Posts
I'm proud to announce that, today, Philosophical Comment (using the statistics of Blogger) reached the handsome number of 200 000 reads.
Thank you!
Showing posts with label statistics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label statistics. Show all posts
Monday, 10 March 2014
Sunday, 29 December 2013
This Was Philosophical Comment 2013
Time once again to make a bit of a summary for this blog during a year which will soon end – last year's summary is here.
The trend mentioned last year of a seemingly (after my recovery from illness) continuously increasing popularity (in terms of reads) seems this year to have initially continued and then leveled out somewhat after last year's extremely positive surge. The monthly figures have in 2013 been residing rather steadily between over 6 000 and over 9 000 reads, with 9 549 as the top figure for September and today the total number of reads ever passed 188 000. There will, however, be a notable dip in reads for this the last month of the year, as with a few days left the figure is still only at slightly more than 3 600 (click the image to see a larger version).
I have also noticed a tendency of a less secured minimum number of monthly hits during autumn, although I've had a few posts that have attracted more than the average attention to make for good monthly figures in the end. A main explanatory factor for this development, as it seems, is that Blogger has chosen to move its Blogs of Note page, where Philosophical Comment has been featured and thus widely displayed at the top since August 2012, into archive mode, favouring instead the increasing integration with the Google+ platform and its blog function. During the year, I've also – albeit with some reluctance due to my dislike of the increasing dominance of Google and what that means to make for a less dynamically evolving internet – finally chosen to integrate Philosophical Comment with Google+, although much remains to be done on that front to have impact on read numbers. I have to say, I do prefer to have the quality and attraction of posts to determine readership over strategic marketing tricks like these. But I can't deny the world around me, so here we are, we'll see next year if I managed to conjure the energy to maximize exposure in this new environment, or found the time and inspiration to post more regularly.
So, over to the posts themselves. This is the all time high statistics of the blog so far (click the image to see a larger version):
Compared to last year, some significant changes have occurred. First, after several years at the top, the WikiLeaks piece is now third, with my musings over various less impressive sides of the new online landscape of academic publishing is at the top. There are still a few posts connecting to my comments on the many strange moves connecting the the management of the American Journal of Bioethics up there, but as that affair is now a thing of the past, I expect these to gradually be pushed down and eventually off the list by fresher and more relevant material. A few posts that made last year's all time high list have been so pushed off, to be replaced this year by a rather sarcastic piece commenting on a scandalous and eventually officially declared unlawful police registry of roma people in south Sweden, a lament over my academic colleague Adrienne Ash, who sadly passed away this year, a brief pointer to a post by my colleague Udo Schuklenk on his Ethx Blog regarding how to reason around the idea of a military intervention in Syria and, finally, a cross post and referral to a nicely indexed eminent series of posts on moral responsibility, free will and such matters by John Danaher on his Philosophical Disquisitions blog. Not that John really needs the assistance, but I'm nevertheless happy to have been able to thus helped a few people find their way to one of the better philosophy blogs around. Off the list fell, most notably, my comment on how to assess the possible criminal insanity of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik. It may also be noted that while last year it took about 650 reads to make the list, a post this year needs to get above 840, another indication that the leveling out of reads numbers mentioned above has more to do with a less stable minimum than decreased numbers of the top hits of this blog.
Finally, as tradition dictates, a look at the geographic source of the total readership (click the image to see a larger version):
The USA readership is increasing its dominance further, and in all the main reader of Philosophical Comment continues to be anglophone or European, although China has this year made the top ten country of reader list. The full span of the geographic home of readers, however, is better displayed by this image from the ClustrMap function attached to this blog (where larger red markings indicate a larger concentrated number of unique readers of the blog – click the image to see a larger version):
This function displays statistics starting later than Blogger's own, and also counts only unique hits on the entire site (thus not number of readers of individual posts or number of reads). As you can see, Philosophical Comment has a notable readership also in South America, Asia and, albeit still weaker, throughout Africa. Go here to inspect the numerical relations in more detail!
So, that's it. As usual, I wish to thank all you people who read Philosophical Comment, who follow the blog in the various ways available, who comment on the posts, like them on Facebook and other places, +-click, tweet, cross-post and refer to them in other ways. A happy new year and a very best 2014 to you all!
The trend mentioned last year of a seemingly (after my recovery from illness) continuously increasing popularity (in terms of reads) seems this year to have initially continued and then leveled out somewhat after last year's extremely positive surge. The monthly figures have in 2013 been residing rather steadily between over 6 000 and over 9 000 reads, with 9 549 as the top figure for September and today the total number of reads ever passed 188 000. There will, however, be a notable dip in reads for this the last month of the year, as with a few days left the figure is still only at slightly more than 3 600 (click the image to see a larger version).
