48-Hours Makes San Francisco #1!

Late surge in visits makes "Frisco" last week's Top ATR town

Hold it a sec, okay? Before you take us to task for using "Frisco," consider this from The San Francisco Chronicle in 2003:

"Frisco, that once-verboten term for the city by the bay, is making a comeback among the young and hip. Herb Caen is spinning at warp speed."

It appears, however, that the venerable scribe from the City by the Bay would come to approve of the reference, saying in 1995:

"The toughest guys on the old S.F. waterfront, neither rubes nor tourists, called it Frisco, and no effete journalist would have tried to correct them."

So, now that we've got the okay from a Pulitzer Prize winner, we'll continue. Ahem...

Owing to Blogger's server meltdown this weekend, which had us otherwise occupied, we finally had a chance only last night to digest our latest analytics. It was another week of growth for us by most of the standard metrics (unique visitors, page views) and until Thursday, San Diego was in pace to emerge again as the top ATR town. However, a flurry of unique visits from the bay area Friday and Saturday crowned San Francisco as the top Auction Talk Radio town for last week.

We couldn't be happier if we were Jack and Reggie in a ragtop Caddie.

San Diego dropped to #2, just ahead of Silicon Valley villes Mountainview and Sunnyvale, with Columbia, Alaska AGAIN in our top five. The rest of the top 10 are: Plano, TX; New York City; Monterey Park, CA, which is really a 'burb to #10 L.A.

On the international front, Stockholm, Sweden was our top foreign city. And Sweden was again the #1 foreign country visiting ATR last week. We also got a lot of love from Canada, Germany (perhaps because we ran an image of Heidi Klum), Italy, France, Brazil, Turkey, Spain and Portugal. We even had a few honored guests from Japan.

We just mentioned Heidi Klum, who was part of a story we brought you last week about the charity auction involving her hit TV series "Project Runway." The day we ran that post, last Tuesday (3/4) was our most visited day since we re-launched this site a few weeks ago. We note that because another of our most-visited days was the week before that, when we posted a piece accompanied by a photo of Adriana Lima.

Were those posts that intriguing to you or, alas, is it an example of the simple truth that sex sells? Fear not; though our aim here is to be fun and informative, cheesecake is not on the menu.