I was planning to blog about an interesting thing I’d noticed in my blog stats. It’s this:
It’s my post on Valerie Shrimplin’s excellent Michelangelo book, which seems to be getting more and more popular. I’m pleased because I think she’s done a really interesting and exciting piece of work. The trough on the right is the period when people were reading the blog post on the Clioaudio server, so whatever the stats were, they weren’t registered here.
The reason I bring it up now is that John Hawks had an interesting post arguing that science is the draw to ’science blogs’. This has a response post at Uncertain Principles where Chad Orzel reads John Hawks’ claim that he doesn’t do much non-science blogging as he does zero non-science blogging than then lambasts him for not having a comparison sample. I’m assuming that’s a misunderstanding from not following John Hawks’ blog and not seeing that non-science posts sometimes appear rather than something sinister.
To be fair Chad Orzel does have the data to show that people don’t want to read about Physics. What I would say is that the population that doesn’t read about Physics on Uncertain Principles is not the same population that does read about Anthropology on John Hawks’ blog. This reason I think this is my own data. Here are my all-time top 20 posts. By all-time I’m not including the times this blog has been hosted on my own server, but it’s a reasonable sample.
At the same time I do occasionally post on politics and Britney Spears. In contrast to the posts above the Britney Spears posts are doing poorly, especially since genuine Britney photos were released on the web.
It’s not a huge surprise. This Britney post was a one-off event with a change of blog title and a Britney theme. I stole the idea from Britney Spears’ Guide to Semiconductor Physics. The most lasting effect was that for six months Microsoft indexed this site as The Britney Spears Site of, like, Really Old Stuff. If I want lots of viewers then forget creationists, postmodernists or posh hotels in Paris. People generally seem to want Archaeoastronomy, Archaeology and Ancient History.
Why the difference? Are Archaeology and Anthropology far more interesting than politics which in turn is far more interesting than Physics or Biology? I don’t know, but despite the ego-boost I doubt it’s true. I’m increasingly finding the US politics posts on Scienceblogs™ a turn-off because I’d far rather know the truth about Alistair Darling’s extraordinary eyebrows than which corporate funded politician is going to bring change to the US by reigning in the corporations. If I’m right and Physics is more interesting than US politics then why else might some Sciencebloggers have more success with politics than science?
One reason could be that I’m putting down ideas that I want to refer back to, and sometimes other people do as well. There’s a couple of entries which have been linked from Wikipedia. Some entries, like the one on Calçoene, are more or less the best English language version of a report anyone has access to at the moment. Both of these things mean they may have more longevity than a post about the harder sciences where the fields are moving faster. I suspect some posts just have a useful title for peculiar searches. It’s also possible that to some extent creationist bashing / atheism is what’s expected by readers of Scienceblogs™. I think that’s one of the things that annoyed Rob Knop at the defunct Galactic Interactions. That might seem unfair, but stereotypes often are.
Where I’d disagree with Chad Orzel and John Hawks is that you can measure the value of a post by page views. The best post on this weblog is Let’s hear it for Dr Chris Malyszewicz. Here’s the graph:
135 views. Most days none at all. It’s probably had a few more views than that because it’s one of the older posts, but not that much more.
I wrote it because someone heard there was to be a hatchet job on a clinic which hadn’t opened yet in an area which badly needed it. Malyszewicz claimed to have a degree from a university in Leicester and they wondered if I could help. What I did was put the facts out in the public domain. By and large it’s clear the public isn’t that interested. I think one person who did read it was the journalist and his editor who delayed the story. Later the scandal broke in the national press at the Guardian.
It’s not ancient history or archaeology. It’s not massively read. It’s not about peer-reviewed science. But it may have made a difference to a few people who haven’t read it.
I’m not sure how you measure the worthiness of blog posts. Page views might come in to it to a degree, especially when you start a blog. These days I’d be interested in an increase in readership that takes no effort, but I can’t be bothered with chasing numbers because whatever readership you have there’s always someone bigger. Of course I can say that because I’m very relaxed with 3000 views per week average. If I had 100 views per week, like some good bloggers do, then perhaps I’d have a different opinion.
