Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Birthdays, statistics, and dithering on a slow afternoon


I ran across Uriah/Norm's 4th Birthday post at Crime Scraps the other day (Happy Belated Birthday, by the way!), and today I decided to go back to see how long this blog has been going (obviously I don't have enough to do this afternoon). As of a couple of weeks ago, this blog is 5 years old. Also in the not-enough-to-do category, I looked at my statistics at Blogspot and Sitemeter: internationalnoir has 469 posts, and has had 84,000 visits and 127,000 page views. According to the ranking of popularity calculated by Alexa it's the #1,449,267th most visited site on the web, and (more encouragingly) as of a minute ago, it was #43 in Technorati's "Top 100" books blogs (4 places behind Kerrie's estimable Mysteries in Paradise) with a Technorati Authority of 760 (whatever that means—if anybody has any idea, please let me know). Now the question is, what do all those numbers mean...other than reflecting the blogosphere's fascination with statistics.

7 comments:

Maxine Clarke said...

Happy birthday to you, too! I so much enjoy your blog, it is one of my enduring favourites, so please keep it going for another 5, and more ;-)

I know not much about stats, but it's the quality that counts, not the quantity, of course.

Thanks for all the great reviews. I've read many a fascinating novel, thanks to your posts.

Glenn Harper said...

Thanks for the kind thoughts, Maxine. I'm a big fan of Petrona, though I don't leave many comments (I should make a resolution to do that more...

Uriah Robinson said...

Happy Birthday to International Noir. I really enjoy your reviews and those extra special books you find. All the best for many more years.

Jose Ignacio Escribano said...

Happy birthday. It is always a pleasure to read to your posts and an excellent source of new and interesting books. Well done.

Kerrie said...

Happy blog birthday Glenn. More important than the stats is that you continue to find blogging interesting to do

Bernadette said...

Happy birthday Glenn. I feel like such a baby compared to you and Norman. I'm not quite two yet.

If you really want to know Technorati Authority is a kind of real time assessment of your blog's "worth" in what I'll call the link economy for want of a better term. What their algorithm does is look at all the registered blogs in a given category (books) and looks for things like links to/from each blog and ranks each blog accordingly. There's a whole heck of other maths in there too (that they won't share) (and that they keep changing to stay a step ahead of the people who sell their ability to game their system and get blogs artificially ranked high). If I had to guess I'd also say that it looks at things like length of blog's life, posting schedule, unique visitors per post and a whole bunch of other stuff besides. These days Authority is calculated often (weekly maybe) and can change wildly in a relatively short period while rank tends to be a bit more stable (it uses an equally complex but different algorithm).

I know this is more than you wanted to know, but I happen to need to know this stuff for my day job so I thought I'd share :)

Glenn Harper said...

Bernadette: Thanks for the expert explanation! The "Authority" sounds a bit mis-named...