I have also noticed a tendency of a less secured minimum number of monthly hits during autumn, although I've had a few posts that have attracted more than the average attention to make for good monthly figures in the end. A main explanatory factor for this development, as it seems, is that Blogger has chosen to move its Blogs of Note page, where Philosophical Comment has been featured and thus widely displayed at the top since August 2012, into archive mode, favouring instead the increasing integration with the Google+ platform and its blog function. During the year, I've also – albeit with some reluctance due to my dislike of the increasing dominance of Google and what that means to make for a less dynamically evolving internet – finally chosen to integrate Philosophical Comment with Google+, although much remains to be done on that front to have impact on read numbers. I have to say, I do prefer to have the quality and attraction of posts to determine readership over strategic marketing tricks like these. But I can't deny the world around me, so here we are, we'll see next year if I managed to conjure the energy to maximize exposure in this new environment, or found the time and inspiration to post more regularly.
So, over to the posts themselves. This is the all time high statistics of the blog so far (click the image to see a larger version):
Finally, as tradition dictates, a look at the geographic source of the total readership (click the image to see a larger version):
This function displays statistics starting later than Blogger's own, and also counts only unique hits on the entire site (thus not number of readers of individual posts or number of reads). As you can see, Philosophical Comment has a notable readership also in South America, Asia and, albeit still weaker, throughout Africa. Go here to inspect the numerical relations in more detail!
So, that's it. As usual, I wish to thank all you people who read Philosophical Comment, who follow the blog in the various ways available, who comment on the posts, like them on Facebook and other places, +-click, tweet, cross-post and refer to them in other ways. A happy new year and a very best 2014 to you all!
Sunday, 6 January 2013
This was Philosophical Comment 2012
So, this being the last day before I'm back at the office after the winter holidays, I sense it's the last chance to provide my traditional summary of the basic statistics of this blog for the year that has just passed (the one from last year is here).
First out, an image demonstrating the number of readers over the blog's entire existence that illustrates several things worth highlighting:
As you can see, there was a drastic and significant dip in readership from February (which was a top month of the blog up till then with 6 477 readers) to July (1 852 readers). During this time, I was acutely ill in what turned out to be Hashimoto's thyroiditis, a metabolic condition causing a number of very uncomfortable symptoms, initially mostly of a mental nature and in my case akin to what used to be called a "breakdown", that left me on whole or partial sick-leave till October last year. Hence, during this acute phase I made only five posts, and the decrease of readership can be linked to that, since as soon as I started posting again from August, readership quickly went back to former levels and then increased even more, hitting an all time high in October with 7 234 readers. So, in spite of the dip, the long-term trend of ever increasing popularity of Philosophical Comment is holding up! Total number of readers in 2012 ended up equaling 50 776 and the total number of readers over the entire life of the blog is now very close to 100 000 and will break that ceiling in early 2013.
2012 also turned out to be the year when Philosophical Comment started to receive some major recognition. First, New York Times linked to my report of the death of J.J.C. Smart and, as will soon be obvious, made it one of this year's most popular ones. Just recently, The Guardian used one of my posts from 2011 as a source in an article on the process of privatisation of public health care in Sweden – namely one of my comments on the attempt of the director of leading Swedish private thinktank/research institute, Centre for Business and Policy Studies (SNS), to silence research demonstrating the weak scientific basis of this policy trend - making that piece to quickly rise in the statistics of readers per post. Since mid August, Blogger lists Philosophical Comment in the first row of its "interesting and noteworthy" Blogs of Note, of course, helping to explain further the continued success. Unfortunately, the increased attention has also brought some undesirable side-effects in the form of annoying spam commentators, recently forcing me to temporarily (I hope) change the comments function from open to moderated.
So, over to the popularity of individual posts:
The piece on the Wikileaks cablegate publication from 2010 is still firmly placed at the top, no doubt thanks to the continued publicity around the handling of Bradley Manning, further publications from Wikileaks and the continuously bizarre personal developments around Julian Assange due to his no doubt very deeply felt insistence to avoid visiting my country to be interviewed by the prosecuter regarding rape and sexual coercion allegations. The posts from 2012 that have made the list are, as indicated, the one on the death of J.J.C. Smart and two early posts on the troubles around the management of the American Journal of Bioethics that came to last over several months, with the resignation of Summer Johnson McGee from the post as editor in chief and manager of Bioethics.net as the last event in a long series of several both odd and disturbing ones (links to reports of all of these can be found in the post just linked to). Besides that, I'm very happy that a piece on how academics and students should and could mind themselves in the new landscape of fake or extremely sub-standard online open access journals. The other pieces include, another one of the scandal around Centre for Business and Policy Studies (SNS) from 2011, as well as a not very surprising one as top hit on how to assess the culpability of Norwegian anti-muslim mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik from the same year (I might add that the final court verdict ended up being exactly in accordance with my analysis in this post).
