13 January 2008

What people read on blogs

Amatomu, South Africa's answer to Technorati (and much better than Technorati) provides statistics to show which blog posts are most popular, and some of the results are unexpected, to say the least.

By far the most popular post on this blog over the last 30 days is Books to read before you die. Admittedly it's a fairly recent one, but it seems to attract ten times as many readers as the next most popular one, on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Very few readers leave comments, though.

On my WordPress blog, Khanya, the current favourite post is The appearance of Jesus Christ, which was posted over 6 months ago, on 23 June 2007. It is quite a short post, which mainly makes reference to discussions that were taking place on a couple of other blogs. But again, very few people who visit it comment, so I've no idea if they've found what they're looking for.

The second most popular post on Khanya is a bit of a cheat, however. It was, like this one, wondering about what got people reading certain blog posts rather than others, and was inspired by some remarks of a blogging friend (whose blog has since closed), who was wondering much the same thing. The post is What to do on Sunday if you're bored? and I think I must have been pretty bored when I wrote it. And so must most ofl the other people who read it, since it still seems to be popular, in spite of being over four months old. Far fewer people seem to be bored on Tuesdays, though!

But apart from the "bored" posts, I still wonder what makes people read some posts rather than others, and yet the most popular ones seem to receive relatively few comments.

2 comments:

Sue said...

You need something that shows you how people found your blog, or at least the keywords used in search engines. I too find that sometimes surprising posts are the most popular, but then I look at the search terms used by people finding it via Google, and it makes more sense.

People who find blogs via search engines are unlikely to comment, because they're just looking for information, and may not even know what a blog is or how to comment. I find that most comments come from regular readers, rather than those who just find one post after searching for something.

Steve Hayes said...

Sue,

WordPress actually supplies statistics of search engine terms, but I'm not sure how to do that on Blogger.

But yesterday people found my WordPress blog (Khanya) with the following searches:

Search Views
reactive policing 5
what to do on sunday 5
stuff to do on sunday 4
fun stuff to do on sunday 2
jesus christ 2
is christianity socially inclusive 2
brixton gauteng 2
ikon paraskevi 2
buddhism in america 2007 2
Do not apologize for the Slave Trade 1

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