December closed out with a record 100,631 hits at the blog site during the month, including a bit more than 16,000 during the last five days of the month when Judge Posner's visit no doubt prevented my site from seeing the 50-75% drop typical at sites with large academic readerships. The year 2004 saw about 750,000 visits to the site--I say "about" because of the transition time in November, when the WebStat counter was inactive, but the Typepad counter was working, and recorded some 60,000 hits. During the fall, the daily weekday traffic rose to over 4,000 hits per day, with about 2,000 per day on the weekends.
Roughly 2/3rds of visits are from folks who have been here before--the actual number is probably higher since no doubt some readers visit the site from different computers. My thanks especially to the regular readers. I am gratified that you've found this site worth your time.
Since I started the blog on August 3, 2003, about 80% of visits have come from U.S.-based computer addresses--about half of those .edu addresses. 5.2% of visitors come from the United Kingdom, 3.9% from Canada, and 1.6% from Australia.
Continental Europe accounts for about 2.3% of all visits, with the most readers coming from Germany (.6%) and France (.4%). Scandinavia accounts for another .8%, with nearly two-thirds of those from Finland. Japan produces .6% of the visits, and Singapore .4%. Other countries and locales that have produced .1 or .2% of the visits include Mexico, Brazil, Hong Kong, Israel, New Zealand, and Ireland. Given the small numbers involved (say, four or five hundred visits), this could simply represent two or three individuals who visit regularly!
My blogging habits are going to change a bit in 2005, at least through about May. I will be posting less, primarily for reasons of time. I will aim for more substantive, and discursive, postings on Mondays and Thursdays. I may put up short news items (e.g., faculty moves, occasional links to articles or notable items in Cyberspace) other days. I won't be posting on the weekends any longer, unless there is something time-sensitive that deserves dissemination.
I'm also giving up most of my other blog reading (other than the handful in the links to the left), and I am most definitely giving up my periodic perusal of the right-wing blogs (like InstaIgnorance). It demeans one's sensibilities in subtle ways to wade, even occasionally, through the fantasies and half-truths these parochial creatures recycle day in and day out. And no good (other than some light amusement) results from calling attention to their dishonesty and ignorance. There is enough right-wing pathology in the mainstream and traditional media that one hardly needs to supplement it with the blogosphere!
I will also be doing somewhat less on political matters, and somewhat more on academic matters--consistent with the original purposes of this site. I shall try to keep up with the "Authoritarianism and Fascism Alerts" and the "Texas Taliban Alerts," since those represent the two major, and related, threats to democratic and Enlightenment values in the United States today, and I perhaps have some modest value to add on these topics (and my sense is one portion of my readership is particularly interested in these topics). I shall have less to say about Bush & his bestiary of madmen, now that the election is past, except as it pertains to the preceding themes. There is still some hope that Bush, Inc. may yet self-destruct--witness their venal designs on social security--and that the rapacious greed of the plutocrats will be their downfall. But there is little I have to add, and these topics are extensively covered by others.
Recent Comments