Here's what everyone has been most interested in on kottke.org this week:
The best flag in the world (#1 by a wide margin)
From sketch to photo instantly (this is insanely awesome)
Bullets are slow
The Rape Tunnel: FAKE
The most beautiful suicide
Beyonce's Single Ladies covered by Pomplamoose
Cool cats
Carl Sagan Auto-Tune (feat. Stephen Hawking)
Parkour on a bicycle
From the desk of Mr. Jagger
Inventing the past
Minna Kottke
Dogfighting vs. football in moral calculus
The no control cafe
Drinking like Mad Men
George Saunders plays house(less)
Airlines nickel and diming themselves to death
Are you moving to San Francisco?
Wooden skyscraper
Huge Pepsi Throwback news
Flat-earthers
Rare hour-long Alfred Hitchcock interview
Popes, they don't make 'em like they used to
The most famous unkindness
Pizza pi
Again, the data is from Google Analytics and only includes URLs that were directly accessed...no search or referral traffic. Compare those to the most liked posts in the kottke.org RSS feed from roughly the same period of time, data courtesy of Google Reader:
The best flag in the world (174 likes)
From sketch to photo instantly (this is insanely awesome) (150 likes)
The no control cafe (98 likes)
Beyonce's Single Ladies covered by Pomplamoose (84 likes)
Carl Sagan Auto-Tune (feat. Stephen Hawking) (81 likes)
Bullets are slow (71 likes)
Michael Pollan's food rules (43 likes)
From the desk of Mr. Jagger (38 likes)
Pizza pi (37 likes)
Vivian Maier, recently discovered street photographer (37 likes)
The most famous unkindness (35 likes)
Airlines nickel and diming themselves to death (30 likes)
The vomitorium myth (29 likes)
Totally not burying the lede (29 likes)
Drinking like Mad Men (25 likes)
Thirty dumb inventions (25 likes)
Rare hour-long Alfred Hitchcock interview (24 likes)
Complaining about the inevitable (23 likes)
Glaciers from space (23 likes)
Cool cats (22 likes)
This only includes posts from the past week so the older stuff isn't represented. Interesting differences. The stuff with images or videos tends to do better with likes on Google Reader than just text. If Google Reader had an API, you could use that and the Analytics API to make a pretty decent "here's what's popular on the site" sidebar thingie a la the NY Times and most other publications.