Musings on Traffic (the web kind) Posted Thursday, May 26, 2005 5/26/2005 10:12:00 AM

It is the 26th of May and at this point I've been blogging for 2 months now. I thought the two month anniversary is a good moment to stop and reflect on my work here. So far my traffic has been mediocure as to be expect on a new blog without a coherent theme (I've talked about this before). In the last two months (60 days) I've posted 44 entries for an average of 1.4 days between posts. Some of those posts were on the same day. I've posted on 36 days out of 60 missing 24. 14 of the 60 days I was half way around the world but still managed to post 2 entries during that time (what dedication!).

I had two major "hits" when my blog was linked to by some other majors blogs. The chart below shows the jump in traffic during these events. There are some interesting things I notice. For one the "Glass - Solid or Liquid?" post generated more unique visits to my blog whereas the "MapPoint" post generated many more page views. I take this to mean that the viewers of the MapPoint post either returned many times or found the article interesting enough to visit other pages. On the other hand the glass post generated a lot more visits presumably because of the popularity of either the skeptic's circle, the Pharyngula website, or both but the visitors didn't find the post interesting enough to stick around. It is also interesting to note that the Glass post continues to generate many hits a day while the MapPoint post has basically fallen off the map.

So I guess what this tells us is that it is not the quality of the posts that count, as the MapPoint post was apparently better quality, but getting your site linked to by other popular sites, as evident in the glass post. Also, worthy of noticing is that now that my site has shown up on the Pharyngula blogroll my blogs value, according to BlogShares, has gone from B$1,000 to B$14,000 (Yes, I know this is a fictional market, but interesting none the less) [note: apparently because the way Pharyngula does it's random blogroll my value is now back down at B$1,112.89. Buy, buy, buy.. it is bound to come up again].

Even if the above observations are true (probably not) I'm not going to let that change the way I blog. I'm still going to attempt to post about interesting things (at least for me) and am not going to attempt to have my blog name dropped every where. I'm in this for self improvement not popularity.