I now have MyBlogLog data from March 3-24, 2005 (with most of 25^th added), though five days of it show zero in all categories - March 3 & 4, and March 8-10. I hate missing data, not sure why it didn't record for all those days.

Oh well missing data aside, I have learned some very interesting things watching this log. For the period there were 170 clicks to off-site URLs. 48.2% of the clicks were to pages listed on the sidebar (n=82). Of those, 20 were to my webpage http://www.loisscheidt.com for 24.4% of the sidebar clicks. An additional 16 clicks, the second highest number, were placed to Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs, which is linked multiple places in the sidebar.

47.1% of the clicks are to URLs that appeared in post entries (n=80). The top two most clicked URLs are Preople Rank with nine and Levenger with six. Finally, 4.7% of the clicks were to URLs that appeared in both entries and the sidebar so the actual origin is impossible to define (n=8).

Additionally 28.8% of the clicks were to URLs associated with the blogger - my webpage, papers I have written, my CiteULike list, and other websites to which I contribute.

It appears that a significant number of the clicks lead the reader to pages that give them more data about the author rather then to pages that give them more information about the topics. Now to be fair this could be a unique finding since it is getting late in the semester and students are looking for sources to use in their class papers. Or it may simply be a function of writing an academic weblog, in that readers want to verify the credentials and authenticity of the writer. *w* More research is needed.

For the clicks not associated with me or my work, I have been surprised to see how few of the readers actually click through for more information on the day the link is posted. For example looking at March 23 statistics for the individual date, on that day there were nine click throughs but only one of them was to a link posted that day, Guardian Unlimited. Interestingly the single click through used that day was to the general site not to the specific article I cited and discussed in the post. The remaining eight clicks were mostly to links listed in the sidebar (n=6). The remaining two click throughs were to links that appear in earlier posts on the page, prior to March 23, and on the sidebar as well.

So much for a little Friday night content analysis with a touch of ethnography thrown in for spice. I will have to see what stories the numbers tell when I have a quarters worth of data. Assuming I can wait that long for the analysis. LOL

Posted by prolurkr at March 25, 2005 09:46 PM

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