statistics

CatSynth 7th Anniversary!

Today we mark seven years since CatSynth first went online!

Here was the photo of Luna from that first post on July 19, 2006.

As we do every yeah, we celebrate this occasion with some stats.

2,278 posts.
12,218 comments.
538,771 visitors.
760 “cat-and-synth” posts.

Some overall stats for the past year:

Our top day for visitors was January 26, 2013. This was during NAMM.
The greatest number of visitors came from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany.
The top cities are San Francisco and New York. The top city outside the U.S. is London.
iOS and Android are among the top five platforms used by our visitors, surpassing Linux.

Our top commenters over the past year:

Tillie and Georgia	187
meowmeowmans	142
Gattina	70
Snowcatcher	57
Kitty	56
CatSynth	53
Beth F	45
Sukhmandir Kaur	42
AVCr8teur	42
Louis la Vache	40
Sue St Clair	39
KatzTales	37
Cafe au lait	34
Marilia	33
The Chair Speaks	29
Sweet Purrfections	27
Cats of wildcat woods	25
Marg	24
Team Tabby	23
Beth @ 990 Square	22
SandyCarlson	22

It’s great to see longtime readers continue to participate over the years, and always good to see newcomers as well. Interestingly, the number of comments has gone down significantly over the past year. My conjecture is that an increasing amount of the engagement around CatSynth has migrated to our Facebook page, and to Twitter, where we have lively communities of commenters. In terms of Facebook, here are our most shared/liked posts over the past year:

The Green Wood, an opera by David Samas	64
CatSynth pic: Brian Eno Purina ad	44
Weekend Cat Blogging: Good News from PAWS	38
Pitta of the Mind, Red Thread, and Pet the Tiger at Turquoise Yantra Grotto	36
CatSynth pic: Gary Mew-man	33
CatSynth pic: Moog Little Phatty	31
Superb Owl	29
Outsound Music Summit: Fire and Energy	28
CatSynth pic: Chewie on Ensoniq EPS	26
CatSynth pic: Pinto and Moog Little Phatty	25
Jay Korber Benefit Performance, Berkeley Arts	25
The Fashion World of John Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk, De Young Museum	23
CatSynth pic: Maggie Monotron	23
Military Cats	20
CatSynth pic: Schnuffi and Modular	19

It’s gratifying to see a mixture of “cat-and-synth” posts and art/music reviews in this list. It supports my belief that mixing all the different topics together into one stream is worthwhile. I particularly enjoy our many cat enthusiasts commenting on the music reviews or highway posts.

We hope to continue this project for a long time, and hope it continues to be a valuable and worthwhile resource. And a big thank you to all our readers and fans! You make this a joy to work on.

CatSynth 5th Anniversary!

Today we mark the 5th Anniversary of CatSynth!

I started this site on July 19, 2006 as a novelty when a friend and former colleague at E-MU systems suggested that I “should make a website about cats and synths.”

Every anniversary we feature the photo of Luna from the inaugural post.

I still have that Novation keyboard, though it does not get used as often of late. Luna of course still is very territorial about that beanbag chair. Times have changed a bit, here is an iconic photo of Luna from this past year, this time with an iPad app (in this case, the Smule Magic Piano):

Another quirky way we like to celebrate is with statistics. First the basics:

1559 posts.
0.85 posts per day.
8784 comments.
5.63 comments per post.
476 posts featuring cats and synthesizers.
195 reviews (and gig reports).
381,735 visitors.

Even after five years, people from around the world continue to send us pictures of cats and music gear. These days most of those come via our Facebook, which together with twitter has become a major way people engage with this site.

From Google Analytics (which we finally got working properly over the past year), here is an overview of where our visitors come from around the world.

By far and away most of our visitors are from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Australia, France and Germany. I’m gratified to see so many visitors from India, though I’m curious why we never receive any comments from there…

It’s also interesting to look at cities.

