9 Comments

  1. In my case — using WordPress.org — I don’t get a lot of stats. I can see pageviews. If there’s anything fancier, I haven’t found it yet, but then I’m not looking — it’s a new blog and I’m testing the waters (first time blogging outside a firewall).

    Shel Israel did pop by my blog yesterday so that’s something!

    Thanks for the transparency.

  2. @Mark,
    Dammit I meant to finish with “no comments from size queens” Heh. Though I’m glad you shared, your stats add context. 🙂

    Anyway, sweetie, you are kinda proving my point. It’s easier to share statistics when you are a major player with over 100k of visitors that moves you into a sort of broadcast mode (Your blog is a green #1 in the Ripple diagram). But if one is a #4 blue dot, it’s much scarier and potentially humiliating to reveal all. Particularly if others expect you to be more than you are…

    @insidebox try “Get Recent Comments”? I think that might show it. If not check out clickable culture they have something that shows 5221 comments on 4158 entries

  3. Yeah, I’m conscious of the irony, Laurel! But it does raise the question of how meaningful raw numbers are, even in the sort of ranking games people play, because of the very disparate size of the different micro-publics interested in various issues/topics represented in the blogosphere.

  4. Hi Laurel, thanks for referencing my post!

    Like you I also thought 30 visitors a day was pretty exciting, and yes I agree it’s interesting to occasionally show people how many people come to visit.

    In showing that I now get 200 odd (and a variation of 40-400 per day) uniques, I was also illustrating that to be in this blog business you have to be a) in it for the long haul and be prepared to build credibility slowly and b) have some other reason for maintaining a blog than to attract readers.

    Old news for you and most of your (many!) readers, but all too often you see posts giving blog newbies tips that leave them to believe they’ll be getting thousands of readers from day one – and as we know, that just ain’t going to happen!

    For example, the other day I saw a post by someone giving a tip of placing free ads with a URL back in Craigslist to get readers. A daft idea if I ever heard of one, as obviously clicks on your site and ‘readers’ are two very different things

  5. Laurel – great overview of the suite of metrics that can be used to measure social currency (or, site ranking, or site relevance, or influence, or traffic, or …).

    What your post also says to me is that there are many (non ‘technical’) people out there who might know enough (or be opinionated enough) about any topic to meaningfully blog about it but who will have little hope of assessing what impact they are having (reputationally, financially, etc) with what they create.

    Defining ‘relevance’ is likely to be a fun debate for a while yet – the world in which we participate is such a wonderfully emerging playground!

  6. Genius post Laurel.

    I’ve been thinking about starting a self help group called Blog Stat Junkies.

    My name is Paul and I’m addicted to my site stats.

    Can we group hug now?

  7. I’m sorry, no group hugs, it will diminish my coolness/social currency. 😛 *hugs*

  8. Howdy! This is kind of off topic but I need some advice
    from an established blog. Is it hard to set up your
    own blog? I’m not very techincal but I can figure things
    out pretty fast. I’m thinking about creating my
    own but I’m not sure where to start. Do you have any tips or suggestions?
    With thanks

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