Merging Web Site Traffic Analysis With… Sim City?

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the alternative-representations dept

Dealing with large amounts of data is often difficult. For years, people have tried to come up with better graphical representations of data – which is why we see so many pie and bar charts all over the place. One developer has decided to go one step further in making website traffic analysis more visual. For anyone running a website, visitor traffic analysis often becomes something of an obsession. They want to see their stats, about who’s visiting, how many people are visiting, where they’re going and what they’re doing on the site. Most web hosting companies offer up some very simple traffic analysis programs, but they usually don’t let you dig too much into the information. There are a number of large “enterprise” level traffic analysis packages that are popular, as well as some cheaper ones that are pretty good themselves. However, they all produce the same sorts of charts and lists of data. Robert Savage thought that the data could be presented in a more intuitive way and created an interface for web traffic analysis that looks more like Sim City than a traditional analysis package. The idea is that pages getting a lot of traffic look like large buildings, and people moving from one page to another hail taxi cabs, so you can see where they’re going. Buses with their rooftops labeled show where people are arriving from (Google, Yahoo, etc.). The larger your website, the more it looks like a city than a small town. While it sounds (quite) gimmicky, people using it say it becomes addictive very quickly. Of course, it looks like the VisitorVille website can’t take the traffic beating it must be getting – at posting time, all of its own images are broken.