Just out of interest, I thought I would take a look at the most popular posts on the blog and see if it gave an insight into visitors here.

The top three most viewed articles on WhyDontYou (at the time of writing this post) are:

1. How to Defend Religion? with 2411 direct views (it even has 14 comments and over 1000 home page views).
2. One Person’s Take On Christianity has managed a total of 2332 direct views, although it only generated three comments and 14 home page views.
3. Content Negotiation – Mirrored Post, which despite being a blast from the past still gets 10 – 15 hits a day and has amassed a total of 1979 direct hits but in languishing in the comments stakes.

Alternatively, using Feed views you get this picture:

1. Rapture with 5197 feed views (a paltry 106 direct views of the URL though)
2. Faith in its death throes? with 5150 feed views but only 114 direct views
3. Computers aren’t doctors with 5119 feed views but only 126 visits to it’s URL.

This produces some interesting assumptions about people who come here. It seems (and this correlates for more than just the top three) that a post is either popular with people coming to visit the site (direct URL views) or popular with people reading it on the feeds, but never both. For example, One Person’s Take On Christianity has amassed exactly ZERO feed views.

The most popular category is Bad Shops with almost twice as many views this year as the second most popular which is Television (13598 views vs 7278), which, given the high quality philosophical content here, speaks volumes about what people are really interested in 😀 .

Now, my original aim was to see if I could get an insight into visitors here. I am not sure the stats are really successful.  The preponderance of Religious related posts in the “most popular” lists makes sense, but I have no idea why “Content Negotiation” has become a run away success. How to defend religion has a constant stream of visitors since Ruth Gledhill linked to it in her article for the Times Online but why the others are popular currently escapes me.

From a technological point, I have no idea why the decisions between reading post / viewing feed seems so heavily polarised. There are no posts I can find which have a similar number of both, it seems very much an either/or thing.

Lastly, I wonder if, by highlighting the most popular, will this make them even more popular? I often see blogs with sidebars proclaiming the “most viewed” posts – surely this will have the effect of making those even more viewed and, as such, increasing the distance between them and others to the point at which it can never be crossed.

Comments welcome 😀

[tags]Technology, Feedburner, Feeds, RSS, Content, Blog, Philosophy, Society, Content Negotiation, Religion, Ruth Gledhill, Times, Firestats, Statistics[/tags]