Metadata Monday

I haven’t put up any metadata for a while, so I thought that a snowy Monday morning would be as good a time as any.  One of the downsides of moving to a blog hosted by WordPress.com is that they do not provide as robust a set of statistical data and so far have not provided a way to integrate with Google Analytics.

Also it seems like they record fewer page views and visits than Typepad did.  In fact, Typepad consistently recorded more visits than Google Analytics for the same blog so their algorithm for determining visits must be exceptionally sensitive.

For fun, I decided to compare the page views over a 28 day stretch from December 20th to January 16th. I picked this span because my new blog saw its first 1000 (1030 to be exact) page views.  It is also a time when people tend not to visit blogs very often choosing (I imagine) to spend time with families and away from the office and work. I also tend to blog less regularly at the holidays.  So this period of time is least likely to be distorted by a sensational blog post (cough, cough) and is most likely to reflect he baseline visibility of the blog.

Here is a pretty dense chart showing the trends over this period from 2007-2008 to 2010-2011.

Here are the figures:

2007-2008: Total Views: 1081. Average: 38.6.  2008-2009: Total Views: 2317. Average: 82.8.  2009-2010: Total Views: 2369. Average: 84.6.  2010-2011 (Old Blog): Total Views: 1668. Average: 59.6.  2010-2011 (New Blog): Total Views: 1030. Average: 36.8.

As you can see, the new blog (despite the less generous stats provided by WordPress.com) has some catching up to do. Of course, it does not have hundreds of blog posts providing content visible to search engines behind it either, so my guess is that over this same span of time next year, there is likely to be some improvement.