Measurement of Internet Popularity Score

As I've mentioned before, generating comments from content on the internet is harder than I expected it to be.  Over the past few months, I've spent some time thinking about how to quantify that: how can you score how active a site is on the internet?

One easy metric is the number of hits your internet site gets per month.  To clarify, here is a screenshot of this blog's hits per month, courtesy of the statistics Google provides:

So, I'm averaging about 150 hits per month, although it's been tailing off lately (partly due to the fact that I'm telling Google not to track my own page views).  That's fairly meager, as other sites can get over a million hits per month.

I think another measure of internet popularity is the number of comments generated on the site.  Is the site so popular that people feel the need to put in their own two cents?  In that regard, I'm pretty meager at (as of this writing) 2 comments.  Ever.  But many of the sites I read, I read them because of the comments -- sites like slashdot, armscontrolwonk, and arstechnica often have more meat in the comments (from its readership) than in the original postings.  And then, of course, there are sites like facebook and twitter where the content is the comments.

So, what if you combine those two metrics?  I present the "Measurement of Internet Popularity Score", or MIPS.

(click for full size version)

Note the log-log scale.  This covers a lot of ground.  I've highlighted and named a few regions:

• Lonely Outpost: Less than 300 hits per month and typically less than 10 comments per month.  Yep, I'm squarely in this field.
• Minor Internet Contributor: These sites have a readership between 100 and about 50,000 hits per month, and generate fewer than 100 comments per month. Niche sites and very popular blogs fall into this category.
• Broadcaster: These are sites with huge levels of readership, but aren't necessarily geared towards generating comments.  Some news sites and government information-dissemination pages fall into here.
• Major Internet Contributor: These are the heavy-hitters of the internet, which can draw large readership and spark enough interest that hundreds to thousands of people feel compelled to post their comments.
• Social Media: When the readership gets above about 100,000, and the number of comments approaches the number of readers, now you're into social media territory.
• 4 Chan: This is the land of the absurd, where you get more than 1 comment per hit.  4 Chan is one stereotypical example of a site overrun with internet freaks and teenagers who post their ramblings and inappropriate blather on the internet.  For the record, I never go there; I just know about it from xkcd references.

It has to have a catchy name, but I'm not sure MIPS is quite it.  In the meantime, help out this blog's MIPS by telling your friends and posting your thoughts (other areas? other names?) in the comments.

2010 In Review

Shockingly, 2010 has come and gone.  This marks the technical end of the first decade of the 21st century (remember, since there was no Year 0, the millenium officially started on January 1, 2001).  And it also marks the end of the first year of this blog.  Time for a site refresh, as you can see.

I've only been running Google Analytics for a few months now, so I can't do any advanced navel-gazing over site statistics, or anything nearly as cool as the Google Zeitgeist.  But I can offer some thoughts on the year, as well as some insights (which will also serve as motivational points for myself) for the upcoming year.

Note: I linked to the Barley Blog above because they were the first to do a review of what is probably our favorite beer, the Blue Dawg Wild Blue Lager.  The Barley Blog hated it, and for beer purists, I can see why -- it doesn't taste like a beer. (The Barley Blog also hates that their review is still coming up as a top hit for their site, to which I say, "Neener, neener.")  For anyone else, it's a fantastic way to consume something with 8% alcohol in it.  If they sell it in your area, I highly recommend it.

• Being consistently creative is hard.  After one year and 36 posts, it's harder than I expected to come up with something that (I think) is creative, thought-provoking, and mildly inspirational.  It gives me a new-found respect for the people who can do it regularly, and on a much more frequent basis, like XKCD (Randall Munroe), George Will (Washington Post commentator and general pundit), John Siracusa (ars technica contributor who's not very prolific but makes up for it in brilliant posts ... he likes to keep his signal-to-noise ratio high), Daring Fireball (John Gruber), and this political junkie who produces fascinating (to me) insights of geo-politics.  My hat is off to those folks who do this well and do it consistently.  It's not easy.
  
• Documenting how bad the driving is in DC is hard.  I've only done 6 "Driving In DC" posts in the past year, and I'm ashamed of myself.  On a day-to-day basis, you come across countless examples of how bad it is.  But to actually stop, remember it, take a picture, or otherwise document the scenario is hard.  The idea for "Driving in DC" was partially motivated by this site, and it's impressive how long they've been able to keep it up.    (Slightly irreverent, but very funny.)  I promise I have more examples in store, I just haven't gone through the documentation process yet.  Stay tuned ... and if you have any suggestions or examples of your own, feel free to post them in the comments.
  
• Generating comments is tough.  I have received one comment on this site.  Ever.  One.  I get it, that the stuff I post about isn't really comment-inducing.  Posts about Jane's crazy OMGWTFBBQ party last week may be more likely to get feedback, but that's what facebook is for.  The readership-to-comment ratio has spawned an idea for another post (like a Dunbar's Number) that I'll put up sometime in 2011.
  
• Generating ad revenue is tough.  Google provides a really cool way to generate revenue for each site: see those ads on the left hand side of this screen?  The way they have it set up, if you opt in to AdSense, Google places content-specific ads to the right of the screen.  Each time someone clicks on an ad, the owner of that website gets a kickback.  In this case, that's me.  (I'll be ecstatic when the AdSense revenue can cover the $13 annual domain name costs.  I'm hoping for 2015.)  On one hand, I'm surprised at how few clicks I get on those ads ... given a few hundred site visits, you might expect a few clicks here and there, right?  Nope.  Personally, I never click on those things, so it only stands to reason that nobody else clicks on them, either.

So have a happy 2011.  And although we've missed it once today, later tonight will be 11:11:11pm on 1/1/2011.  That won't happen again for another 10 months ... and it'll be even cooler 10 days after that.

Loss of time

I happily spent a fair amount of time in the evenings over the past few weeks watching the Olympics, which negatively affected the amount of time I had to update the blog.

I fear that with this new development, I may lose more time:

Popular Science has scanned in all 137 years of their articles, and made them freely available for all to search and peruse.  It's not that Popular Science is the paragon of all things scientifically truthful, or that Popular Science is the Oracle of Things to Come, but at least they consistently write about things that are just plain cool.

To really crank up the nostalgia, enter a yesteryear into the search field ... say, 1950 ... and enjoy reading about the latest Russian car designs from 1950.

My one complaint is that the interface is hokey.  Why can't I make the viewing window bigger?