I started out writing this blog for my own amusement but, as it is available on a very public place in the form of the Internet, I am always curious as to who else actually reads this guff. There are comments sections, but I find that most comments sections in blogs are rarely used except for high profile individuals and those in major publications (the Guardian newspaper's blogs can attract thousands of replies - but then it has one of the largest readerships of any online publisher). The Blogger site allows for emails to be sent to the author and I've received some of those. One was asking me if they could use an 20 year old photo taken at Anfield in a fanzine, and I received a couple of replies to the Guide Dog posting (and yes, it is a talking dog but it wasn't the CO-OP).
However, recently Blogger have added a statistics facility to their software which shows how many people have accessed the various blogs and which countries they come from. This has only been running for the past month so I have no idea how many people have viewed the older posts prior to this time and I would expect that a few of the hits will be from search engine bots. Nevertheless, there are some patterns emerging. As you would expect, most of the views are from English speaking countries with the UK having most, followed by the USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
There is one exception to this Anglophone audience and it has me a little perplexed. For one day last week I received 11 hits on a post entitled "The Big Bang" from China. This post was about the last episode of the latest series of Doctor Who. As far as I am aware, this television show is not aired in China so what were all these people expecting to see? Did they think it was about the pioneering work of Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble? I can see how that might have happened. Possibly they thought it was some decadent western pornography that had slipped past web censorship software? The odd thing is that the contents of that post would be largely unintelligible to anyone who hadn't seen the TV show and, whilst I can see how one person may have clicked on the posting believing it to be something else, why would 11 people do that all in one day? Perhaps I said something that really tickled the Chinese funny bone? Maybe we will never know.
And for the record; the most hits I have received for a single posting is when I suggested doing something unspeakable to an octopus.
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Very interesting. I have now had a look at my stats - once I'd found it them hidden under the Draft-Blogger link. I too have had a following in China with 25 hits - but I couldn't tell which item they were looking at. The most observed item was "The Shopping Trip" from the end of March. I also had a hit from Latvia so here's a message for my Latvian reader - Sveiki!
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