Not surprisingly, the top cities are San Francisco and New York. In Google, it’s SF followed by NYC, while in Facebook, New York is the top city.

Our most popular posts judged by number of visitors are the annual endangered wild cats on earth day. Over the past year, our most commented posts were:

Wordless Wednesday: Herman (Groundhog Day)	35
Wordless Wednesday: Doll and Metal Beams	28
Wordless Wednesday: 6506 (Baker Beach)	27
Wordless Wednesday: Matzoh Man	27
Happy Birthday Luna!	25
Wordless Wednesday: 7643 (New York, Late Autumn)	25
Wordless Wednesday: Wet Paint	25
Wordless Wednesday: Mosaic with Saxophones	24
Wordless Wednesday: Summer Solstice	24
Wordless Wednesday: Harrison Street Hipstomatic	23

Our top commenters the past year:

Kitty	199
Mickey, Georgia and Tillie	146
Gattina	94
CatSynth	90
The Chair Speaks	66
meowmeowmans	65
Snowcatcher	56
AVCr8teur	51
Daisy the Curly Cat	48
Cats of Wildcat Woods	41
Beth @ 990 Square	40

Thanks to all our friends (in time zones earlier than U.S. Pacific Daylight Time) who already sent in comments for the anniversary, and to the Cat Blogosphere for their anniversary shout-out!

And while we will continue to keep doing what we do, it has been more of a challenge over this past year to keep up with posts, especially the longer-form reviews. There is a trade between doing music and art, and writing about people doing music and art. But I still love doing everything here, and will find a way…

Fun with Stats: Nobel Peace Prizes by Country

In light of today’s Nobel Prize award in peace, a little number-crunching of peace prizes by country (using this Wikipedia page as a data source). I actually did not guess this distribution in advance.

United States	22
France	10
United Kingdom	10
Germany	6
Ireland	5
Sweden	5
Belgium	4
South Africa	4
Switzerland	4
Austria	3
Israel	3
Argentina	2
Bangladesh	2
Canada	2
China	2
Egypt	2
Norway	2
Poland	2
Portugal	2
Russia / USSR	2
Costa Rica	1
Czech Republic / Austria-Hungary	1
Denmark	1
East Timor	1
Finland	1
Ghana	1
Guatemala	1
India	1
Iran	1
Italy	1
Japan	1
Kenya	1
South Korea	1
Macedonia	1
Burma (Myanmar)	1
Mexico	1
Netherlands	1
Palestine	1
Romania	1
Vietnam	1

You can read a speech by the most recent winner Liu Xiaobo here.

CatSynth 4th Anniversary

Another year has past since we started this site four years ago. Thanks to everyone who already wished us a happy anniversary, and to the folks at the Cat Blogosphere for their shout-out today.

And just as we have with previous anniversaries, we are celebrating with statistics of questionable import.

Over the past four years, we have written 1220 posts, and readers have contributed 6699 comments. We have received 293,916 visits. This comes out to about 5.5 comments per post, and about 43 visits for every one comment left. We also have about 270 “catsynth pic” or “catsynth video” posts. Make of these numbers what you will.

In terms of tags and categories, there are not really any surprises. These top terms do reflect what the site continues to be about:

Cats (cat)	704
Synthesizers	449
Luna	277
Music	246
Art	190
weekend cat blogging	183
WCB	181
San Francisco	160
Personal	153
News	151
Wordless Wednesday	147
Reviews	134
Photography	132
Modernism	91
Highways	82
Art	74
analog	74
video	74
cats on tuesday	70
electronic music	62
synth	62
performance	55
carnival of the cats	45
Travel	45
black cat	44

We now turn to stats specific to the past year. The top five days for visits since July 19, 2009 are:

November 6, 2009	1036
April 18, 2010	859
May 11, 2010	808
October 15, 2009	787
March 22, 2010	780

