According to sitemeter, my blog has now received over 400,000 visits and 675,000 page views (which is probably the number of readers Andrew Bolt’s blog receives in an average week). I’ve no idea how this measures against other blogs — pretty poorly, I imagine, as on average that (apparently) works out to be something like 600 or so visits a day.<\/p>\n
Which is not very much.<\/p>\n
(But it’s certainly better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.)<\/p>\n
Anyway, Googling ‘Andrew Bolt’, ‘blog’ and ‘popularity’, dredged up the following:<\/p>\n
‘Monitoring the Australian Blogosphere through the 2007 Australian Federal Election’, Lars Kirchhoff, Thomas Nicolai, Axel Bruns & Tim Highfield, a research paper [PDF<\/a>] given at the July 2009 ANZCA09 conference —<\/p>\n This paper examines the observable patterns of content creation by Australian political bloggers during the 2007 election and its aftermath, thereby providing insight into the level and nature of activity in the Australian political blogosphere during that time. The performance indicators which are identified through this process enable us to target for further in-depth research, to be reported in subsequent papers, those individual blogs and blog clusters showing especially high or unusual activity as compared to the overall baseline. This research forms the first stage in a larger project to investigate the shape and internal dynamics of the Australian political blogosphere. In this first stage, we tracked the activities of some 230 political blogs and related Websites in Australia from 2 November 2007 (the final month of the federal election campaign, with the election itself taking place on 24 November) to 24 January 2008. We harvested more than 65,000 articles for this study.<\/em><\/p>\n — which defines the ‘political’ blogosphere in terms best summarised by John Dewey: ‘As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance’.<\/p>\n Well, kinda.<\/p>\n