Saturday 26 April 2008

Blog Posting and Waves of Interest






After a year of blogging I'm beginning to wonder just how much control we really have over the number of readers we attract. Bloglandshire is packed with advice and tips about methods to generate traffic ranging from creative tips where its 'content' that matters through to the 'dark arts' of SEO and link love techniques.

What I have noticed is that often the number of visitors is unpredictable and never seems to directly correlate with either 'news worthiness',' expertise, interest or originality. There seems to be a deeper 'force' at work perhaps an aspect of Chaos Theory in which the number of factors affecting the popularity of blogpost are that vast and interconnected that seeking the 'magic bullet' is perhaps a fools errand.

As an experiment I'm going to do a couple of posts over the next few days just to see what happens and then I'll post my findings and assessment. In fact this post will be one of the examples that will set out to test the hypothesis that:

Post popularity cannot be correlated to the quality of post.


There is of course a problem with the hypothesis...

3 comments:

  1. what ever you do m8 - keep the faith!

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  2. At the risk of ruining your experiment...the response to an individual post does seem to be random, and certainly not related to the quality of the post. I've written terrifically profound (I think) posts that have had no comments, whereas the daft ones rumble on for days. Mind you, I don't suppose actual comments reflect the number of people who have read it.

    I'm sure an equation could be constructed to explain it though...

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  3. You're so right.
    I have been telling that too those sponsoring services over and over again.

    ReplyDelete