There was an unusual spike in visits here on Monday the 5th and Tuesday the 6th.
Nothing in the search terms indicated a reason nor was tehre anything out of the ordinary about any of the posts or comments that day to explain it but statcounter, recorded a similar spike.
For the first time in the history of the Olympics every country has at least one woman in its team.
That’s blooming marvellous and someone’s said it with flowers – leaving roses on the grave of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst.
The note on the blooms reads: In remembrance of your courage and determination. For the first time ever all Olympic teams have a female athlete. Thank you EMC.
London Olympic Stadium holds 80,000 people. This blog was viewed about 330,000times in 2011. If it were competing at London Olympic Stadium, it would take about 4 sold-out events for that many people to see it.
In 2011, there were 2,419 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 8,791 posts. There were 93 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 7mb. That’s about 2 pictures per week.
The busiest day of the year was October 20th with 1,947 views . . .
There’s no doubt the election was good for readership.
I can’t compete with the popularity of Kiwiblog and Whaleoil whose stats here and here show almost as many readers a week as I got in the month. But the number of visitors to this blog in November was the highest yet:
UPDATE: Open Parachute has the sitemeter blog rankings here.
Kia Ora, Air New Zealand’s in-flight magazine, has a blog watch in its February edition.
The two blogs featured are Kiwiblog and this one about which Kia Ora says:
Kiwiblog creator David Farrar has been “fomenting happy mischief” online for nigh on eight years and his followers grow by the day, with more than 6,500 regular commenters.
Right leaning Farrar is prolific, posting up to eight time s a day on a healthy mixture of politics, the internet and technology (even asking for help with his laptop).
From the window of her North Otago farmhouse, Ele Ludemann reflects on New Zealand’s social and political world from a rural and slightly right-leaning perspective. The self-confessed media junkie also provides titillating words of the day such as “bumfuzzle.
They rely on public access to Sitemeter stats which is why some popular blogs don’t feature.
Sitemeter always seems to be less generous with its counting than Stat Counter.
In September Sitemeter recorded 16,528 unique visitors for this blog and 22,818 total visits. While Stat Counter recorded 17,472 unique visitors and 24,206 total visits.
To put that in perspective the top three blogs on Open Parachute’s chart got 227207 visits (Kiwiblog); 147877 visits (New Zeal) and 134 942 visits (Throng New Zealand).
homepaddock This Year’s Visits and Page Views by Month
UPDATE: Open Parachute has the August blog rankings. If your blog isn’t one of the 214 ranked it might be because you need to have sitemeter with public access to stats.
Open Parachute has done the NZ blog ranks for July too, with a change in methodology which puts his rankings more in line with the other two.
Being out of the country for all of July with a couple of weeks with no access to a computer had an impact on visitor numbers to Homepaddock. It also showed a relationship between the number of posts and number of visitors.
I’d expected fewer posts to result in fewer return visits but it appears to also have led to fewer unique visits too.
homepaddock This Year’s Visits and Page Views by Month
However, while being in the top 20 is flattering, I’m very aware of that quantity deosn’t equal quality.
To stop myself taking too much from my place in the rankings, I note that spam outweighs real comments by about 10 to 1.
If that doesn’t work I look at some of the frequently used search terms which lead people to Homepaddock. They suggest people arrive by accident while hoping for some very strange things which they definitely won’t find here.
I’d asked a perfectly straightforward question: Was he a dope-smoking hippy? And the rest of his reply was: “I was a child of the 60s and 70s.”
I said that of course the answer was “yes”, and he said “I’ve given you the answer” and I said “yes”, and so on.
Smoking dope might have been normal for Goff and his friends in the 60s and 70s, but that doesn’t make it the norm for everyone.
I was a child of the 60s and early 70s and a student at Otago University in the late 70s but I never smoked dope.
I’m not making a judgement on the presumption that Goff did smoke dope in the past. We all did things in our youths we might regret in hindsight and wouldn’t do now.
But his answer does remind me of the definition of unintentional arrogance at Open Parachute:
“The assumption that the way we define reality is necessarily the last word.”
We all have different realities, formed and affected by our experiences.
Failure to understand this is not just arrogant it’s ignorant and, especially in a politician, it’s dangerous because it blinds them to a variety of possibilities for both causes and solutions.
There’s a school of thought that the only reliable way to rank blogs is by using actual sitemeter data for visits. Unfortunately, most blogs don’t make this information public. Perhaps if more did bloggers could compare their statistics with those for other sites or have a listed ranking. This would help their interpretation.
It depends on what you’re ranking of course, visits are only one measure, comments are another and some blogs get fewer visitors but more comments. But quantity isn’t necessarily the same as quality anyway.
However, since it’s all just a bit of fun and there’s no reason to keep stats secret, should anyone want to know how many people pop into Homepaddock, what they look at and where they come from, click on the Sitemeter logo above the Clustermap at the bottom of the sidebar and it’s all there for the world to see.
I started blogging last April but didn’t install Sitemeter until part way through July, since then it’s recorded:
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