3rd December, 2007
NaBloPoMo Damage Assessment
Monday, 9:56 am in Bloglife
Okay, so that thing about NaBloPoMo assessment? Let’s do that now.
As it turned out, I made a total of 29 posts1 during the month of November, and considering I was out in the bush for half a week I’d say that’s pretty good. I’ve given a breakdown of each post in the cut, including the general gist of what it was about as well as how many comments (including my own) it received; overall, as well as a breakdown of v-s.net comments versus LJ comments.
- Review Review #1 28 (28-0)
Drama (causing), WPRs, void-star.net. - Nice Place, Don't Live There 24 (14-10)
Drama (commenting on), online communities, opinions. - Very Sage 9 (4-5)
void-star.net, layout. - My Top 5 Designing Resources 4 (4-0)
Links, webdesign. - Music Monday #3.5: Summer 3 (1-2)
Music. - R for Remember 0 (0-0)
Misc. - A Tale of Two Gritties 6 (0-6)
Comics, linkbait (positive). - Wednesday Morning Fanservice 7 (0-7)
Entertainment, short post. - The Beginner's Guide to the Election #1 16 (4-12)
Politics, opinions, ‘how-to’. - Justifying Readability 35 (23-12)
Webdesign, typography, linkbait (positive and negative), drama (causing). - Welcome to 1999! 8 (1-7)
LiveJournal, short post. - Unjust(ified) 3 (3-0)
Typography, webdesign. - Justify Bookmarklet 0 (0-0)
Typography, webdesign, bookmarklets. - 29shards: Cycle #3 0 (0-0)
Writing prompts. - Obligatory Birthday Post 23 (10-13)
Vanity. - More Blathering About Typography 12 (8-4)
Webdesign, typography. - Linkdump! 5 (5-0)
Links, misc. - Welcome to Web 2.0 18 (4-14)
void-star.net, vanity. - The Typography Mini-Survey 10 (10-0)
Webdesign, typography. - Buying a Mac? 23 (13-10)
OS wars, opinions. - Stop! Hammer Time! 6 (6-0)
Photo. - Does He? 1 (1-0)
Photo. - Where's the Milk? 0 (0-0)
Lifehacking, productivity. - Blog Burnout 2 (2-0)
NaBloPoMo, vanity. - Christmas Wishlist Meme 22 (4-18)
Meme, vanity. - Yiff in Hell, Furfags! 2 (2-0)
Art. - FAKTS 12 (0-12)
Meme, vanity. - LULZ DEMOCRACY! 13 (9-4)
Politics, real life, short post. - Back From Exile 4 (2-2)
Life.
So, what did I learn from this? Quite a bit about my readers, actually. Those of you who read this via LJ are quite different than the people who read this the raw blog. LJ readers are more likely to be interested in me personally and in interactions with me (in this case via the two memes). People who read the blog are more interested in drama and webdesign. Tech opinions were equally well-received, while politics was of more interest to people on LJ though probably because more of them are Australian rather than any other reason. As I’d observed in my rant on the 2nd, ‘creative’ posts were roundly ignored by mostly everyone (oh woe is the suffering artist, et cetera).
To back up some of the other observations I’d made on the 2nd, I also threw out two pieces of linkbait last month; one intentionally ‘positive’ and one intentionally ‘negative’ (though it got picked up positively as well). The positive post was A Tale of Two Gritties which got picked up by When Fangirls Attack. Mint tells me this bought in about 411 new visitors. The negative post was Justifying Readability, in which I not-so-subtly buried some bitchiness towards Jordan.2 This went round a bit via a forum and into Internet Police, whose post bought in about 258 visitors. For the record, ~Jem [h]’s ‘positive’ link to the same post got about 63 clickthroughs.
The interesting thing here is that visitors from WFA were overall less ‘valuable’ than visitors from IP. People coming in from IP were much more likely (and I really should’ve produced some back-up stats to justify this but I didn’t get around to writing the SQL so oh well) to have ‘deep visits’; at the very least they’d check out the ‘About Me’ page, the memberlist and scan the archive. They were also more likely to make return visits and to leave comments than WFA visitors. I’m not really sure why this would be so, but my best guess is that even though the IP post was negative, it was better targeted; the sorts of people who read IP are the sorts of people who are more likely to be interested in personal blogs in general. Of course, the other – slightly darker – option is that IP visitors were more likely to trawl around either a) looking for more drama, or b) trying to start some.