Over to readership, I'm very happy to be able to confirm the continuing internationalisation of the blog, where both the UK and USA are now stronger as the home country of readers than Sweden, where especially Russia but also Germany and Canada are slowly gaining.
In spite of the obvious and rather expected dominance of anglophone and/or European countries as the origin of the readership, as a whole, Philosophical Comment is truly global in its outreach, with many readers from Asia (especially Japan, India, Indonesia and the Philippines) and South America, which can be viewed with the help of this tool (linked to the blog later than the blogger-statistics given earlier and, in addition, calculating hits slightly differently, but nevertheless serving this particular purpose fine).
So, with hope for the best to all of you in 2013, thanks to all readers, commentators, linkers, tweeters, posters, thumbs uppers, and what have you in this increasingly exciting world of borderless online communication!
First out, an image demonstrating the number of readers over the blog's entire existence that illustrates several things worth highlighting:
As you can see, there was a drastic and significant dip in readership from February (which was a top month of the blog up till then with 6 477 readers) to July (1 852 readers). During this time, I was acutely ill in what turned out to be Hashimoto's thyroiditis, a metabolic condition causing a number of very uncomfortable symptoms, initially mostly of a mental nature and in my case akin to what used to be called a "breakdown", that left me on whole or partial sick-leave till October last year. Hence, during this acute phase I made only five posts, and the decrease of readership can be linked to that, since as soon as I started posting again from August, readership quickly went back to former levels and then increased even more, hitting an all time high in October with 7 234 readers. So, in spite of the dip, the long-term trend of ever increasing popularity of Philosophical Comment is holding up! Total number of readers in 2012 ended up equaling 50 776 and the total number of readers over the entire life of the blog is now very close to 100 000 and will break that ceiling in early 2013.
2012 also turned out to be the year when Philosophical Comment started to receive some major recognition. First, New York Times linked to my report of the death of J.J.C. Smart and, as will soon be obvious, made it one of this year's most popular ones. Just recently, The Guardian used one of my posts from 2011 as a source in an article on the process of privatisation of public health care in Sweden – namely one of my comments on the attempt of the director of leading Swedish private thinktank/research institute, Centre for Business and Policy Studies (SNS), to silence research demonstrating the weak scientific basis of this policy trend - making that piece to quickly rise in the statistics of readers per post. Since mid August, Blogger lists Philosophical Comment in the first row of its "interesting and noteworthy" Blogs of Note, of course, helping to explain further the continued success. Unfortunately, the increased attention has also brought some undesirable side-effects in the form of annoying spam commentators, recently forcing me to temporarily (I hope) change the comments function from open to moderated.
So, over to the popularity of individual posts:
The piece on the Wikileaks cablegate publication from 2010 is still firmly placed at the top, no doubt thanks to the continued publicity around the handling of Bradley Manning, further publications from Wikileaks and the continuously bizarre personal developments around Julian Assange due to his no doubt very deeply felt insistence to avoid visiting my country to be interviewed by the prosecuter regarding rape and sexual coercion allegations. The posts from 2012 that have made the list are, as indicated, the one on the death of J.J.C. Smart and two early posts on the troubles around the management of the American Journal of Bioethics that came to last over several months, with the resignation of Summer Johnson McGee from the post as editor in chief and manager of Bioethics.net as the last event in a long series of several both odd and disturbing ones (links to reports of all of these can be found in the post just linked to). Besides that, I'm very happy that a piece on how academics and students should and could mind themselves in the new landscape of fake or extremely sub-standard online open access journals. The other pieces include, another one of the scandal around Centre for Business and Policy Studies (SNS) from 2011, as well as a not very surprising one as top hit on how to assess the culpability of Norwegian anti-muslim mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik from the same year (I might add that the final court verdict ended up being exactly in accordance with my analysis in this post).
Over to readership, I'm very happy to be able to confirm the continuing internationalisation of the blog, where both the UK and USA are now stronger as the home country of readers than Sweden, where especially Russia but also Germany and Canada are slowly gaining.
