It feels like I haven’t done a metadata Monday for a while, so maybe, a slow early spring Monday is a perfect time to rectify this oversight.Since I last metadata-ed, I’ve made 123 posts for a total of 323 and have moved from right around 56 page views per day to just over 70. There has been a steady climb in page views as the quantity of content grows and my blog has become more visible and as new readers discover the brilliance (cough, cough) of my musings.
One of the cooler new features offered by the service that hosts this blog (wordpress.com) tracks the location of various readers. They’ve been tracking my readers for about a month now, so I have at useful little dataset.
Only 48.6% of my visits come from the United States. The rest comp from a mix of other places. The UK ranks second (8.8%), followed by Greece (8.6%), Canada (3.6%), and, oddly enough, the Philippines (3.3%). Australia ranks sixth (3.2%), with Italy (2.7%), France (2%), Turkey (1.9%), and Spain (1.5%) filling out the top ten. The vast majority of the countries (99%) on the list have more than page view. It’s interesting that I don’t receive any views from China or Iran. These were countries from which I consistently received views in the past (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and, of course, here (which doesn’t actually have metadata but was delicious!)). I wonder if my blog is blocked now?
UPDATE: I just heard through a friend of a friend that wordpress.com is blocked in China which accounts for the lack of page views from there.
Over the same 30 day span, my internet community looks a bit different. The vast majority of page views (72.5%) come from search engines. My old blog, which I leave up as a cleverly set trap for crawling searchers pushes 6.6% of my page views in my general direction. Kostis Kourelis blog send 2.6% my way (although the author has admitted that many of those might be his views; they still count!). Research News in Late Antiquity, Surprised by Time, Corinthian Matters, Paperless Archaeology, all send right around 1%. I still haven’t quite figured out the extent to which I should use Twitter and Facebook, but the two combined for about 1.6% of my views.
So, if you’re an regular reader, I apologize for turning you into a number, and I appreciate you taking time to view my little pseudo-literary adventure here! Keep coming back!