Of course the big question is whether or not NaBloPoMo has increased the overall traffic to my blog, and the answer is… well, I don’t actually know. Mostly because I don’t have another full month to compare to in Mint, and I’m too lazy to pull the stats out of sk.hits. I’m pretty sure I’ve picked up a few new regulars which is nice. And on a personal front? It’s damn hard, let me tell you, to find something interesting to post about every day for 30 days. And to be perfectly honest, asides from the raw challenge, I’m not sure what the point of the exercise is. NaNoWriMo I can understand, but I don’t think I’ll be queuing up next year for another month of furious blog topic finding.
So there you go.
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Comments
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From a visitor point of view, your increased posting on topics ‘relevant’ to me gave me a greater period of time to get to know (and enjoy) your writing style, which in turn means I’ll be more likely to come back again. As demonstrated by me commenting more regularly. It also made me link to you, although the only person that’ll benefit is me.. I don’t think many others use my links page.
I’m glad you noted how many hits you got through my positive link btw. I turned off my outward bound link tracker to speed up Mint, but in previous months there has been a massive difference in the amount of clicks depending on the context of a link. A ‘positive’ link (as you put it) only gathers a marginal amount of hits more than the first 10 commenters on a post, and is therefore only beneficial in terms of potential PageRank. On the other hand, a negative link is more likely to get a large proportion of my daily (regular) visitors flooding towards it. This difference between interest in positive/negative links isn’t affected by the amount of comments on my post or the amount of people clicking through from my feed. It’s something I’d like to study more closely but never remember to do so.. meh.
Anyway, this isn’t about me so I’ll stfu now. :S
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Anyway, this isn’t about me so I’ll stfu now.
Hah! No, I like long discussion comments; that’s why I’ve got them threaded. Actually, these are short compared to some of the ones I get over at LJ.
I don’t think many others use my links page.
I think you’d be surprised. I’ve had 214 hits from 19 sources from your blog. 45 from the actual links page. Okay, so some of those other ones are going to be from my comments, but the majority I notice coming through are actually from your sidebar links rotation thing. It may not seem big on those numbers, but compared to most link-page traffic that’s massive.
The difference between positive and negative linking and traffic has always fascinated me, too. It’s also partly why I think it’s much, much easier to be e-famous by having a ‘negative’ online persona. I’ve been trying to think of a way to properly test it; I think if you made a negative post tomorrow about me, then watched the clickthroughs from that during a 24-hours period (about the ‘peak time’ from your last post) that’d be an approximate indicator. Except then you run into a problem of context and… argh. Double-blind controlled trial this is not.
I’ve always been fascinated by the workings of online communities. I think I learnt it from Scot who was my inadvertent online mentor; as I understood it, he used to occasionally use the grep user base for just these kinds of experiments. Social engineering FTW.
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The ‘problem’ I have with the whole e-fame+drama thing is that it doesn’t necessarily work. OK, people go to the Internet Police for the drama and that’s what the hits are for. The same could be said for sites like PSGR (I’m assuming you know of PSGR). However, in my own personal experience, there is no difference between a normal day and a drama day in terms of hits (even with retards impersonating me on the blogs of those I criticise *groan*). The biggest benefit from a drama post is long term SERPs - google the domain of anyone I’ve pantsed and see who comes up 2nd
I don’t know whether the identical hits are because my blog covers a wide variety of crap and those who read the drama also read the other stuff, or whether I have twice the audience I realise and one half visits on the normal days and the other on the drama days. (LOL, not likely.)
Either way, as you say, it is fascinating. I guess people - no matter how much they protest and spout ‘holier than thou’ BS- love to watch the drama sparks fly.
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I think drama makes it easier to get ‘known’. Once you’ve got readers you’ve got readers, but for mostly-unknown people like yours truly it is much easier (as demonstrated) to get attention by being involved in drama than it is the just politely plod along minding your own business. I do think there’s a tipping point of sorts on this, however; blogs like yours are already known to most people in the ‘community’, so when your name pops up in connection to something there’s less novelty value and therefore less spike in activity. If that makes sense?
I also think there’s a definite in-group-out-group dynamic going on… but I couldn’t really articulate the mechanism. MOAR STUDY IS REQUIRED!
I guess people - no matter how much they protest and spout ‘holier than thou’ BS- love to watch the drama sparks fly.
Even the holier than thou attitude is part of it, though. I mean, at the end of the day you’re either involved or you just ignore it; there’s no middle ground. But yeah, people do love a good train wreck… usually so long as they’re not the ones involved.
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I’m not sure this pertains to lj vs. void-star, but the only reason I don’t visit the blog on lj is because I don’t have a lj and have little overall interest in blogging.
I was only vaguely aware this was connected to a lj.On another note, I don’t think I could stand for writing a blog every day for a month. I’d probably end up resorting to ‘Uh… yes, and my dog uh… shed a little bit today.’