The Blog Year in Review

Each year, I do a little “year in review” post and over the last few years (2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and so on), I’ve observed how strange the world of blogging has become. Not only have my daily views declined steadily over the last five or six years — in fact, last year, I had only 47 views per day — but with the fragmentation of the social media landscape, I anticipate fewer viewers in the future. This used to bother me more than it does now.

When blogging started, I had this idea that blogging and blogrolls would create communities of like minded scholars connected by our shared interest in one another’s work. I’m not sure whether this ever emerged from blogging (and I’ll admit that I don’t read any of the classic blogsthatI used to read religiously), but some aspects of this kind of mutuality became the core functionality of social media. Now, of course, social media communities are fragmenting and some social media companies are incorporating some of the functionality of blogs (longer posts for example) to create new hybrid forms of digital sociability. At the same time, we’ve probably discovered that the digital agora isn’t as friendly and productive a place as we had hoped. When I think about this stuff, I get a bit discouraged, but when I don’t think about it and just keep posting stuff to my blog, then that feeling goes away. So, for now, I’ll just keep blogging.

Here’s a list of the top 22 posts written this year based on views per day. The ranking is a bit bogus in that most of my posts are viewed most frequently in the 30 or so days after they appear. As a result, more recent posts tend to have more views per day than posts from earlier in the year. That said, all these posts ranked in the top 20 of posts made this year irrespective of how many views per day.

1. Pseudoarchaeology is in the Air

2. On the Edge of a Roman Port

3. Why Pseudoarchaeology and Why Now?

4. Some Other Archaeology: Late Antiquity at Polis: Recent Research

5. A Memorial for a Digital Friend: Diana Gilliland Wright

6. Whitewashing Pseudoarchaeology

7. Environmental History at the Northern Great Plains History Conference

8. Ancient and Modern Argos

9. Isthmia Data

10. Pseudoarchaeology in an Age of Archaeologies

11. Digital Archaeology in Review

12. Three Things Thursday: Early Christian Greece, Mineral Rites, and Jimmy Carter

13. The Archaeology of Burning Man

14. Grand Forks, UND, and the Ku Klux Klan

15. From Corinthian Twilight to the Busy Countryside: Remaking the Landscapes, Monuments, and Religion of the Late Antique Corinthia

16. Pompeii Dreams

17. The Larnaka Museum

18. Writing about Pompeii in the Age of Catastrophe

19. Archaeology of Homelessness

20. Smashing Statues.

21. A Mildly Anarchist Teaching Encounter

22. The Archaeology of Oil Production: Part 1

You’ll notice some patterns, of course. There are five posts on books that I read (2, 8, 13, 19, 20), four posts on pseudoarchaeology (1, 3, 6, 10), four on the northeastern Peloponnesus in antiquity (2, 8, 9, 15), and four on archaeology of the contemporary world (13, 19, 21, 22). There are also two on the Northern Plains (7, 14),  two on digital archaeology stuff (9, 11), two on Cyprus (17, 4), weirdly two on Pompeii (16, 18). This more or less sums up what I write about.