This Post is Old!
The post you are reading is
years old and may not represent my current views. I started blogging around the
time I first began to study philosophy, age 17. In my view, the point of philosophy is
to expose our beliefs to rational scrutiny so we can revise them and get better beliefs
that are more likely to be true. That's what I've been up to all these years, and this
blog has been part of that process. For my latest thoughts, please see the
front page.
Blog Year 2010 in Review
Welcome to 2011! As I have done in past years, I will provide a review of this blog's 2010 activity.
The year 2010 saw over 141,000 visits from nearly 44,000 distinct users. This is a significant increase over last year, probably due to my joining The Prosblogion in September.
There were 80 posts in 2010, holding roughly constant from the 79 in 2009. That makes an average of nearly 1770 visits per post, a significant increase from 2009, but still well behind 2008's 2623 visits per post.
Most Popular Posts
- March 15, 2010: Philosophers' Carnival 105.
- November 13, 2005: Translation vs. Transliteration. This post ranked sixth in 2009. Prior to that, it had not been among the top ten posts, though "translation transliteration" has been among the top search strings since 2007.
- September 22, 2009: Philosophical Science-Fiction Stories: A Preliminary List. This post was number 1 in 2009.
- March 22, 2009: Kant's Argument for Monogamy. This post didn't make it into the top ten in 2009, but it's hardly surprising that it should make the list given the number of times the word 'sex' and 'sexual' appear.
- November 20, 2008: What Is Composition? This is this post's first appearance in the top ten as well. This is a philosophically substantive post which does not contain the word 'sex', so I'm happy to see that someone is reading it.
- March 15, 2008: Berkeley's Theory of Reference and the Critique of Matter. This post is also here for the first time, and is also a philosophically substantive post. All of these substantive posts appearing for the first time may indicate a shift in readership, probably coming from The Prosblogion.
- February 21, 2009: The Problem of Sex in Kant's Ethics. This is also a philosophically substantive post, but says 'sex' in the title, which always adds hits.
- June 6, 2007: Discussions on Scripture and Tradition. This is a short post which just provided links to a couple of interesting discussions on other blogs.
- October 9, 2007: "Dionysius" on God-Talk. This post discusses some issues in the translation of Pseudo-Dionysius' "Mystical Theology."
- June 12, 2006: Philosophers' Carnival XXXI! For some reason, this carnival is more popular than others. Although it didn't make the top ten in 2009, it was 8th in 2008, first in 2007, and third in 2006.
Most Common Searches
- kenny pearce
- maundy thursday quotes. The reference is presumably to this post, but it doesn't show up on the first few pages of Google.
- translation vs. transliteration. References to this popular post continually dominate search engine referrals. As you can see, there are several variations on this search below. I'm second on Google for this search.
- translation and transliteration. I'm first on Google for this search.
- cotton patch bible. This post appears on the first page of Google, as it has since 2008.
- church dogma. This post has been on the first page of Google since 2008.
- translation transliteration. I'm second on Google for this one.
- transliteration translation. Also second for this one.
- etymology talent. This post comes up fourth on Google.
- cotton patch bible online. I'm third for this one.
Top Referrers
I'm getting more and more referrer spam, so this might not be totally accurate, but here is the data I have, such as it is.
- Leiter Reports funnels tons of traffic to every Philosophers' Carnival.
- Siris.
- The Prosblogion.
- PEA Soup. These referrals are coming from a comment I left on this post.
- Horseless Telegraph.
- Philosophy, etc. sent quite a few hits my way, via Philosophers' Carnivals 103 and 114.
- Brains. These referrals are coming from Philosophers' Carnival 107.
- The Atheist's Advocate: Philosophers' Carnival 118.
- Chrisendom was also one of the top referrers last year as well, but I am not aware of any links to my blog from it. Odd.
- Reason From Scripture. The referrals are coming from my comments on supererogation.
- The Sword and the Sacrifice Philosophy: Philosophers' Carnival 115.
Conclusions
The
Philosophers' Carnival continues to drive a lot of traffic my way, and I get a lot of Google hits to old Bible posts. However,
The Prosblogion was also a major contributor, despite the fact that I only joined the end of September. (I expect that in 2011 Prosblogion may be the top referrer.) Probably due to the influence of Prosblogion, I am seeing a lot more hits to philosophically substantive posts, which is also good. Another interesting fact: only one of the top ten posts was written in 2010. Of course, the 2010 posts had only a fraction of the year to collect traffic. This suggests that users following my RSS feed are not the dominant force.
Posted by Kenny at January 1, 2011 10:24 AM