Like every blogger, I watch my stats but I’ve nearly really taken note of which are my most popular posts, or where I get most of my visitors from. But other bloggers do it regularly, and since I hadn’t finished the reading diary post I was planning to post today, I decided to generate some quick and easy blog content by posting a few 2014 stats about It Doesn’t Have to be Right… It Just Has to Sound Plausible. The following are for the current quarter, January to March 2014.
Most popular posts
- The list: 100 Great Science Fiction Stories by Women
- 2014 Hugo thoughts
- The future we used to have, part 22
- Dune Mania
- 20 British sf films
I’m pleased 100 Great Science Fiction Stories by Women continues to be popular. It’s perhaps my most reblogged and linked-to post ever. It’s currently Hugo season, so the popularity of a post on that topic is no real surprise. I’m not sure why part 22 of my The future we used to have posts has proven so much more popular than the others – perhaps it’s because it features Giant Computer Brains. Dune is, obviously, a very popular novel, and I suspect most of the visitors to that page have come from image searches. I’ve no idea why British sf films is getting so many hits three and a half years after I posted it.
Most referrals from
- Search Engines
- semalt.com
I suspect a lot of the search engines results are image searches, and probably for the aircraft and cars and stuff I’ve posted in my The future we used to have series. I get around four times as many visits from Twitter than I do from Facebook, even though notifications of new blog posts appear on both platforms. I’ve been linked to from Reddit on a number of occasions, usually because someone has taken issue with something I’ve written. New visitors still filter through in dribs and drabs. I’ve no idea what semalt.com is, it looks like some sort of analytical website.
Most popular search terms
- avro vulcan
- ian sales
- future houses
- sncaso trident
- водолазный скафандр
- ancillary justice
This is just weird. I’m apparently not as popular on my own blog as the Avro Vulcan, a Cold War V-Bomber. The SNCASO Trident was a French prototype interceptor from the 1950. I think I posted a photograph of it on my blog once. The Russian means “diving suit”, and no, I’ve no idea. I posted a review of Ancillary Justice on my blog here, and since the book has been much spoken about, and is on so many award shortlists, it’s no surprise that the review generates traffic.
It Doesn't Have To Be Right... 
March 24, 2014 at 12:21 pm
The Vulcan is da bomb. 😉
March 24, 2014 at 3:49 pm
I’ve just added a comment to your 20 British Films post…
March 24, 2014 at 5:36 pm
I saw. I must admit I’d not considered A Matter of Life and Death as it seemed to fantastical.
March 24, 2014 at 7:43 pm
The fantastical bit (we assume) “exists only in the mind of a young airman whose life and imagination have been violently shaped by war”, a spoiler stated by the film-makers in a text crawl in the opening sequence (about 2:00 in this youTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM2c6q7g3Dw ).
AMOLAD is about many things and works on many levels*, but one thing it is about is heading off survivor guilt. David Niven was willing to die during the war, but now the war is over and he has to look to the future: it is set in May 1945, the end of the war in Europe, and the girl he first meets after his death-defying non-parachute jump is called June.
Plus all the neuroscience jargon and doings, which looks like hand-waving but was in fact cutting edge accurate stuff.
*It’s also my favourite film.
August 2, 2014 at 6:36 am
semalt is a referrer spammer, their traffic is fake. they use a botnet of computers they infected with malware to spam stats.