The 650-Cent Plague turns two

This blog post marks two anniversaries: I started this weblog two years ago (on January 15, with a review of the now-defunct manga magazine Daisuki), and this is also the 50th post. That means, for two years I’ve been publishing two posts per month here. On this occasion, I thought a look back might be appropriate. WordPress provides detailed traffic statistics, so here are five ‘fun’ facts about The 650-Cent Plague:

• Even if we bear in mind that web traffic statistics are always to be interpreted with caution, and that the number of hits isn’t equal to the number of people who have read a blog post, it boils down to: virtually no one is reading this.
• The people who did read this weblog probably didn’t find what they were looking for: most traffic comes via Google, and the most frequent search terms were related to the flower photographs of either Sarah Jones or Luzia Simons. Given that these searches were for the most part performed on Google Images, it seems likely that those visitors were simply looking for images by these two artists (which are available in better quality at the artists’ websites, anyway), rather than my short comparison of their art on the occasion of the Goslar exhibition.
• Another source of relatively high traffic was Facebook. I don’t have a Facebook account myself, but Robin Vehrs kindly posted a link to my review of his comic on Facebook. This resulted in the highest hits-per-day number in the history of The 650-Cent Plague (on August 4, 2012). The downside is: some people left comments pertaining to my review on Facebook, and I don’t have the chance to reply. Still not loving Facebook.
• Anyway, the real currency in blogging are not hits, but comments. And the comment numbers for this weblog are dismal. Still, thank you, everyone who left a comment here – all five of you.
• Having hardly any readers wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t take me so much time to write a blog post. I keep track of such things in a spreadsheet, and the average time spent on a post is almost 3 hours (not counting the time I spend reading the texts I write about).

Not yet, Colonel…

That being said, I still think blogging is a good exercise for any scholar. It helps me thinking about things, expressing that in writing, and remembering them. So I guess I’ll continue ‘talking into the void’ at The 650-Cent Plague for the time being. Any suggestions for how to make this weblog more interesting are highly welcome, of course.

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