Six-Month Review

Borrowing heavily (to the extent that it may be considered outright thievery in some jurisdictions) from the regular "six-month reviews" that my blog buddy Paul O'Connor does at his excellent Longbox Graveyard blog, I present my first attempt at a six-month review for activity on the blog.

Note that this entry will not be quite as colorful and in-depth as Paul's, but give me a break -- this is my first attempt.

Mostly, I am just going to review and comment upon my most-read posts, and what that says about the blog. And since this is the first one of these, this does betond six-month review, and is more of a "history of the blog, so far" review.

My posts with the most views all have one thing in common: reposts and retweets by people with waaaaaayyyy more followers and friends than I have.

(1) May 28, 2013: Review of John Hodgman's book The Areas of My Expertise. The author retweeted the review to his 900,000 + followers, and less than .1% of them clicked through to the post. Still ... the most viewed post ever.

(2) December 21, 2012: Review of Jon Auther's book  Europe's Financial Crisis. He has far fewer followers than Hodgman, but many more must have clicked through to the review.

(3) May 28, 2013. My "Teaser Tuesday" entry about Lian Dolan's novel Elizabth the First Wife. I have long been a fan of Lian's, and have blogged about her more than once -- she is a faithful retweeter, and her followers are faithful click-through-ers. As a matter of fact, #7 on this list is my Feb 3, 2013 post on Lian's podcast "The College-Bound Chronicles."

I will note that my semi-regular "Teaser Tuesday" posts generate consistent clicks and comments.

Also, one trend is noteworthy: 2 of the top3 blog posts were from this year, so that's promising.

(4) January 1, 2012. Pure link-bait, this one. I posted my own "Podcast Awards" and tweeted out the entry to every podcaster mentioned, many of whom then retweeted the post. This entry also has the distinction of generating the most comments of any post.

(5) July 26, 2011. More link-bait, a list of podcasts focusing on books and authors. Looking back, this is my first entry that used that little trick, and was (by a factor of two) the most-viewed entry of 2011.

The next time I do this, in about six month, I'll focus just on those six months. Maybe I'll include some blog stats and trends, etc ...