I do not agree, however that there are more atheist bloggers than readers.

In a similar manner to salient, I was being a bit tongue in cheek. There certainly are a lot more bloggers than people who comment on other peoples blogs though (unless, of course, you are PZ Myers ).

That’s interesting — and weird — about 0 seconds registered when someone reads the most recent post. It certainly makes more sense than my theory. Well, I have admitted to being tech illiterate.

I have sympathy for the closeted de-cons — it must be very difficult to give up one’s security blanket *and* fear that one will also be ostracized.

I, too, always try to click through to any post that interests me on Planet Atheism. I do read many uninteresting posts right there, but if I think the blogger deserves attention, I’ll use the link.

I do not agree, however that there are more atheist bloggers than readers. I’ve learned recently through a post I wrote about de-cons who were still in the “closet,” that there are lots of “invisible” people who read atheist blogs. I was amazed, but heartened. I think, too, that there’s something fluky about the way visit length shows up on the statistics counters. If a person just reads the most recent post, I think the visit may show up as zero time.

There are actually very few of these, which suggests to me that there may be more atheist bloggers than readers!

I wonder about this as well.

I agree with your new policy BTW. I try to make sure if I read a post on PA / PH that I like, I visit the source site just in case they are checking out their traffic. Good blog posts are a rare beast, so I want to encourage as many of them as possible!

My stats seem to indicate when someone has been on a site where the Blogroll indicates my site — some of these people appear not even to click on the url because the visit length is 0. This suggests that they have merely been in the vicinity of the url for my site. There are actually very few of these, which suggests to me that there may be more atheist bloggers than readers!

People could also be coming from Planet Atheism OR reading you on PA, in which case you would not even know that your post had been read. I think that I shall make it my policy to actually visit the links that I see on PA, rather than reading the posts there. That way, bloggers won’t feel so neglected.

Wtf!!! On-site it says 11/25/2007 12:13:00 AM.

This brings me to the story of how I discoverd the Wordpress provider. Before discovering Planet Atheism — yes, I’m forever behind the times — I used to search for ‘atheism’ on Technorati. One day I noticed that my post had not shown up on T despite my having ‘ping’ turned on at Blogspot. So, I set up a website on Wordpress to check whether the problem was with Blogspot. Lo and behold, the W post showed up almost immediately on T. I abandoned the Wordpress site because I did not like the lack of ‘artistic’ control over website appearance at Wordpress. I did like the community features, though.

Blogspot does not provide site stats the way that Wordpress does, so I use statcounter. I have noticed that I get hits from Google’s blogsearch, but very rarely from Technorati. Since I don’t make money from my site, this is all merely of academic interest to me. However, it is presumably quite important to those who carry advertizing.

I found something funny too, when I run the same keywords as Salient I get something completely different for the term Science (lower stats), and slightly different data for Atheism (highest stats–even after taking into account the 1 day difference between his data pull and mine).

I’ve also expanded the research a bit, to 180 days rather than just 30 days. I also present a brief history of 6 months of Technorati problems.

Now, if someone wants to pay me £200k, I will spend a whole year trying to change that…

I pinged Technorati for salient after writing this and it sees him now