Fun with Google Analytics

I sort of like looking at the stats for this blog - for the most part, they're not particularly impressive, but sometimes they're amusing.

For example, in the past week, two people from Sweden have been here. One had a wrong URL and left right away, the other actually stuck around and read something. I've also had a couple readers from Australia, and a few from the UK, most of whom were returning visitors, but who spent much less time on the website than the Australians did. Of my United States readers, more than half came from Virginia, and almost none came from any of the South, Midwest, or Alaska.

Maybe you all think this is incredibly boring. But the fact that I have an international audience whose reading habits I can stalk via internet makes me happy.

One of the top search terms that brings people from Google to here is "feminism in cartoons," so anyone here looking for that should totally head over to Sociological Images, which has a pretty long discussion about the upcoming Disney movie The Princess and the Frog. One thing they comment on was that originally the black Princess character was going to be cast as a maid. When I was talking about this movie to a friend and mentioned that, she immediately went "Ooohhh, no. Cinderella as a maid is ok, but the first black princess, not so much." Which, as far as automatic reactions go, says a lot about the way different roles are perceived depending on the race of a character.

That same conversation included a lot about Miyazaki movies, which I adore, and I am now thinking about race in Miyazaki/Japanese films vs. in American ones. I'll get back to you on that.