In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Via the O'Reilly Radar, I learned about the Pew Internet Report on Location-based Services.

Their key findings: "In its first report on the use of “geosocial” or location-based services, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life project finds that 4% of online adults use a service such as Foursquare or Gowalla that allows them to share their location with friends and to find others who are nearby. On any given day, 1% of internet users are using these services.

Key findings include:

• 7% of adults who go online with their mobile phone use a location-based service.
• 8% of online adults ages 18-29 use location-based services, significantly more than online adults in any other age group.
• 10% of online Hispanics use these services – significantly more than online whites (3%) or online blacks (5%).
• 6% of online men use a location-based service such as Foursquare or Gowalla, compared with 3% of online women."

Do statistics matter? Yes and no. Yes because it confirms we have users who seem to appreciate the geonews aggregation service we provide, thus justifying all the volunteering work we do for a community we love. No because it's only statistics.

While our fifth year anniversary will actually occur later this month, let's use the recent website migration as an excuse to look at the stats today. After 5 years online we:

• Published 4,714 stories.
• Users contributed with 3,445 comments, but a significant amount of it was spam comments that got deleted (spam should be a problem anymore on the new Slashgeo incarnation). 264 different registered users published most of the non-anonymous user comments.
• We had 9,266 registered users. But the true number of registered users is probably closer to 3,000 (last Spring), because we suffered from bots registering ghost accounts lately.
• We generally got between 25,000 and 40,000 hits every day, with a total for the 5 years of over 25,8 million hits.
• There was close to 2,000 users reading us via our previous Daily Newsletters (if you want to continue receiving it, you must subscribe to it again on this new Slashgeo website)
• There was 3,084 people subscribed to our RSS feed, plus the 4,179 people following us via Google Reader.
• Our most active single story had 32 comments (next one was 24).
• The 10 most active Slashgeo editors individually published between 10 and thousands of stories. The site would not exist without this collaboration of volunteers.
• The site also rely on user submissions, with some 7 users got over 10 story submissions published. With the gold medal going to user 'geognerd' with 17 published submissions.

Have I forgot anything?

So, if you're a company and want to benefit from the traffic we get, you can contribute to the site to get visibility in several ways, including getting into our top donors list (right-hand side column).

With the new Slashgeo, we should have access to much more precise statistics for the future, not that they matter that much. Don't hesitate to contact us to improve the site and contribute to it.