blog.kennypearce.net

Blog Year 2012 in Review

It is now, believe it or not, 2013, and time for my annual review of this blog's activity.

Posting has been quite light here for the last few months. The reason is that I spent the fall semester teaching at Pepperdine. I actually thought, going into it, that this would lead to more blogging, since I would be going back through important texts and thinking about how to present them to students and so forth. But it turned out quite to the contrary, probably because of some combination of spending all of my very limited spare time trying to get through at least a little bit of actual research, and not spending much time processing material new to me. (Often I do a lot of my blogging when I'm processing new ideas or arguments.)

The light posting resulted in a significant decrease in the number of visits as compared to 2011 but, interestingly, no significant decrease in the number of distinct users. The number of visits decreased from over 184,000 to about 126,000. The number of distinct users decreased just slightly from over 60,000 to around 59,000.

There were only 30 posts in 2012. That's nearly 4,200 visits per post, so that statistic continues to rise.

The popular posts, searches, and referrers reflect the fact that there was light posting this year, and hence a larger percentage of hits were Google searches leading to older posts.

Most Popular Posts

1. November 13, 2005: Translation vs. Transliteration. This perennially popular post dropped out of the top 10 last year, after ranking 2nd in 2010 and 6th in 2009.
2. December 6, 2005: "Talents" in Matthew 25. Another post from the same period on the same subject. Although this is an old post, this is its first appearance in the top 10.
3. July 2, 2012: Rule Utilitarianism and Divine Command Theory in Berkeley's Passive Obedience. Here, finally, is a philosophical post written this year.
4. September 22, 2009: Philosophical Science-Fiction Stories: A Preliminary List. As I have mentioned before, this post probably got the most external linkage of any post in the history of this blog. It ranked 2nd in 2011, 3rd in 2010, and 1st in 2009. I made some amendments to it here. Readers interested in this sort of thing might also be interested in my history of Swampman.
5. February 7, 2006: How Did Early Christians Interpret 1 Corinthians 11:10? Another several-year-old Bible post. This is this post's first appearance in the top 10.
6. November 21, 2005: Ivy League Elitist ... Porn? This post was about a (now probably long dead) controversy about the sorts of things the Student Activities Council at Penn was funding. I doubt if any of the people viewing it now find it the least bit interesting, but it does have the word 'porn' in the title, so the hits keep coming. This post actually hasn't been in the top 10 since 2006 when it ranked 6th.
7. May 22, 2007: Kenneth L. Pearce, BA BAS. This post was about my upcoming plans and blogging habits immediately following my graduation from Penn, and so is probably not terribly interesting to the people who are finding it. I assume people must get there by searching for my name (I guess it's a good thing if people are searching for my name). This post was number 9 in 2009 and number 5 in 2008.
8. November 20, 2008: What is Composition? At number 8, this is only the second philosophically substantive post on the list.
9. January 10, 2006: Smoking Bans, Private Property, and the Free Market. This one, I suppose, can count as philosophically substantive. I must confess that, after several more years of education and reflection, this post seems to me to exhibit some of the naivete of which I think most libertarians are guilty. Nevertheless, I still agree with the general idea, at least in principle. This is the first time this post has appeared in the top 10.
10. August 14, 2005: The Cotton Patch Bible, Online. This was just a link to an interesting and amusing paraphrase of the Bible, which, after being out of print for several years, was made freely available online. This is its first appearance in the top 10.

Most Common Searches

1. 1 corinthians 11 10. The post in question is currently second on Google (it probably shouldn't be).
2. cotton patch bible. My post is currently fourth on Google. Fortunately for Google, the actual text is ahead of me.
3. welcome to the jungle. I have no idea what's going on here. Google site search doesn't come up with anything for my web-site for this search string.
4. cotton patch bible online. I'm second, right after the actual text, for this one.
5. what is composition. My post is not on the first several pages of Google, so these users were probably using a different search engine. I note that there is nothing about philosophy in the first several pages of Google results.
6. 1 cor 11 10. My post is fourth for this variant.
7. kenny pearce. The front page of this blog is the first result for this search.
8. porno elitis. (I'll refrain from linking this one.) The search really is 'elitis' not 'elitist', but it surely must be going to this post. As near as I can tell, 'elitis' is not a word in English (even in slang), but according to the logs 65 users got here by this search.
9. epieikes. This is a Greek word whose translation causes difficulties in the New Testament. The post in question is here; it ranks third on Google, after a couple of lexicons.
10. i corinthians 11 10. I'm third on this variant.

Top Referrers

1. Gentle Wisdom (I can't find where on this blog I'm linked to, but it's a legitimate - and interesting - blog that I've read before, so I'm confident in classifying it as non-spam).
2. The Prosblogion
3. Siris
4. Appeared-to-Blogly
5. Musing Out Loud - Philosophy
6. Horseless Telegraph (I link to the old site, from which the referrals came; the new site is here.)
7. Better Bibles Blog (again, I can't find the link, but I know this blog).
8. Zen College Life's 50 Best Philosophy Blogs
9. The Mod Squad
10. PEA Soup (Perhaps this one shouldn't count, since I posted the link in a comment myself.)