The last year or so has seen a lot of pundits talking about the death of long form blogging. The continuing rise of Facebook, Google +, Twitter, insert other social network here, are supposed to be hastening along the death of the blog and longer articles.
But I’m not seeing it.
I’ve spent some time looking back on the stats of this blog for this year and this is what I’ve found:
- February of 2011 saw this blog receive 18 900 visits (or 89 700 hits depending on how you like your traffic stats.)
- December of 2011 saw 26 000 visits (111 700 hits).
- Although January is only a few days old, in the first 5 days there were over 1 100 visits here each day (26 500 hits).
Visitor traffic is up almost 50% over the year. The death of long form blogging? I’m not sure if less people are writing, but apparently more people are reading.
More than anything I’m thankful for the people who continue to put up with me online. I’ve been writing for over six years and have found this to be the best thing I could ever do as a teacher. I have no idea where these stats stack up with other edu bloggers as traffic is something that most people play pretty close to their chest. (and to be honest, beyond knowing if this is a trend others are seeing, I’m not that interested) I am pleased though to see that open reflection and sharing of the craft of teaching is not a trend that is going away.
Thanks for stopping by.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/churl/1122196748/sizes/m/in/photostream/
I haven’t been tracking my blog stats to analyze an increase or decrease in traffic, but I do pop into StatPress every so often just to see what the daily snapshot is, and my little no-name blog with 2-4 posts a month is getting several hundreds, sometimes over a thousand, hits a month. I don’t attract the volume of comments I used to, which I attribute to my own commenting falling off in the last few months, but I still find great value in the reflective piece of blogging.
I’ve been blogging since the summer of 2007, and I agree – the reflection and sharing (I know there’s an audience out there, even if they’re silent) are integral to my growth as a professional.