Sunday, April 16, 2006

Incoming!

OK, so I admit it - I'm a narcissist. I've got a statcounter on my blog, which tells me how few visitors I get. That number is too small to be worth boasting about - I like to think of my readership as exclusive but influential :-) - but more interestingly, it also tells me where they have come from. Not surprisingly, most hits are from blogs that have a link to me, such as RC, Stoat, John Fleck. Probably some of these are readers following a regular trail through blogworld (I used to, before switching to an RSS aggregator) and others are random one-offs. Other than the climate-related stuff, a handful of hits come via the Japan bloggers webring.

Every so often, there's a flurry of hits from some much better-read source which mentions me or my "work" (does a bet count as work?), such as (in no particular order) Reason, Nature, RC, The Grauniad (try the Corbyn link). I got a startling number of hits from an on-line Polish newspaper article which mentioned the bet, which I can't find any more. But I was amazed to see that the biggest number of hits I've ever had in a day came from the recent TCS article - well over twice as many as came from the RC article that covered the same research. It's scary to think that large numbers of people might actually consider TCS to be a credible source on climate science (or indeed anything else aside from rightwingnuttery).

Outside the deliberate links, I occasionally get hits via some amusing search strings. Just about anything with a septic's name in hits one of my failed bet attempts one way or another (Piers Corbyn, Zbigniew Jaworowski, Myron Ebell, Richard Lindzen, World Climate Report) which I hope enhances their reputations. The position in these google searches goes up and down a lot, and currently several of them are not on the first page, but they are high enough to get hits some of the time. I note that the bet makes a popular talking point on various forums and blogs too. Items that I've mentioned from the Japanese press, such as marry a blue-eyed foreigner and population crash also get some hits. But, saving the best till last, my favourite is the number of people who are trying to find out how to do it doggie style, who must find this page rather....anticlimactic. Best of all, some of them have had to wade through about 8 pages of links before they get to my page (it's currently riding ridiculously high in the rankings)!

2 comments:

coby said...

I have a similar "vanity post" because I got a kick out of some of the search strings I showed up in. I have discovered that by making the septic point before debunking it, presumabley sceptic search terms like -big hoax global warming- and -global warming skeptic blog-

Not planned, but it works out well!

coby said...

err, that should read "that by making the septic point before debunking it.....I get the peope probably trying to reinforce their prejudices.