isthebaybridgeopen.com recap

Last Tuesday night, after Caltrans closed the Bay Bridge for repairs, I set up a single serving site: isthebaybridgeopen.com, and then proceeded to pimp it lightly here and on Twitter.

Just because I find this kind of stuff interesting, here's a quick summary of visitor traffic and activity. The data here is from Tuesday night through "now" (or whatever Google Analytics defines as "now"):

• 2,756 visits / 3,285 pageviews
• 45 comments, or 1 comment for every 73 pageviews
• 48 tweets, or 1 tweet for every 68 pageviews
• This was a local story, so the vast majority of the visits were from California
• 45% of visits were direct, 55% were clicks from referring sites

And the top ten referring sites were...

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. SFist
4. Google
5. Planet.mozilla.org
6. Baybridgeblog.org
7. mobile.SFist.com
8. oduinn.com
9. sippey.com (hey, that's me!)
10. bayarearidersforum.com

Obviously this wasn't a huge viral hit. But it was a fun little $15 / 15 minute project. And in case you hadn't heard, the Bay Bridge is now open.

Comments

[Yann]

I would have ordered the comment-thread reverse chronologically to foster conversation :-)

Except for the obvious on/off information provided by the page, the content was the comment thread. I think the "community" was mostly interested in how pissed the others were (and possibly were looking for people more pissed than them, since it usually alleviates pain to know than some are hurt even more :P

Next version should definitively include a poll mechanism to guess when the bridge will be open again (actually you could even start it now by polling when it will break again).

The contest winner could win a BART ticket or something -- unless you still have this nice mug of yours to give away ;-)

[finn]

relevant failure: http://labspace.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=230793

[Michael Sippey]

@finn -- oh, that's good.

@yann -- next time I'll put the comment form at the top. (Would need to force it in position with TypePad Connect, but that's probably do-able with some CSS hacking.) I think the next site will be a **betting** site where you can put money down on when the Bridge will break. Might not be legal, and someone without enough motivation could, you know, breathe really hard on the eyebars and cause some damage...