2008 in Blogging

Because there's no better form of procrastinatory blogging than making traffic graphs:

That's how you know it's Science!

Unlike the last couple of years, 2008 did not see any gigantic spikes in traffic, despite a couple of posts that I thought would really have some juice. Shows what I know.

The first half of the year pretty much fit in with a steady upward trend since the move to ScienceBlogs (see below). In early June, though, it all got to be a bit too much, and I cut way back on posting (less than half as many posts in June as in the previous few months), leading to a major drop in traffic. Things more or less recovered toward the end of the year, but overall, traffic was pretty much flat for the year.

The three highest-traffic weeks come in a clump in late March and early April. Sadly, much of that was for stupid reasons-- the only post that drew major hits that I'm proud of was What Everyone Should Know About Science (the second-most-popular post of the year). The rest of the traffic came from Talk Like a Physicist, The Framing Fracas and subsequent posts, and the "Vox Day" incident, which was the most popular single post of the year. Whee.

I posted a list of my favorite posts of 2008 a while ago, and I don't think there was anything in December that would knock any of those off the list.

In the event that you're interested in the overall traffic trend for the blog, here's the graph of blog traffic from the very beginning. Like the graph above, it's binned by week, because that seems to be about the right time scale for smoothing out completely random fluctuations while still keeping a reasonable sense of the variation:

And that's where things stand at the start of 2009. I'll post some less meta stuff next week, honest, but it seems like sort of a waste to put anything too heavy in the day between New Year's and the weekend...