On a whim, I took the all time stats of my blog posts (more than 1000 posts) , and tried to plot their distribution.
Basically I copied and pasted all the data in a Google docs spreadsheet. and I created dummy codes (like URL1, URL2…. URL 500)
Next I downloaded the….
I wasnt in the mood for downloading and uploading stuff so I decided to use GGPLOT using Jeroen’s Application at http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~jeroen/
I used the mirror server that Dataspora provides as I have had latency issues with Jeroen’s website.
I got this error while trying to connect the Dataspora App to my Google spreadsheet
The page you have requested cannot be displayed. Another site was requesting access to your Google Account, but sent a malformed request. Please contact the site that you were trying to use when you received this message to inform them of the error. A detailed error message follows:
The site “http://dataspora.com” has not been registered.
Oh dear! Back to Jeroen’s /UCLA’s page.
http://rweb.stat.ucla.edu/ggplot2/
I get this warning but it still manages to log in
This website has not registered with Google to establish a secure connection for authorization requests. We recommend that you continue the process only if you trust the following destination:
http://rweb.stat.ucla.edu/R/googleLogin?domain=rweb.stat.ucla.edu
wow it works! thats cloud computing now so I wonder why Google and Amazon continue to ignore the rApache, and Jeroen’s cloud app . Surely their Google Fusion Tables can be always improved or tweaked. Not to mention the next gen version of R which will have its own server
Pretty cool screenshot (but click to see more)
I get the following pretty graph. Hadley Wickham would be ashamed of me by now.
What went wrong- well one page has 36000 views . Scale is the key to graphical coherence . So I redo- delete home page in Google spreadsheet ,reimport replot. ( I didnt know how to modify data in the cloud app, maybe we need a cloud PlyR) I redo it again as I have a big outlier-The top 10 Statistical GUI article which ironically has only 5 GUIs in that article but hush dont tell to high quality search engine)
So again Belatedly I discover something called layer in ggplot.
Base Graphics engine has really spoilt me to write short functions for plots. 
I give up. I rather prefer hist() I go to my favorite GUI Rattle, but it has some dating issues with the dll of GTK+
So I go to John Fox’s simple GUI. R Commander- is the best GUI if you use Occam’s Razor, and I am using Occam’s Chainsaw now.
I get the analysis I want in 12 secs
Summary- GGPLot is more complicated than base graphics engine.
Deducer GUI is not as simple too
R Commander is the best GUI because it retains simplicity
Ignore long tail of internet only at your peril
Almost 2/3 rds of my daily traffic of 400+ comes from old archived content That is why Search Engine Optimization and Alerts for Keywords are CRITICAL for any poor soul trying to write on a blog (which has no journal like prestige nor rewards)
If you make life easier for the search engine, it being a fair chap, rewards you well
Existing web traffic estimates like Comscore and Google Trends ignore this long tail
Comments are welcome (Data is pasted below of 500 rows X 2 columns if you can come up with a better analysis)
Since SAS has ignored web analytics and Google Analytics is hmm hmm, this could be an area of opportunity for R developers as well to create a web analytics package.
Related Articles
- Cloud Computing May Decrease Your API Call Limit (programmableweb.com)
- Book: ggplot2 by Hadley Wickham (r-bloggers.com)
- Google Instant Search: What does this mean for advertisers? (wpromote.com)
- 2 Fun and Useful Goog,e Spreadsheet Tricks (searchenginejournal.com)
- R Graphs Resources (decisionstats.com)
- The Importance of the Long Tail with Keywords and Phrases (businessbloggingtips.com)
- As Google Retools its Search Engine, Content Farms Lose Traction (xconomy.com)
DECISION STATS 