In spite of the obvious and rather expected dominance of anglophone and/or European countries as the origin of the readership, as a whole, Philosophical Comment is truly global in its outreach, with many readers from Asia (especially Japan, India, Indonesia and the Philippines) and South America, which can be viewed with the help of this tool (linked to the blog later than the blogger-statistics given earlier and, in addition, calculating hits slightly differently, but nevertheless serving this particular purpose fine).
So, with hope for the best to all of you in 2013, thanks to all readers, commentators, linkers, tweeters, posters, thumbs uppers, and what have you in this increasingly exciting world of borderless online communication!
Tuesday, 20 December 2011
Merry X and a Happy Y from Philosophical Comment!
We are approaching (or perhaps in some cases already in) that period this time of year where various festivities originating in the phenomenon of winter on the northern hemisphere of the Earth and that of summer on the southern are taking place. Call it whatever you like, regardless if you want to install some sort of institutionalised religious connotations into it or nor not – for the purpose of this post I'll call it X. We are also quickly getting closer to a night that in many people's minds has a meaning over and above expressing the calendar convention invented in the 1500's. Nowadays mostly an excuse for adding to CO2 emissions in spectacular manner that is televised all over the globe, I'll call this phenomenon Y. As we are approaching X and Y, like last year, I thought that I should sum up how Philosophical Comment during has been doing in 2011 – if nothing else for the practical reason that after Y, my blog statistics will not tell me specifics for that year.
The overall trend is that the interest in Philosophical Comment is growing in a (for me) rather unexpected way. Here's a graph illustrating the number of readers since May 2009 to this day (December 20, 2011):
As I write this, the total number of readers is quickly approaching 40 000 (thirty-eight and a half thousand to be precise). The last 3 months have ended with over 4000 readers each and if nothing extraordinary takes place, this will be the result also of December.
Looking at the posts from this year, the charts in terms of number of readers looks like this:
For some reason that is beyond me, a post in a series reporting about a partly inside, partly official quarrel related to a leading research journal in my field, The American Journal of Bioethics, has continued to attract readers in spite of being a matter of the past and is the top 2011 post by far. The reason for why the second place is occupied by my piece on publication ethical problems within bioethics is far more understandable, not least since it spurred quite a lot of debate involving, among others two chief editors of bioethics/medical ethics journals. It is an even smaller surprise to find my take on the decision to declare Norwegian extreme right terrorist and mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik legally unaccountable attracting readers – the post has also been linked to by several bloggers in Norway and other Nordic countries. After these comes a number of posts that have attracted well over 500 readers each, among which I am particularly happy to find a very recent one (thus promising more) on where activists who have been targeting the quack scam cancer clinic run by a Stanislaw Burzynski should be directing their attention to put a halt to this sorry excuse for medical practice. I'm also pleased that one of the posts on the very controversial and heavily criticised claim of Priscilla Coleman that abortion can be shown to cause mental health problems (as it seems, solidly rebutted by a recent huge study, if not before) made the top list.
It is difficult to extract more precisely what sort of people from what places are reading Philosophical Comment, but one trend this year is clear; Russia and Germany are picking up behind USA, Sweden and the UK. Now, if I look at statistics for particular weeks or months, odd countries of all sorts may pop up, but the just mentioned are the clear top sources of readers. So, in all, the readership continues to be quite global, although some countries from the northern hemisphere are dominating as the home of readers:
And here's a list to underscore the trends:
So, that leaves me nothing more than to thank you all who read, link, pass on, quote, comment and so on. See you next year, here or on twitter. Merry X and a happy Y!
The overall trend is that the interest in Philosophical Comment is growing in a (for me) rather unexpected way. Here's a graph illustrating the number of readers since May 2009 to this day (December 20, 2011):
As I write this, the total number of readers is quickly approaching 40 000 (thirty-eight and a half thousand to be precise). The last 3 months have ended with over 4000 readers each and if nothing extraordinary takes place, this will be the result also of December.
Looking at the posts from this year, the charts in terms of number of readers looks like this:
For some reason that is beyond me, a post in a series reporting about a partly inside, partly official quarrel related to a leading research journal in my field, The American Journal of Bioethics, has continued to attract readers in spite of being a matter of the past and is the top 2011 post by far. The reason for why the second place is occupied by my piece on publication ethical problems within bioethics is far more understandable, not least since it spurred quite a lot of debate involving, among others two chief editors of bioethics/medical ethics journals. It is an even smaller surprise to find my take on the decision to declare Norwegian extreme right terrorist and mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik legally unaccountable attracting readers – the post has also been linked to by several bloggers in Norway and other Nordic countries. After these comes a number of posts that have attracted well over 500 readers each, among which I am particularly happy to find a very recent one (thus promising more) on where activists who have been targeting the quack scam cancer clinic run by a Stanislaw Burzynski should be directing their attention to put a halt to this sorry excuse for medical practice. I'm also pleased that one of the posts on the very controversial and heavily criticised claim of Priscilla Coleman that abortion can be shown to cause mental health problems (as it seems, solidly rebutted by a recent huge study, if not before) made the top list.
