100000 PVs

100KPV!

A milestone sort of day: The Blob passes 100,000 pageviews.  This is, therefore, all about you Dear Reader. We just passed 1000 posts = kiloblob and for the last two years+ they've been going up at a tad over 1 per day, so you might think that each post gets about 100 reads.  It doesn't work like that, however, because all most all the the PVs are to the opening page rather than to a particular post. At the moment The Blob is getting about 150 strikes a day [R showing PVs/day over the last month] , sometimes a little less than 100 [I get worried that a steep decline to oblivion in imminent] and very few days it scrapes over 200 [I delude myself that I'm about to go viral and start schmoozing with Justin Bieber].

As both of my friends live in Ireland, and as I do quite a bit of strictly local parish-pump stuff, I'm not surprised that Ireland provided the biggest chunk of Bloboreaders.  They have, however, recently been topped out by Merkins who are about 70x more numerous and have a high proportion of native English speakers.  I continue to be bemused by the number of readers from Russia [N=144m] and Ukraine [N=44m].  It might be because of an early post twinning Irish counties with Ukrainian Oblasts.  But that can't be the only explanation because I have virtually no readers from Belarus [N=9.5m] despite my linking their Voblasts with the 6 counties of Ulster.  The top 10 sources account for +80% of the traffic to The Blob, so there is a rather long tail.

Pageviews in a blog are a bit like citations for scientific papers: they peak a few months after publication and then disappear to a trickle over the succeeding decades. I don't expect any of my papers from the 1990s to get any more notice.  Hot as they were back then, science has moved on and folks are now citing more recent material. Some of my posts have been 'important' because I'm saying something new and interesting but much of the material here is strictly ephemeral and is in no sense timeless. Apart from that, some of it is impenetrable: not even I can understand what I was going on about in some of the earlier material.  Nevertheless, with my two-week event horizon, it's fun to pick random material from the Blobopast.  I think that must be what happens because older posts tend to have more PVs than more recent. I am up on the top page of Google for some stuff: I'm #1 for "Maude Delap" above Wikipedia for example. That's quite gratifying because I have been compiling a List of Women in Science which I think is rather good but which gets very little attention. ANNyway, 4 Blobs in the list below of posts with >200 strikes are these little essays about women making their way in a boy's world. The green Blobs seem to be accidental or from spam-attack because there really isn't anything in them that justifies the interest.

Nirenberg and Matthaei 1961	1114
Vital Statistics	733
Local Milk O'Magnesia	547
2014 Marmalade is IN	478
1339	474
Always for others	394
The World through Geoguessr	386
Vlambeer has bottle	369
100-up	363
Ireland's Shame	348
Jocelyn Bell Burnell turns 70	346
Pythagoras and the bean stalk	335
Maude Delap a life in the wet	326
Footless and fancy that	322
Eat! enough of the washing already	321
Potential energy	315
The Madness of the Inclined Plane	287
Banged up in chokey	252
Mary Mulvihill	244
Vexillology a la Nord	222
It's not helping your kids	210
Total for >200	8386

The 100-up post is really just a list of names of people who appeared early on in The Blob, so the interest here must be due to quite obscure biographical combinations put into Bing or Google: "Frank Ramsey Gene Wilder" "Ralph Leighton Raj Padam" and "James Gleick James Joyce James Lovelock" are all top-hit at Google.  Last weekend, for example, I got a slew of Bing hits looking for "Phoenician Deity" because that clue had featured in my 2013 Christmas Crossword and so I was halfway down page 2 at Bing. I presume some Sunday paper crossword in the Midwest was foxing readers with a comparative religion deficit.  In the US Midwest that would be everybody.

ANNyway, thanks for your continued attention, I write The Blob because I can do no other but it's nice to know that someone somewhere is reading the stuff.  Now if you'd only recommend me to your well-connected cousin in Minsk, I'd maybe get some traction there and be invited on a speaking tour by the Belarus Minister of Culture.