In the month-and-a-half since I started the wiki at ObsoleteSkills.com (thanks again for the idea, Scoble), it has been linked to from a whole bunch of blogs and websites, generating almost 3 million visits. Big name sites including BoingBoing, Slashdot, and Daring Fireball have all given me the privilege of a link. What really surprises me, though, is the percentage of traffic generated from each of these sources.

Above is a graph compiled from the top referrers to ObsoleteSkills.com. Looking at this graph reveals a few surprises: most notably that the majority of visits didn’t actually have a referrer, meaning people are just typing the domain into their browsers or using bookmarks, etc. This would imply that a lot of the traffic is from returning users, which is great.

Slashdot and StumbleUpon were, predictably, the next biggest referrers. I was surprised to see how little of the traffic came from David Pogue’s blog, which would seem to be a fairly high-traffic blog, and from BoingBoing, which is one of the most popular blogs around. It is also worth noting that Daring Fireball only linked to the site two days ago, so this won’t be representative of the actual percentage of referrers it might send.

Just so that there is a bit of scale to the graph, the lowest referrer to ObsoleteSkills.com shown on the graph (Gamespy Humor) represents a little over 32,000 visits, and there are obviously a bunch more referrers not showing on the graph.

Note: I’ve mixed the spelling of referrer on purpose, see Wikipedia for details.

Yes, I’ve been at it again and developed another Twitter bot. What makes this one special, however, is the fact that it is my first interactive bot.

So, I would like to introduce you all to @weatherbot – the interactive on-demand Twitter weather service. While it is still very beta, I think it is at a point where it is quite stable. To use it, all you have to do it follow the bot, then send it an @reply with the location you want the weather forecast for. In a few minutes, you should get a direct message from @weatherbot with the forecast for the rest of the current day and the next day in the city you asked for. The bot will report the temperature in Fahrenheit or Celsius appropriate for the requested location.

For example, if you are interested in the weather in Sydney, follow the bot then simply tweet “@weatherbot sydney australia” – without the quotes, of course. As long as you follow the format “@weatherbot city country” it should be able to work out what you want, though for the more generic named places, it might help to put your state/province in as well. The service should work for almost any major city in the world.

For those interested in the technical details, every few minutes the bot grabs its replies timeline using the Twitter API, then creates a queue of requests. From those requests, it will grab your search string and through some special sauce magic figures out the location ID for your request, then grabs an XML packet of the location’s weather forecast using the Yahoo! Weather API. It then parses the XML, extracts the needed information, and forms it into a string which it then sends back to you using the Twitter API as a direct message. The bot manages its queue so you don’t get your weather multiple times from the one request.

Feel free to give @weatherbot a try, and get in contact with me if you get any odd behavior.