Learning Accelerates Itself - GA & this new venture.

I don't yet know what my audience feels about this podcast...but I'm glad I instituted Google Analytics on day 1 of the podcast, as I can begin to see traffic patterns. From reviewing GA this evening, I can see:

I've had, in the past ten days these raw stats:
- 92 pageviews;
- 61 unique views;
- 52.08% bounce rate
- 68 pageviews of the root (or index) level
- from 3 to 8 pageviews of non-root pages
- a peak amount of 14 visits on Monday, October 14th.

-- from this (specifically the 68 views of the main page) I can see that when I post URL's on Twitter, Facebook or MySpace I should probably give the specific blog URL rather than the main page URL. Also, what accounts for the 14 visitors on Monday? I think alot of that could be due to an e-mail I sent to colleagues at work about the Williamsburg podcast from the just-past weekend.

Fun stuff (does this mean much?):
Browser & OS - % of visitors:
- IE on Windows - 45.8%
- Safari on Mac - 39.6%
- Firefox on Mac - 8.3%
- Firefox on Windows - 6.25%

My main concern: how can I tell how much of this is from me checking my blog site, or from me editing the blog, and then "viewing" the results? Any of it? I'll have to cross-check my browser, OS, ISP and screen-resolution (all data that GA tracks) and try to weed out the effect of my own visits.

So...learning about analyzing stats on a website. What does this do? It allows one to see how the web industry is gauging itself, how it might be doing various things to optimize it's collective or individual presence on the web, and how a business might spring up from the need to interpret these Delphic wisps of vapor for the general business user who may be missing some very important statistics about his or her company's impact via their web presence.

More later as I learn it. :-)

..Alex.