Hmm, November 6, 2009. Who knew our post on Reconnaissance Fly and Noertker’s Moxie at the SIMM Series would get so much attention 🙂

The posts that received the most comments over the past year:

Wordless Wednesday: Morning Sunshine	36
Wordless Wednesday: Cooper River Bridge, South Carolina	32
Wordless Wednesday: High Line	32
Dona Nobis Pacem: Blogblast for Peace!	31
Wordless Wednesday: Asians.com	28
Wordless Wednesday: Bay Bridge from Pier 14	25
Wordless Wednesday: Yan’an Elevated Road, Shanghai	25
Wordless Wednesday: Before Winter	24
Wordless Wednesday: 5946 (Vacant Lot, California)	24
Wordless Wednesday: Three Circles	23
Wordless Wednesday: Coffee Cup on the Patio	23

And the top commenters over the past year:

kitty	203
Mickey	143
CatSynth	96
Gattina	75
SandyCarlson	51
Sukhmandir Kaur	50
Robin from Israel	38
Beth @ 990 Square	37
Katz (And Other) Tales	32
cindy	31
AVCr8teur	30
jams o donnell	47
Carver	26
Sniffie and the Florida Furkids	23
Beth F	23
Cats of Wildcat Woods	22
Ms. Latina	20
Snowcatcher	19
Digital Flower	18
Susan Adcox	18
Cafe Au Lait	17
The Chair Speaks	16
Harry Spotter	16
Jewelgirls Katz	15
Judi	15
Nikita Cat	15
jason	12

These are the stats that change the most from year to year, as we welcome new readers and others fade away for any number of reasons. One interesting thing to note is our two top commenters (who have retained those spots for the last two years running) are both from Canada.

Our Facebook page gives us a new source of questionable stats to reflect upon. We have received about 30 contributions (pictures or videos). The city with the most declared CatSynth fans is New York. The countries with the most fans (after the United States) are Canada, the United Kingdom, and Finland. These are all plausible, but I am a bit skeptical of Facebook’s data gathering and presentation tools.

Thanks to everyone who has read and supported us, wherever you happen to be, and we’ll look forward to more over the next year…

Fun with stats: The Year in Hate and Extremism

I heard this report last night on Fresh Air, and then went to read the original article at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Here are some not-so-fun statistics:

The number of hate groups in the U.S. has been going up for years, rising 54% between 2000 and 2008. The number of groups rose again slightly in 2009 — from 926 in 2008 to 932 last year — despite the demise of a key neo-Nazi group.
Furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80%, adding some 136 new groups during 2009.
An astonishing 363 new Patriot groups appeared in 2009, with the totals going from 149 groups (including 42 militias) to 512 (127 of them militias) — a 244% jump. (If you’re not familiar with what a “Patriot group” is, you can read more here.)
A new poll from Harris interactive finds that 40 percent of American adults think that Obama is a socialist; 25 percent believe that Obama was not born in the United States and is therefore not eligible to be president; 20 percent say Obama is doing many of the things that Hitler did; 14 percent say Obama “may be the Antichrist.”
According the SLPC’s map of extremist and hate groups, the state with the second largest number of groups, after Texas, is California.

It’s easy to forget sometimes, but your friends here at CatSynth could be targets for such groups. Far less of a danger than an auto accident, statistically speaking, but still…

Fun with stats: 100th Anniversary of Mother's Day

From the Associated Press:

55 percent of mothers are between the ages of 15 and 44.

81 percent of women between the ages of 40 and 44 are mothers. In 1976, 90 percent of women in that age group were mothers.

94.1 births per 1,000 is the number of births in Utah in 2006, the nation's highest. Vermont was the lowest with 52.2. West Virginia's was 58.3

10.4 million single mothers live with children younger than 18, up from 3.4 million in 1970.

83 percent of mothers who went back to work within a year of their child's birth returned to the same employer.

5.6 million is the number of stay-at-home moms in 2006.