This Blog

I've been hammering away at this blog since May 2006. Yes, that long. It rarely attracts much traffic, but in glancing at my analytics today I see that I'm approaching 125,000 pageviews. It's time to take stock.

How Do People Get Here?

Google dominates, with twice as many referrals as Twitter. After that comes Facebook, my own web page, and various flavors of Google (UK, Canada, etc.).

What's more interesting is a list of keywords that most often land people on my blog. The top:

1. cognitive mobilization
2. political knowledge and political participation
3. titular colonicity
4. cognitive mobilization definition
5. whatpeopleknow.blogspot.com
6. in hell
7. perceived knowledge
8. hot place
9. michelle bachmann
10. what people know

A few words about this odd list. Yeah, I wrote about Bachmann, probably too much. And titular colonicity is just too much fun. Early in my blogging I wrote about "cognitive mobilization" mainly because it was an early research area of mine. Haven't touched the stuff in years. As to "in hell" and "hot place," I did some posts like this one that probably attracted traffic.

Top Posts

A few years ago there was an infamous walkout at our student newspaper, The Red & Black. I wrote about it. A lot. As you can see below, my posts from that period in summer 2012 lead the way in terms of popularity.

In all, five of my top 10 posts involve the R&B walkout. You can take to Google and get the background because, frankly, I'm in no mood to write more on the topic other than to say the good guys won. Otherwise you can see the top posts more or less reflect the keyword results above. To the left, my traffic spikes over time. That weird 2010 spike? No idea. I've gone back and for the life of me I can't figure it out. While I can't yet find the specific post, I'm fairly certain I blogged about something, put an image on the blog, and mentioned it in a listserv that generated a lot of visits.

Where Are Readers From?

It's no surprise that most of my audience is based in the U.S., but what may be surprising -- or disconcerting -- is that second place is owned by Russia and 5th place by Ukraine. See the list below:

1. U.S. (81,156)
2. Russia (5,488)
3. Germany (4,205)
4. U.K. (2,979)
5. Ukraine (2,452)

Other Factoids

Chrome is the leading browser, used by a third of my audience, followed by Firefox (26 percent) and Internet Explorer (22 percent). Windows computers make up 61 percent of my traffic.

Summary

I have no summary. This is a modest blog, one that rarely influences or informs or even entertains. And sometimes it does all three. It has migrated from being strictly about political media research to one that covers lots of different things, but beyond that there's little more you can say.