torsdag 2 januari 2014

2013 blog stats

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It's time for the annual self-preoccupied, inwards look at this blog. It's now officially a tradition since I did it last year too :-)   Since then I have also written another sum-up of blog activities when I managed to time blog post number 200 with the third anniversary of the blog (in September). This is blog post number 237.

When I wrote about the blog a year ago, the number of visitors had increased by 40% in 2012 compared to the year before, but that wasn't as impressive as it sounds since I also published almost 40% more blog posts (73 compared to 54). During 2013 I increased the number of blog posts yet another 20% compared to the previous year (to 89) as well as the number of visitors. I had, in fact, 60% more visitors during 2013 compared to 2012:




I think it's pretty incredible that since the blog was started 3.5 years ago almost half (47.8%) of all visits happened in 2013. That might to some extent be an effect of Facebook - I nowadays usually write a short status update on Facebook and leave a link to the most recent blog post.

Two reasons I managed to post 89 blog posts during 2013 was increased blog discipline plus the fact that I had a drive, a "blog week" in the beginning of November when I published a new blog post every day for seven days in a row. That counteracted the fact that I had been very busy for a couple of months before that and had a big backlog of stuff to write about. In last year's blog summary I wrote that:

"Of the 147 published blog posts this far:
- 8 blog posts (5%) have been read 200 times or more
- 15 blog posts (10%) have been read 100-200 times
- 99 blog posta (67%) have been read 26-99 times
- 25 blog posts (17%) have been read less than 25 times"

I have painstakingly gone through the whole history of the blog again and the corresponding numbers right now are that of the 236 blog posts that have been published at this point in time:

- 30 blog posts (13%) have been read 200 times or more
- 74 blog posts (31%) have been read 100-200 times
- 119 blog posts (50%) have been read 26-99 times
- 13 blog posts (6%) have been read 25 times or less

The improved stats are due both to new (2013) posts in general being read more often that earlier blog posts and because people drop by to read older, pre-2013 blog posts. Of the 147 blog posts that had been published in 2012 or earlier (above), no less than 13 blog posts have "graduated" from the least read group and 26 have graduated from the second least read group of blog posts. Of the "old" (pre-2013) blog posts, the number of blog posts that have been read 200+ times have gone up from 8 to 17 and this group has furthermore been joined by 13 new (2013) blog posts that have entered the most-read group with 200+ page views. The ten most-read blog posts in the history of the blog are currently:

Blog purpose and history (Sept 2010, 3810 times)
On students' cognitive inability (March 2013, 1456 times - NEW!)
Can a student fail at a Swedish university? (March 2011, 1020 times)
ICT society scenarios & the future of work (June 2013, 604 times - NEW!)
EIT ICT Labs (March 2012, 490 times)
Mobile application design & development (March 2011, 487 times)
World championship in programming (Oct 2011, 461 times)
Social media, modernity and superstition (Nov 2011, 424 times - NEW!)
Cohero - playing games at work (May 2013, 398 times - NEW!)

I notice that four of the blog posts above are new to the list (I for some reason only had a top 9 list last year). Last year the cut-off limit to make it to the top 9 list was 198 page views. That very last blog post to make it to last year's list has since then garnered more than 200 additional page views. Some blog post are (apparently eminently searchable and continue to direct new visitors to the blog.

One conclusion is (thus) that there is quite a lot of inertia. Older texts that were popular "back then" continue to get new readers. Newer texts (6 months old or less) have on the other hand not had the time to get up to speed. In notice that all three blog posts that were published in 2013 and that made it to the list above were published during the first half of the year, in March, May and June.

All the curves are pointing up. This is ironic since I personally believe we are soon to wake up to the fact that this is the century not of (continued) exponential growth, but rather of peaks and declines. If that would sink in, I guess it would just make my blog more, rather than less popular in the short run.

The only complaint I have is that you guys never comment on anything any longer. Of the 90 blog posts that were published in 2013, only 10 have had people commenting on them and only one (1) person has commented on a single blog post during the second half of the year.
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