into the main design of websites:
Vibrant Software
Techtel Marketing

And at least once I’ve appeared in an unfortunate news story. An unfortunate story with an unfortunate lack of a “This is not a picture of the real guy!” caption. My first thought when I found this? “This explains a lot…”

And a little off-topic, since I heard about these via email, but I’ll brag about being offline as well. This photo was reportedly printed on about five thousand fliers for some anti-ticketing service in San Francisco. And this one almost made it onto a billboard in West Virginia, until the organization decided not to go with billboard advertising.

But where were we? Oh, yeah, Flickr stats. Usually, if you don’t completely control a page, you’re left somewhat in the dark when it comes to statistics. But Flickr has opened up and given some pretty good stats for photo pages that you own, including view counts and referring pages. Let’s take a look at the referring pages and see if I can find anything new and interesting. Here we go, I found a couple of note:

1. Denver Post
2. This picture was linked in a deleted segment of the Wikipedia article: “List of bow tie wearers,” which is up for deletion in its entirety.

Admittedly nothing terribly exciting at the moment, but my Flickr stream has been pretty stale for about a year as I’ve been playing around with Picasa Web Albums recently. Maybe I’ll try to get the two in sync someday so you can view the photos in your preferred interface. Yeah, right after I convert all of those old home videos to DVD and scan all of our old photo albums.

*At work, we put [queries] in brackets, so everyone is clear on exactly what the search was. So, [“phrase search”] represents a user who searched for those words using quotes to specify a phrase, and didn’t simply do a [keyword search].