— urbantick

Six month into writing this blog it hits the 2500 visitors mark. The last post on this was back in mid January where it hit the 1000 visitors mark and now it is more than double this number. This is very good news.
Again there were some very supportive links to the work on this bog and the work was quoted on a number of other blogs including digitalurban and GISagent, many thanks to them.
The graphs with the stats updates from sitemeter show a surprisingly similar picture. There is almost no change in the visitor’s pattern in terms of hour of the day looking at the total visits per hour. It is again this peak around three in the afternoon and a second one around ten in the evening. The later one could probably be America with the time difference ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ that they also visit around three in the afternoon local time.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Image by urbanTick for urbanDiary

The visitors per week day look​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​also similar, the mid week days are popular, with Thursday having the lead, where as the weekend is rather quiet.

The last update on this was followed by an outlook for this project. One point was on collecting tracking data of a number of individuals and the other point was regarding an option to build up an online community to collect much more data to dandify the picture of urban cycles.
The tracking of participants has started as the UrbanDiary project and it is already one month that fourteen individuals collect data of their daily activities. This pre study is going well and the data is very good.
For the second point the UrbanDiary project has now a facebook page!

It is updated with news from this blog, but mainly with news from the UrbanDiary project and enables participants and people being interested in this topic to share information and experience directly. The page is accessible to facebook member and to non-members so you can bookmark it and following it even if you are not on facebook.

Tonight we had the 1000th visitor on the blog. It is great that so many people are interested in the work on the topic of everyday cycles and routines.

Image by urbanTick – Visitor statistics by Sitemeter

The first entry on the bog dates from the 7th of October 2008. So only 98 days online, with twenty entries featuring seven videos and a number of images.
The visits so far have developed rapidly and closely related to being referred from by popular blogs.
Some analysis of the hit record shows the popularity of the bog over the course of 24 hours. It turns out to be very popular on mid weekdays, in mid afternoon…

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Images by urbanTick – graphs by hour and by weekday

As we started this blog, it was not the aim to attract a lot of attention, rather was the idea to use it as a diary (in the sense of the project) and logging the work that we are doing here to keep track of things and log some progress. To now see that putting the work online generates such an interest really is a big motivation. The topic of cycles as it is defined at the moment puts the focus on everyday routines and habits and this really is what we all experience or rather produce. Anyone experiences it on a daily basis, e.g. rush hour, shop opening hours or meal times or is involved in longer periodic events such as the now just passed festive season with the busy celebrations. To understand more about these patterns is the aim of the work and obviously makes a lot of people curious.
The interest was generated by some big blogs that picked up the work and made it prominently accessible for a wider audience. The DigitalUrban blog where the now everywhere quoted labeling Fabian started, then the New Scientist blog, the Gearth blog, the AllPoints blog, the PlymothianTransit blog, andrelemos.info and also the heomin61 blog.
So maybe it become a routine for some visitors to come back a check this spot for new work and of course comments and suggestions on the work are very welcome.
For the future progress of the work on cycles and rhythms the aim is to make a broader study based on GPS tracks involving a number of individuals. Maybe even to start an online community who would share individual routines to help painting the bigger picture. Something like “the City Routines“, a big drawing that represents the habits of inhabitants. We’ll see how it goes.