Blog and browser popularity

A couple of months ago I read in a news report that Chrome had overtaken Firefox and Internet Explorer as the most popular web browser. Not among readers of this blog, it hasn't!

Here are the latest stats for web page browsers used to view this blog:

A couple of months ago I also noticed a surprising increase in the number of readers of this blog apparently coming from Ukraine.

I thought that there might have been one or two posts that appealed to Ukrainian readers, but no, the trend has continued.



At first I thought it might be because I sometimes blog about the Orthodox Church, and there are Orthodox Christians in Ukraine and Russia, but I actually blog far more about the Orthodox Church on my other blog, Khanya, which had only five Ukrainian reader in the last month -- there were many more from other countries with substantial numbers of Orthodox Christians, such as Greece, Bulgaria. Serbia and Russia.

Visitors to Khanya blog for 30 days ending 2012-06-28

I haven't seen any comments from anyone from Ukraine to say why they like reading this blog rather than the other.

Or perhaps Blogger's statistics are just screwed up.

Blog statistics - countries

Amatomu have recently began revamping their web tracking, and are offering several new statistical comparisons. I'm not sure how accurate they are yet -- one of the popular posts on this blog, Books to read before you die, dropped from most popular to zero reads the moment Amatomu brought in their new tracking system, whereas other trackers show that people are still reading it, so I think there are still some teething problems with the new systems.

But they are still interesting, nevertheless.

One of the new indicators is the countries people come from to read blogs, and I found it interesting to compare this blog with Khanya (my Wordpress general blog) and with my Family History blog.

The MyBlogLog widget shows that most of the recent readers of this blog are from the UK. So I thought I would compare the Amatomu statistics.

Notes from Underground



Khanya



HayesGreene Family History

The family history one seems to have a higher proportion of visitors from Australia and New Zealand, which don't feature on this blog.

I suppose that can be explained by having several recent posts on the Sandercock family, many of whom emigrated from Cornwall in the UK to Australia and New Zealand.

Khanya recently had a lot of visitors from Pakistan, which doesn't feature in the statistics for the other two. I suppose that could be explained by a recent article about the use of Allah as the name for God, and Pakistan having a large Muslim population. But there is a discrepancy: the article was mainly concerned with a law in Malaysia prohibiting Christians from using "Allah" as the name for God in their publications. Why then do more Malaysians apparently feature as readers of this blog, rather than the other one? Could it be that Pakistan is planning a similar law, thus arousing more interest there than in Malaysia, where the law has apparently been in force for some time?

I'm also interested in Amatomu's statistics about other things. In the two general blogs, this one and Khanya, Firefox is the most popular web browser. In the family history one, Internet Explorer is. I suspect that that is because family historians are less interested in computers for their own sake than most blog readers. For family historians, computers are primarily a tool and a means to an end, so they accept the default web browser that comes with their computer, as long as it works. Only when things go wrong will they look for something else. Other blog readers are perhaps more technically minded, and compare different kinds of software to find something they like.

Another interesting thing is the cities from which readers come, but I'll save that for a post on the Khanya blog, where the WordPress platform handles graphics better than Blogger.

What's up with Amatomu?

The Amatomo lists of popular blogs seem to have got really screwed up.

Consider this:

Fastest climbing blogs (overall)

Memoirs of a Self-Confessed Slut (+1453)

by memoirs-of-a-self-confessed-slut

The Spear Does Arabia (+1401)

by The Spear

Entropy (+1401)

by docmoo

Contact Online (+1370)

by David MacGregor

Travis Noakes (+1250)

by Travis

Contact Online has always been somewhere in the top 20 blogs in the religion section, until about a week ago, when it dropped right out of sight, and far from jumping up 1370 places, this evening it hit rock bottom:

65	Muslim Revolution Proudly Muslim Blogger | by Forwarders
66	nextchurch A space to share and shape ideas and theology about what the next church should look like. A South African contribution to the emerging church conversation. | by Andries Louw
67	Contact Online An Anglican News and Commentary site from South Africa | by David MacGregor

And the nextchurch one surely doesn't belong down there either.

WordPress versus Blogger

I have three general blogs on three different blogging platforms, and occasionally I compare them to see which is most popular.

The blogs are Notes from Underground on Blogger (this one), Khanya on WordPress, and my LiveJournal. The graph from Amatomu below shows that the oldest, the LiveJournal one, has the fewest readers, while the newest one, the WordPress one, seems to have the most readers. Is this because readers prefer WordPress to blogger?





Actually the comparison is not quite fair to LiveJournal. Most liveJournal posts are read by friends on feeds, and very few people read the actual blogs themselves. Nevertheless, it does seem to indicate a preference for WordPress on the part of blog readers, though as a blog writer I find it has several limitations, notably that it does not support Javascript, so all sorts of widgets and things just don't work.

