I've been spending some time looking at where School of Everything's visitors are coming from, especially the ones who find us through search engines. If people come from another website, that's much more likely to be because people are talking about School of Everything generally, as an idea. But if people come via a search, it's much more likely that they were just looking about on the internet, spotted something that might be interesting, and stopped by to take a better look.
It's nice to be interesting. But it's all very well us jumping up and down and saying 'La la la we're interesting, talk about us'. Ultimately we'd much rather you visted School of Everything because you find each other interesting. And so I've been looking at our search traffic to learn more about who's visiting us, finding something - or someone - interesting, and hanging around for a better look.
So what's interesting? Well, lots of teachers are using us as a handy way to make a quick website - a bit like the way musicians use MySpace. We get plenty of visits from someone who's looking up a particular teacher, and have spotted them on School of Everything.
Then there are lots of people who are just searching for stuff. For example, feltmaking is for some reason really popular in the North-East of England. Down in Devon and Cornwall, lots of people love painting and drawing.
I'll write more about which subjects turn up where another time. For now, instead of a load of statistics, I've made a picture of what's interesting to our visitors. It's based on 500 keywords that bring people to School of Everything, according to how long they stay (found something interesting) and how often the search has been made (how many people are interested in it).
(Hat tip to Wordle.net for the tag cloud generator)
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