It is difficult to extract more precisely what sort of people from what places are reading Philosophical Comment, but one trend this year is clear; Russia and Germany are picking up behind USA, Sweden and the UK. Now, if I look at statistics for particular weeks or months, odd countries of all sorts may pop up, but the just mentioned are the clear top sources of readers. So, in all, the readership continues to be quite global, although some countries from the northern hemisphere are dominating as the home of readers:
And here's a list to underscore the trends:
So, that leaves me nothing more than to thank you all who read, link, pass on, quote, comment and so on. See you next year, here or on twitter. Merry X and a happy Y!
Friday, 24 June 2011
July 2010 - June 2011: One Year of Philosophical Comment Statistics
So, this is some trivia before I go on my summer holiday, but if you follow this blog, perhaps also of some interest. Although the blog started late December 2009, the statistics function wasn't activated until May 2010, and the following didn't start to reach measurable levels until June-July that year. Thus, the statistics here presented cover almost a 12 month period starting from that.
1. Number of readers/hits
Over 18.000 in total
Over 1500/month on average
Over 346/week on average
Over 49/day on average
However, the deviation from the mean with regard to especially the weekly and daily averages is pretty drastic. In particular, the means are weighted down by the rather low following the first few months, so the daily hit average nowadays normally varies between 50 and 80. To work out the general picture, here's the trend for the entire period, with figures for hits/month:
2. Most popular posts
Here, it may be interesting to see an overview for the whole period, as well as for the last month. Obviously (and perhaps not surprisingly) the post on Wikileaks continues to be the hit piece by far. On second place, I'm quite happy to see that my take on some bad signs of current bioethics research has been a popular item. A rather late coming hit scoring pretty close to that is some recent comments on the ID card folly of Finland. Behind these three, it's a tight race between several posts on rather different topics. Some of these have been starting to move up the list some time after they were posted – something I interpret as a sign of having been early on a topic of forthcoming interest to a larger crowd, such as in vitro meat or uterus transplantation.
3. Country of readers
This is quite an interesting one for me personally. When I started, rather naturally, my readers were mostly Swedes, but pretty soon the US readership started catching on, while the UK has been a strong runner up to those two in the last 6 months or so. Otherwise, I have been pleased to find that Philosophical Comment attract readers from all over the globe. To provide some perspective, here are images displaying the proportions for the whole period as well as for the most recent month:
So, since I'll soon be off the computer for some time (one of my tricks for achieving some real rest during the short time of a Swedish summer), I guess the only remaining thing to say is thank you. To all of you who read, link, comment, repost, and so on.
See you in six weeks or so!
1. Number of readers/hits
Over 18.000 in total
Over 1500/month on average
Over 346/week on average
Over 49/day on average
However, the deviation from the mean with regard to especially the weekly and daily averages is pretty drastic. In particular, the means are weighted down by the rather low following the first few months, so the daily hit average nowadays normally varies between 50 and 80. To work out the general picture, here's the trend for the entire period, with figures for hits/month:
2. Most popular posts
Here, it may be interesting to see an overview for the whole period, as well as for the last month. Obviously (and perhaps not surprisingly) the post on Wikileaks continues to be the hit piece by far. On second place, I'm quite happy to see that my take on some bad signs of current bioethics research has been a popular item. A rather late coming hit scoring pretty close to that is some recent comments on the ID card folly of Finland. Behind these three, it's a tight race between several posts on rather different topics. Some of these have been starting to move up the list some time after they were posted – something I interpret as a sign of having been early on a topic of forthcoming interest to a larger crowd, such as in vitro meat or uterus transplantation.
One year
Most recent month
3. Country of readers
This is quite an interesting one for me personally. When I started, rather naturally, my readers were mostly Swedes, but pretty soon the US readership started catching on, while the UK has been a strong runner up to those two in the last 6 months or so. Otherwise, I have been pleased to find that Philosophical Comment attract readers from all over the globe. To provide some perspective, here are images displaying the proportions for the whole period as well as for the most recent month:
One year
Most recent month
So, since I'll soon be off the computer for some time (one of my tricks for achieving some real rest during the short time of a Swedish summer), I guess the only remaining thing to say is thank you. To all of you who read, link, comment, repost, and so on.
See you in six weeks or so!
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