13 September 2010

TYWKIWDBI welcomes our 500th Google follower

This morning, Swan-pr became the 500th person to follow this blog using Google Friend Connect.  We've been watching this phenomenon with some interest, trying to figure out what it all means.  The graph above shows the number of people following this blog at about 2-week intervals for about the past year.  As far as I can tell, there has been no particular event that has driven people here - just a gradual accretion, probably through word of mouth, email recommendations to friends, casual encounters after Google searches - whatever.

This apparent growth stands in a bit of contrast to the data from Google Analytics, which shows that the number of visits to TYWKIWDBI and the number of pageviews stopped increasing about a year ago and has been about constant since then.  Apparently browsing via a Google Reader doesn't register as "traffic," which must be a source of some annoyance to commercial blogs; for this one it doesn't have any practical effect.

When I started getting "followers," I used to check their profiles and look at their blogs.  This is becoming increasingly impractical, but I do have to say that some of you have quite interesting (and rather odd...) blogs of your own and some totally bizarre ones that you follow.

Very interesting.

Addendum:  Approximately one year later, the 1000th Google follower signed on.  By November of 2012, the rate had slowed a bit, to a total of 1364.

11 comments:

  1. What is Google Friend Connect and where do I find it?

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's the quality of your affect on your audience, not quantity that should matter!!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Look who's talking! Some of your daily and weekly browsing paths go in some decidedly odd directions.

    ReplyDelete
  4. bigjohn - look in the right sidebar, below my bio, to the box I've labeled "like-minded people." There should be a Google icon with the word "Follow" to click on. I forget what happens after that, but it should be intuitive; you'll presumably create a (free) Google account, if you don't have one.

    The Reader is very cool. I use it myself.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I like to read the comments.
    If the comment is interesting, then I follow the link to the commenter's Blog. I probably found TYWKIWDBI from J-Walkblog post. Don't know which one though.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Can you tell how many people are subscribed via RSS? We may not come to the site every day, but we do read (and enjoy!).

    ReplyDelete
  7. Can't wait to see how your followers spike from this post. I read you via Reader but I hadn't thought to follow you til this post - I'm sure I'm not alone.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Oh hell, I've been following through Google Reader. I'll join the other fan club now!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hmm, according to the stats on Google Reader, I see that TYWKIWDBI has 2,068 subscribers through that RSS. Well done you!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Well, now, I'm going to have to admit to some naivete. Until I read the comments above, I didn't quite understand what "Google Friend Connect" was - I assumed it was just a list of the people reading the blog via the RSS feed or Google Reader. I'm not sure even yet that I understand what's going on. But that never prevents (anyone) from being a blogger...

    Hannah, I don't know where at Google Reader you found the data for TYWKIWDBI, but I'm fascinated to learn that 2000+ people are accessing the blog that way.

    I guess I'll have to get more in touch with social networking media and how everything works. I'm such a newbie at this, and a "bowl alone" kind of guy.

    ReplyDelete
  11. I found about TYWKIWDBI from Titam and since then I come once a day.
    Today, I discovered Google Friend Connect...

    ReplyDelete