Two Four Nice Sites*

Whether you've got a celebrity crush, or are a researcher seeking a head shot, facesaerch may be of assistance. It's a search engine that returns only head shots. Facesaerch is built on Google's image search, and features a nice Apple-style photo flow.

I was pondering whether to post about facesaerch, since it got a fair amount of attention back in the summer and fall. I checked its stats at Quantcast, and saw that it gets around 30,000 visitors a month. So, it seemed worth mentioning again.

Speaking of Quantcast, it's an interesting look at web demographics, breaking down website traffic by gender, race, devotion to the site in question, location and more. My favorite feature is the "Audience Also Visits" and "Audience Also Searches For" lists.

Not too surprisingly, visitors to the Willamette Week are also likely to visit the Tribune, Mercury, and Oregonian sites. Other top sites include the Oregon Humane Society, McMenamins, Trimet, and in a sign of the times, Jobdango.

I would take Quantcast's data with a hefty grain of salt -- some of their claims seem a bit dubious. (Just check out their list of "Audience Also Visits" for the Mercury. I'll buy a lot of them, but at least one NSFW site on the list seems unlikely to be such a giant hit among Portlanders. It's devoted to a fairly specific subject, and I would be a bit surprised if so many of my fellow citizens shared the same proclivities.)

I was going to explain how Quantcast works, but Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer just posted about it this very day, and explained in much more detail than I was planning. What a nice burp of the collective unconscious.

These are two nice sites that don't quite earn "favorite site" status, but are definitely worth a look.

*My brain is drained of creative title energy tonight. I'm posting anyway. I've got to make my goal of 150 posts during 2009. Don't break the chain. (Thanks Lifehacker, which is one of my favorite sites.)