[WEB4LIB] E-mail discussion lists and blogs?

[lists at lisnews.com]

>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: web4lib at webjunction.org
>>On Behalf Of Sloan, Bernie
>>Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 5:45 PM
>>Subject: [WEB4LIB] E-mail discussion lists and blogs?
>>
>>
>>There's been some discussion back and forth on this list
>>about using blogs to distribute information rather than
>>posting notes to e-mail discussion lists.
>>
>>Technical/access issues aside, I have a very basic
>>curiosity-type question for those of you out there who
>>maintain your own blogs. Do you have a way to measure how
>>many people are exposed to the info in your blogs?

I think Thomas Dowling's article on web stats from a few years back is
still relevant to answer this question. In short, we only have a rough
guess as to how many people are exposed to our blogs. Reeaallll ruff.

For example, according to Urchin (that's my stats package), in the past
week, LISNews has a total of about 81,500 sessions, about 10,000 a day.
Urchin says "A 'Session' is defined as a series of clicks on your site by
an individual visitor during a specific period of time." So does this mean
that LISNews gets about 10,000 readers a day? Well, probably not. That
same week we served 315,000 pages and that meant about 707,000 hits. This
all went out to about 13,200 unique IP addresses. Does this mean that
LISNews had about 13,200 readers in the last week? Again, probably not.
Looking at the top 10 domains recorded Yahoo, inktomisearch, and Google
were the only 3 that are obviously robots, but there's a majority that are
unknown. So a good portion of visitors aren't people at all, but some kind
of bot, search engine, feedreader, spammer or assorted other non-humans.

If I had to guess, I'd guess that about ~30% of traffic (hits, pages,
sessions, whatever) is not a person reading something. ~30% of everything
we send out goes to a machine that is using or reusing it for something
else. But even that's just a guess, it could be more, though I doubt it's
less.  So do the Apache logs measure all our readers?

How many people are reading our RSS feeds? No idea, like most blogs now
our RSS feeds are some of the most popular pages, and there's no way to
tell how they're being used or reused, or where they're being read by how
many people. To make things worse we have a couple dozen different feeds.

And this doesn't take into account the mailing list, which is several
thousand email addresses as well, and that email contains all the links
posted with each story, so can I count those people are unique readers as
well? I don't know.

SO, to answer your questions, "how many people are exposed to the info in
your blogs?" I have no idea. More than I can fit in my house, but not
enough to fill a stadium.


-Blake Carver
LISNews.com
http://lisnews.com