All entries for Wednesday 04 January 2006

05 vs 04

Now that the first term is over and done, it's interesting (well, to me, anyway) to compare what happened in Warwick Blogs in autumn term 05 versus 04. If there were many fewer entries or comments this year as opposed to last year, that would suggest that there was something of a novelty effect which was wearing off. If there was growth, that might suggest that there is a something of more lasting interest and use going on here.

So what do the numbers look like? Courtesy of Kieran's magic SQL fingers, like this:-

	Autumn 04	Autumn 05
New blogs	2,315	1,026
Posts	11,444	12,704
Authors	1,640	1,275
Comments	21,893	24,365
Commenters	2,819	3,080
Images	17,407	20,070
Page impressions	1.2 million	2.9 million

So what to make of it? Well, the number of new blogs being less is not surprising; last year nobody had a blog, so there was a bigger population to draw from. What interests me the most is that although posts and comments and the number of people posting and commenting have remained broadly constant, increasing only slightly, the number of people reading Warwick Blogs - the page impressions - has more than doubled. Who are all these silent readers? Where do they come from? In part, of course, they come from Google; as the corpus of WB has grown, so there is more chance that some arbitrary Google search will return a result within WB, luring the unwary googler into our evil lair. But it also looks as if more people find it a worthwhile destination for its own sake this year than last year, which is nice.

One other interesting quirk which isn't in the table; the page impressions don't count requests for images from galleries. Those requests run at about 2.5 times the page impressions rate; so we serve about a million pages a month, but we serve 2.5 million images from galleries in the same period. That was mildly startling to me, although it turns out that Google is once again partly to blame; Google Images just loves the 70,000-odd images that Warwick people have uploaded into their galleries. That's quite pleasing in a way, though I was less sure whether I should be pleased when it was pointed out to me that the top request from Google Images comes from a search for girls kissing, where WB scores an impressive fourth place result. Hmm.

John Dale : 04 Jan 2006 17:56 |  Tags: BlogBuilder |  Comments (11) |  Close comments |  Report a problem