Thursday, April 27, 2006

Notes on the blog.

I'm terribly busy, and when your livlihood and your vacation depend on creating 5000 words in 48 hours - blogging isn't a priority, but I do have some notes on the blog.
Not by any fault of my own, but this blog recieved a whopping 12,800 visitors this month and counting. A couple of reasons behind the massive jump have been some fortuiously links, which pushed daily visitor numbers beyond 1500 for three days in a row. However, on a positive note, daily visitors have stabilised around the 300 mark, which is a great thing. What is even more heartening is that many of these visitors are not coming from random keyword searches which befuddle me - like these - One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six. This is just a sampling. Makes you wonder about the pagerank system that Google uses.
That said, many of the visitors come 'directly' to the site - without being redirected from one of several bloggers who link to me - thanks Rashmi and Jai in particular. But these direct visitors are far more than the number of people who actually comment on the blog. The same IP ranges keep on coming back post after post, but rarely leave comments. So you guys obviously like the blog and what I write but leave zero feedback. OK, so some of you lurkers mail me and assume I'm someone else altogether.
Either you folks agree with everything I'm saying, which is a frightening thought really, or there is another reason. Please tell me what it is. I'm not going to write of escapades or show various bodily orifices on the blog - don't expect that. But the mismatch between visitor numbers and feedback is quite weird. Anyway, I really have to get home now, so see'ya folks and keep coming back.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

bloglines don't let one post comments. And K is certainly not eM to make one open another page and post comments!!!!

Anonymous said...

Anon: lol.. But ppl like me who read K on bloglines dont show up on web traffic anyways. So I am not sure if you and me are what K's talking about.

Anonymous said...

Dude, I don't know that there's any correlation at all between number of visitors and comments posted. I've noticed something strange myself - during the days when my hits are very high (thanks to a link from Rediff.com or maybe even India Uncut), the comment count has been quite sparse. And conversely, when a post does get a lot of comments (usually a rant-ish post or a personal one, rather than the book or movie ones), the visitor count for that period isn't any higher than the average. Weird.

(Maybe people are a little scared by your "anonymity"!)

Anonymous said...

maybve its cause people expect gossip on your blog. And normally, gossip does not evoke opinion unless its really newsy. I'm sure that most of the people who visit your blog are print/tv journos who want to know what goes on behind closed doors of their rival organisations(WFN is to blame here). I keep visiting your blog cause i agree with pretty much everything you have to say about the state of Indian media.

Anonymous said...

Here's a comment to make the visitor comment ratio a wee bit more balanced. It might be a coincidence, but I was thinking the same about my blog (though your one month's visitor count is equivalent to my eleven month total).

People don't necessarily comment only when they disagree, if you take a count you might discover that most of the comments are in concordant tones (make this comment an exception). The other possibilities are - one, your visitors are the reading types only, don't like to write; two - they are not stimulated enough, but keep coming back to take in little doses of stimulation; three - they don't want to leave traces of their presence behind (though anonymous comments help and StatCounter tells everything short of the name, sex and age of the visitor); four - they are too petrified with what you write or how you write to be able to contribute to the discussion initiated; five - they come looking for something else (the recent keyword activity will lend ample clues) and go back disappointed ...

Speaking about me, I usually refrain from commenting on stuff (on other people's blogs - on mine I take full liberty) that I know little about or have a skewed view of. But comments are more endearing than the additional zeroes on the visitor counter.

And feed reads are no substitute for the real stuff.

Tip: If it is comments that you seek, try putting the word verification off.

K said...

Soumyadip, the blogs recent numbers have caught me by surprise as well. And I don't want spam-ments - thats why the word-verification. No, I'm not hunting for comments but the reader-comment corelation is very unstable as Jai points out. God knows why? I wonder if someone will make a make a mathematical equation to it, you never know given what all they make equations out of nowadays. Anyway, I'm glad some people who don't usually comment have done so, and thanks for the mails - but I believe one thing is clear - many of the readers here are not bloggers or typical blog visitors and are not used to commenting - and I don't know if that is either a good thing or a very good thing.
Anyway - even if you don't want to comment please feel free to mail me folks.

Anonymous said...

I think people might not comment when they don't have a strong opinion on the subject of any particular post. Or if they don't care about the subject. Or the word verification puts them off. Or...

Anonymous said...

Just to provide some feedback - I read just to keep an eye on what is going on in the Indian media... I don't actually work within it as I'm UK based. But your blog posts are funny