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Just looking at some numbers and nostalgia today, strictly of interest to me (so won’t be offended at all if this is a yawner to you!). Google sends along various statistics on blogs which I usually barely notice, but recently began taking note of.
According to Google the blog has had around 1,125,000 pageviews in its lifetime — I’m not even sure exactly what this really means since I think a lot of those “views” are simply webbots going around cataloguing “content” on the internet (but not sure). Or possibly also spammers, scammers, or hackers trying to get in? I do see that Mike McDowell’s once popular birddigiscoper blog, that started a little before mine (I think), has a similar ~1,243,000 views. While I don’t take the raw numbers Google sends me too seriously, I am interested in the relative numbers or ratios involved: i.e., IF Google says I have 500 views one day and 100 on another day, I do wonder why there may be 5x more readers that one day — is there something in the news or on the Web to account for that, or someone linking to me, or what? Sometimes I haven't a clue!
In the early days/months of this whole saga (and early days of blogging) I didn’t even realize (until someone pointed it out to me) that this blog was one of THE most trafficked of all American birding blogs. At least in the top 5 any given week. Back then, Mary Scott’s “Birding America,” was perhaps #1, and she too was an IBWO advocate of some fame, who encouraged me a lot. Her blog, like so many others from that time eventually dissolved (and that included a number of other blogs touching on the Ivorybill story). Though there are still some hugely popular blogs around, the heyday of blogging is passed with so many more options now available on the Web for information-presentation, especially visual and auditory.
Another oddball stat I only recently noticed from Google is that I’ve done 1685 posts thus far (an average of ~7/mo., despite not that many in recent years), and to my amazement have had almost 4000 comments! Comments have largely been rare ever since the Big Woods & Choctawhatchee searches closed down, so I was flabbergasted that nonetheless in total there have been over twice as many here than posts, because of the heavy ‘discussions’ in those early years (back in the day when even the likes of David Sibley, Louis Bevier, and other key names would occasionally weigh in). Emails too have dropped off considerably, so even though the topic still interests people (Dwight Norris's FB page on Ivorybills now has almost 10,000 followers!) the crowd I was most in touch with has somewhat drifted away.
Anyway, as I've sometimes mentioned before, I originally envisioned this blog lasting for 1 or 2 years, covering the revival of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Arkansas if not elsewhere. And here we are 20 years later scratching our heads???.... I guess, be careful what you wish, or plan, for.....
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