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Mar 14, 2016

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Metadata Post

That's actually a slightly-inaccurate title - the metadata I'm considering today is for the blog as a whole, though since a vast majority of my posts are from the 40 Years project, I think we can forgive a slight inaccuracy.

These are a series of screenshots of my statistics pages, taken today, March 14, 2016, around 10:45. While I'm sure that a good half, if not more, of the hits on my site are bots of some sort, there's at least a few actual people who visit. I'll be considering the data from the human perspective for the most part.


First picture is my "all-time" stats. This one is likely the least indicative of my 40 Years posts, in that my post from many moons ago of links to annotations to Morrison and Quitely's All-Star Superman has a kind of ridiculous amount of hits. I'm always happy to direct people to particular information, but very little of that particular information is of my own making.


 Here's where things start to be a bit more relevant, I think. I'm fascinated by where particular hits come from - the US, of course, is one of my biggest sources of traffic - this makes sense given the vast amount of English-speakers in the country, and given the vast amount of robo-hits that probably come from that country. It's cool to see the map showing places like Brazil and China as having interacted with the blog, though. Regardless of what kind of hits I'm getting, the reach of the blog is in some ways global. That's kind of cool.

 In weekly hits, Russia supplants Canada (c'mon, home team, represent!). Part of me feels like I'm playing some strange game of Risk with this blog.


 And Russia moves into the lead for daily hits.


And, finally, hits for the 2 hour period leading up to the screenshots. US, Canada, Russia - My blog favours the Northern hemisphere, it seems.

I'm not sure what to do with this information really. If my blog were more concerned with geopolitical ideas, or languages, this kind of data could help with determining content. But for a blog that concentrates on comics, where people are reading from is secondary to the fact that people are reading the blog at all! I suppose I could start offering translations of my posts, but having tried to give a speech in French at a wedding once having used online translation software, I am strongly disinclined to try.

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