Four-Year Anniversary

I started this blog on May 2, 2007, with a post entitled Yet Another Blog because, let's face it, did the world really need another blog?

Here are a few (less than) vital statistics about What People Know.

• Every month I posted at least three times, but the record busiest was August 2008 when for some reason I posted 46 times.  Guess I had a lot to say.  The average is about 20 posts a month.
• Most of the visits to my site come from the U.S., followed by Canada, the U.K., Australia, and India.  In all, I had visits from 94 countries.
• Among the U.S. states, Georgia obviously dominates since I live and teach there.  Next comes California, New York, Florida (lotsa people), and interestingly -- D.C., no doubt due to the political nature of my many posts.  Every state is represented, even 63 visits from my home state of Tennessee.  But, he added in frustration, not a single visit from my hometown of Lawrenceburg. Mom, I'm disappointed.
• My greatest traffic was on Monday, Jan. 25, 2010.  As this entry shows, it's because I wrote about a bogus "Census" document sent out by party hacks and posted it online and also to a discussion group I'm a member of, hence a lot of visits to check out the political silliness. 
• While most traffic came to the blog's main page, the most popular specific pages had to do with the entry above, and also about cognitive mobilization, knowledge versus emotion, recall versus recognition, and of course that favorite -- titular colonicity.  Search the blog yourself for an explanation of the latter.  It's fun (and a study needing to be done on mass comm journals).
• Visits to the blog was lowest, obviously, in 2007 since I didn't start until five months into the year.  It went up in 2008, up again in 2009, a little down in 2010.  It's too soon to say about 2011 but I'm behind the same point in 2007, so that's not good.
• Google led to 37 percent of my visits, followed by my own web page (19 percent) and direct traffic (18 percent).  Other sources were blogger, Grady College, Facebook and Twitter, and a sprinkling of others.
• I don't have specific numbers of comments, but they're few and far between (positive, or negative).  Negative ones tend to be by people whose books or comments about political knowledge I'd criticized.  

All in all, the reason I do this is as a resource for those interested in mass comm research to get leads on stuff they need for their own work, especially grad students.  It also forces me to keep up with the literature and sometimes to comment on the day's events.  Does the blog actually influence anything?  Nope, not at all, other than to generate comments by a handful of thin-skinned academics.

So Happy 4th Birthday, What People Know.