Blog hits and trends - John Jason Fallows

On its 11th anniversary, let’s look at blog statistics and and draw some lessons from this compilation:

click to enlarge

Frequency

The first thing to notice is that I wrote a lot until Dec. 2011:

oilelefant.com was a small startup at the cusp of Web 2.0 and even entered then maiden Geovation program, and a lot was written to launch and market a web offering
OpenWare is Esri’s Kuwaiti distributor, where I lived solo for over a year and the blog helped reach European, North American and South Asian audiences
brand-building is shown at left by the peaking graph, also per “social media circuit” described in this Slideshare

linear trend lines were calculated in Excel, adb show three distinct phases
I had two aggregators, Spatially Adjusted and Slashgeo, who helped spread the word, but when they closed shop my readership fell off a cliff
also starting 2012, I settled into a less manic blog posting pace with a flat trend in the middle
the last couple of years I rationalised my professional social media engagements
- Google+ disappeared (ditto Fusion Tables)
- started a Medium professional channel
- re-created LinkedIn with my social enterprise
- focus on GIS for pandemic & climate change
- joined a vibrant #gischat tweeting community
the latter became my de-facto aggregator as described above

The up tick in the trend at right also resulted from focusing on two topics in support of messaging for cottenham.info:

climate change tapestry as background to tackling social isolation in East Anglia villages
and now following the pandemic as it nests into the climate issues from the previous point

Note also an increase in the frequency of the posts, which also contribute to their relevance and public interest.