A rough accounting

The Blob PageView Stats, wee hours 22 Oct 2021 = a week ago:

At the start of El Pandemico, I spent several weeks listening to the news and clipping cases and deaths into an Excel file to plot the rates. Then I stopped abruptly and with prejudice. Recording the number of cases was futility closet unless I/we knew and believed the baseline - how many people were being tested and so had a chance of becoming a documented case.

I was like that with The Blob. An earlier front-end of Blobspot made it easy to find how many people had read my deathless prose and so I reported, for example, the milestone of 100,000 PVs in 2015 about 3 years and 1,000 posts after the Birth of Blob. Then I gave up and with prejudice because of some frankly incredible fluctuations in these readership numbers. If Blogspot couldn't differentiate between human eyes-on-phone from a data scraping FAANG robot, the numbers offered no solace or feedback. Luckily for The Work, I didn't need to be thanked to continue to churn out my daily 700 words. 

On the Write Front, I engineered things so that the millionth word I wrote was Zeugma. But the 2 millionth word passed several months ago without any sort of acknowledgement. According to the hive mind these are the best / most clickable Blobs with their rough PVs

1. Stilt Walking Nonsense 15K a take-down of a meme on the molecular basis of happiness
2. Mary Anning's Dog 4K a passable short bio of the famous fossilista
3. Lack for Nothing 2.5K etymology of Waterford slang
4. GCHQuiz clues and Answers 1K  Ruminations on one 2016 Christmas Quiz
5. Normal accident 1K a near death experience by medical error
6. Castle Rackrent 1K an angry polemic about landlords and homelessness
7. Bellos II 1K a reasonable explanation of how Benford's Law works
8. Da Nags 1K a neat enough essay on the naming of race-horses
9. Baltic Ace 1K an anniversary report of a fatal collision in the North Sea
10. WASH 1K random ruminations on clean water

These are neither better nor worse, by any objective measure, than 10 average posts from The Blob. Note the criterion of average, rather than random. There is a tail of utter bollix in the archive: posts where even I, the author, cannot work out what is going on. So I exclude those but it is a mystery why these posts float to the top. 

It is also a mystery what is happening at the beginning of 2017 and in the Spring of last year. Then, more than a thousand visitors a day were dropping by every day [as illustrated above] Or what happened on 19th October this year when more that 5,000 ppl/robots dropped into Blobland and hopped out again sharpish never to be seen or heard of again? Whatevs! If you're reading this sentence, it means you have stamina; I hope you use any residual energy this day to do your community some service.