After outlining plans for the future, I guess it’s also a good idea to have at least a short look back at the first year of Signifying Media. In a way, this site was not only intended to provide a venue for thoughts and discussions about semiotics and media studies, but also to find out more about blogs by making one of them happen to me. So what has happened? I’ve decided to have a look at some numbers first, and then follow that up with a more subjective and introspective account later on.
Who is looking at this blog? First and most obvious of all, not a whole lot of people (about 30 somewhat regular readers according to my rough guess from reactions and stats, which I think of as a typical seminar size). So I’m glad that you are here; do make yourself comfortable. But let’s see whether we can break that less-than-lots down further.
In doing so, I realize that the first thing that goes out of the window is statistical significance. Looking at rectangles and wriggly lines, it is easy to profoundly interpret stuff that isn’t even really there, and completely ignore the fact that the data provides a very slim basis in the first place. So note that most of this is a game in the spirit of the original experiment: What happens when writing a blog? In this case, What happens to the blog author when he looks at his stats?
The server statistics show that roughly half of the hits come from the US, and another half from Germany, with a small trickle of hits from all-over-the-place. Given that crawlers often hail from the US, it’s safe to assume that a majority of actual breathing readers is here in Germany. As for the small trickle, two spikes for South Korea and Slovenia might well be connected with actual breathing colleagues who know me and live there. I’m glad you’re looking in now and again; welcome!
The same stats also show a roughly steady increase of hits over the first 12 months, with the most notable jump happening in June. None of this is especially significant and can probably be explained by more posts and pages being available, by the site being around for a longer time and attracting purely automated crawlers, plus of course the number of crawlers around and the frequency of their crawling increasing as well:
So what, if anything, happened in June? Fiction, mostly, as a comparison with the visits/sites diagram will show — if any jump happened, that diagram would place it not in June but in April/May, when the summer semester got started and I resumed more serious posting, and also directed some students to this blog by deviously including a link to the starting post on Signs and Media in the announcement for a seminar with the same title. And still, this fictional pointer at June corresponds nicely with the series of posts about the real problems of fiction in the same month, starting with the anti-semitic rabbit Assud on British TV, tying in with the workshop of the ‘Netzwerk Fiktion’ in Berlin, and leading into some research on observable fiction that is still ongoing with a focus on virtuality. This is also the topic on which I received the greatest number of replies from friends, colleagues, and some strangers. (One of the most baffling things about this blog is that while reactions from readers are generally rare anyway, practically none of the readers that do react can be motivated to post their thoughts in the comments, and send me email instead. But more on that in the upcoming introspection.)
Courtesy of the WordPress.com Stats Plugin, we can confirm that post views have grown and then stayed pretty much on one level for the second half of the year; and that publishing a post really does lead to a spike of hits during the next few days. Leaving out twitter announcements, as I did for a few weeks, has a noticeable effect (around -20%), which might still be pointing either to bots or to humans.
However, the most attractive single post happened a lot earlier than that: It has always been and still remains the short look at the destruction of the Daily Bugle in the context of Spider-Man‘s allegorizations of 9/11. Discounting the main page and the short CV up in the right-hand corner (which is fortunately one of the primary sources clicked on by persons googling for my name, as Google’s own statistics tell me), it beats all other content by a ratio of roughly 6:1.
Now some of that seems to be hotlinking to the two scanned images from the Black Issue and from ASM #614. But that isn’t all. A whole lot of referrals to this post — and almost exclusively to this post — originally came through myspace, from the profile pages of users with nicknames sounding like theBlueHulk, Batman99, and MakeMineMarvel (all of these just made up by me to demonstrate the general spirit). I’m not on myspace, and due to a strange and implicit idea about virtues in internet communication that I no longer subscribe to, I resisted the urge to find out more. So whether good or bad, myspace comic fans seem to have engaged that post some way or another. Without, of course, ever leaving a comment (sigh).
The rest of the post hits tail off in a very smooth curve from about 50 down to about 12 readers; German and English posts have about the same chance to attract readers, another sign that most of the readers are German after all. There is no tendency to prefer theory to nonsense, or vice versa.
Other referrers besides myspace are equally divided between twitter.com on the one hand, and various professional sites at Munich and Freiburg University and at various conference websites on the other. So no great surprises there. Likewise unexciting are search terms; the site is usually found when people are looking for me, and sometimes when they are looking at sources about Spider-Man‘s Black Issue.
Vice versa, by far the most clicks on this site lead users to twitter or to those same conferences. The one exception here is Andreas Parggers Derrida-Wiki. According to Google’s Webmaster Tools, the corresponding post is also among the most linked-to pages, for the perverse reason that 123people and similar sites use it to find out more about Pargger. Google also lists the top keywords for Signifying Media as comic, media and packard, which is nice.
Finally, I am puzzled by the akismet stats; while this useful plug-in is amazing at protecting us against spam, its statistical self-observations are clearly way, way off. I have no idea why, but thinking about that would require its own post. A better look at spam is provided by ozh’s wonderful spam-magnet tool. I leave you with this graph of last month’s spam results. Please provide your own interpretation.
I would like to add the following statistics: you’ve published more articles in the first half of January 2011 than in the second half of 2010.