I'm fascinated by the statistics of blogging. Who reads blogs? Why do they read blogs? Do blogs serve a useful purpose or are they just for fun? What's the future of blogging?
Part of the fascination is looking at the data to see which postings attract the most attention and how many people regularly check in each day. Are some blogs better than others? Are some blogs more popular? Why?1
A few minutes ago somebody logged on to Sandwalk to view a page and registered the one millionth page view since this blog began collecting data. That's pretty interesting. It means that Sandwalk is an average science blog in terms of popularity, far behind the best ones that have one million views per month.
One of the interesting things about science blogging is that there's a 25% dropoff in readers during the months of May, June, July, and August. (Other bloggers see this too.) I assume this is mostly students who don't read blogs during the summer. Is it because they only have high speed internet access when they're at school or is it because they're not interested in blogs during the summer?
1. I wonder if there's a direct correlation between the number of readers and the number of postings per day? Some blogs put up lots of articles every day even though many of those articles don't take much effort. Does this build readership so that when you post something important it's more likely to get attention? That doesn't work for me as a reader. There are quite a few excellent blogs that I scan every day even though the postings are infrequent. On the other hand, when I've tried posting several times a day over a period of a few weeks, the number of visits does increase significantly.
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