But knowing which one readers prefer also affects the way I write. I now tend to be more careful about what I wrote on the Khanya blog, knowing that more people will probably read it. Notes from underground tends to get used for quick 'n dirty posts, and the LiveJournal even more so, or even just for pointers to posts on one of the others, if I think some of my LiveJournal friends might be interested, and I hope that some of them may comment.

Interpreting Amatomu

Today this blog reappeared on the Amatomu radar for the first time in more than a month -- it was ranked 200, and my other blog, Khanya was ranked 150 -- nice round figures, so I thought it worth remarking on them.

For more than a month now this blog has been ranked somewhere in the 230-240 range, so why did it suddenly shoot up to 200, and reappear in the top 30 in the News and Politics section? Not because there were any more readers, apparently. The number of readers has remained fairly constant for the last few days. So it must be because there was a drop in the number of readers of the other blogs on Amatomu, no doubt caused by the long weekend, and blog readers going away to where there are more interesting things to do than read blogs.

So where have all the blog readers gone?

I somehow can't imagine that most of them have gone to Moria, even though a very large number of South Africans do go there on the Western Easter weekend -- the top bloggers on Amatomu somehow don't seem to be the type. No doubt from today until the end of the week we will be able to read on their blogs what they have done, and this blog can sink back into obscurity again.

The other question raised by this is why the number of readers of this blog, even though it did not rise, apparently did not drop off as much as some other blogs. And perhaps that is answered by the Amatomu stats as well. Nobody seems to have read much that I have posted in the last week, and there haven't been many comments on recent posts. The most popular post, by far, remains one I wrote several months ago, commenting on a list of books to read before you die. It's still top with 232 reads over the last 30 days. The second one, Easter - Christian or pagan, which was posted even longer ago, has shot up, with 111 reads. Perhaps that explains why there hasn't been such a drop off.

The other thing that needs some explanation is why my Khanya blog, which I started a year ago, is more popular than this one -- it is ranked 150 on Amatomu, whereas this one is at 200.

The only reason I can think of is that WordPress blogs are more popular than Blogger blogs. I started the Khanya blog on WordPress at a time when many of the blogs I read were switching from Blogger to WordPress, because of the "new and improved" Blogger, in which many of the features no longer worked, and there seemed to be a mass migration to WordPress as dissatisfaction with the reduced functionality of Blogger increased.

But that doesn't explain why readers seem to prefer WordPress blogs to Blogger ones, and the Amatomu statistics don't give much of a clue about that. They reveal the phenomenon, but they don't explain it.

Any ideas?

The world's 50 most powerful blogs | Technology | The Observer

When I see this list of the most influential blogs in the world and realise that I've not read any of them, I know how far out of touch I am with popular culture.

Of course I've always thought being countercultural was better, but being countercultural when you don't even know the culture you're being counter to is rather difficult. So over the next fortnight or so, time and Telkom bandwidth caps permitting, I hope to go through this list and fill in the gaps in my education.

The world's 50 most powerful blogs | Technology | The Observer

From Prince Harry in Afghanistan to Tom Cruise ranting about Scientology and footage from the Burmese uprising, blogging has never been bigger. It can help elect presidents and take down attorney generals while simultaneously celebrating the minutiae of our everyday obsessions. Here are the 50 best reasons to log on

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.

Amatomu add religion category

Amatomu have added a "religion" category to their blog directory/aggregator.

This is an improvement, because before it wasn't clear where blogs with a religious dimension should be categorised.

There's still a gap though, because the existing categories don't leave much room for society, culture, arts and books. "Religion" could fit into that wider category, but not all of those things fit under religion.

Still, it's a lot better than Digg, where the humanities are left out altogether, and yet the rather narrow range of categories that remain are split into great detail. On the whole Amatomu is doing pretty well, and does better than Technorati in my view. It's the best tool for finding South African blogs and what South African bloggers are saying, and keeps getting better.

Amatomu - South Africa's answer to Technorati?

First it was South African Blog Top Sites, now it's Amatomu, which is billed as South Africa's answer to Technorati.

It's still in a testing phase, and there are lots of bugs to work out, but it seems to be quite a useful way of finding what South Africans are blogging about.

There doesn't seem to be any way of reporting problems, except through the main Mail & Guardian page (the M&G runs the site), so I'll mention some of them them here, in the hope that someone sees them.

• There doesn't seem to be a way to log in or out. There is a "Sign up" option, but tring to log in there produces the message that this e-mail address is already in use.
• How long will it remain a South African blog list? Is there anything to stop pyramid marketers from Korea or penis enlargers from Oklahoma from signing up?
  
• There is a category list, though I haven't found a way of searching it yet. It might be good to have some discussion on it, to refine it a bit.

Apart from that, it's looking good so far, and I wish them every success.

Blog celebrity?

It seems that my Notes from underground blog makes the C list in authority, based on links from other blogs.





But my LiveJournal only makes the D list, which is the lowest, and only a few other people link to it.

Of course this whole thing is just a ploy to get more links to the blog that does these things, and thus push up its popularity :-)