Cyberweight - Update II

October 22, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

(Update: October 23. I ended the count of hits on this website too soon. Since yesterday, Jeremy ("The Hits Just Keep on Coming") Freese narrowed the gap and then pulled ahead. See the chart below.)

How much influence does a Website wield? My own egocentric measurement is to count referrals to this blog.


So lets compare the personal blog of a sociologist (Jeremy Freese) with an commercial site (Inside Higher Ed). Both these sites mentioned the Montclair SocioBlog recently, and Google Analytics allowed me to count the number of times the link was clicked at each site in the two or three days following.

Las Vegas made Freese a 50 click underdog - hey, this is Internet influence, not Scrabble.

Here are the results.


The late surge of Jeremy's readers put him ahead by only 3 clicks , 89-86. Not bad for a single blogger up against a team of at least eighteen on staff at IHE.

4 comments:

tina said...

This can only be interpreted as evidence that the Freese Effect is diminishing since Jeremy's move to Northwestern.

jeremy said...

My blog has gotten lamer over the last year or so, and so I'm amazed that I'm holding onto readers as well as I have been.

kristina b said...

I once made a comment on your blog, Jeremy, and that day is *still* my highest traffic day ever!

I recently did some sort of informal research on internet traffic, and found some support for the idea that people on very specialized sites are more engaged. (Scoble is a well-known blogger in certain circles. He used to work at Microsoft, and is very clued in to the silicon valley set.)

Polly said...

Who is Ed? Did they hire him?