Poliblog Perspective

The Wardman Wire made an important milestone this afternoon: we just went past 20,000 measured uniques in a month for the first time.

On this occasion, I’m not apologising for posting statistics - since it’s taken 9 months and a lot of work to get to this point.

Figures for the Wardman Wire

These are a couple of screenshots of the display from the “Slimstat-EX” plugin. Firstly, the summary. You can click through for a fuller screenshot illustrating how our traffic profile is rather different (less purely “politico” than most political blogs in the UK).

“Visits” in this screenshot means “Unique visitors” (which is defined as the number of different internet addresses from which people visit during each individual day, summed across the month). “Hits” means page impressions.

And a sorted version showing monthly figures since we started:

These figures are not filtered for *all* search engines (it would slow the blog down dramatically), which is why I emphasize the “uniques” not the “hits”. The hits figures are likely to be high by perhaps 10-20%. The uniques figures will also be slightly high, but much less so than the hits.

There are two major distortions in these figures. The July 2007 figures went haywire because I posted an 18th birthday interview with Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) at a cricket match. It is now up to 287 comments, which is ludicrous - including one from the man himself.

And the “Hits” (page impressions) figure for December is inflated by perhaps 25,000 over and above the 10-20% I mention above, since I left the “search engine pinger” turned on by mistake while posting 100 or so cartoons to appear on the blog between New Year and the middle of April 2008.

So the real “hits” figures for December 2007 and January 2008 are likely to be around 100,000 to 110,000 in my estimation.

And the UK Edition

The real figure for the uniques for the main site in January is likely to be 18,000 or 19,000, but fortunately there are another 4,300 or so who visited the UK Edition (again - click through for more detail) so it still comes in at rather more than 20,000.

Before anyone asks, I have not got the foggiest idea why a search for “development For sweater opportunity building” should land on my site, unless it was a visit from Gyles Brandreth.

Wrapping Up

OK - enough statistical self-abuse. Back to politics.

Did you realise that Mr Darling’s Capital Gains Tax reforms have abolished the indexation allowance for CGT (so you will be taxed on the increase in cash - not real - value of an asset, including if the value has gone down in real terms), and that in fact - like the last budget - they hit the poorer members of society hardest? More on that later when today’s Working Lunch is available online.

Except for the most important thing: a really big thank-you to everyone who has visited, and especially those who have taken the trouble to link to the blog or participate in the debate here. Your presence is very much appreciated, especially if you disagree with what has been written and help generate a wider debate. A wider debate is a worthwhile reason for putting hundreds of hours into building a blog.

I note (in poking around on Technorati) that both Ordovicius and Bob Piper have reached a Technorati Authority figure of 100 recently.

Congratulations to them both.

For readers who don’t track metrics, it means that they have received links from 100 different blogs in the last 6 months, which is a fairly robust measure of how often other people take notice of you. It is not a measure of traffic.

On this measure it places them both almost in the top 50,000 blogs worldwide known to Technorati.

Bob Piper … is Bob Piper

I won’t say much about Bob Piper - he has been blogging since 2004, and pretty much everyone knows him. 3 years and still here is cause for congratulation in itself - whether or not one is in agreement.

Ordovicius - “Wales is not England’s bitch”

Ordovicius has made it quickly - the blog is only just over 5 months old - and has the distinction of (I think) being the newest blogger profiled in the 2007 Guide to Political Blogging by Iain Dale.

I believe that there are only two blogs profiled that started in 2007 in the Political Blogging Guide - and the other one is The Wardman Wire. I did my first posting on March 6th, 11 days before Ordovicius trumpeted his “Wales Awake” clarion call:

I’m a Welsh Nationalist, but this isn’t a blog solely about independence, though the cause for Welsh Independence will be a key ingredient. Likewise it is not a blog solely about politics, though politics will play the lead role in it, I’m sure (especially in the run up to the Assembly elections this May). This is also a blog against defeatism, against the idea that Wales is a defeated nation. The Saxons couldn’t defeat us. The Normans needed 216 years, the most advanced technology in warfare at the time, and a lot of luck to take away our sovereignty, bankrupting Europe in the process. And still we rose again. Even afterwards our warriors -employed by the Normans because of their experience in battle - were recognised as the most hard assed bastards in Europe. You only had to say the words “Welsh bowman” to make a seasoned French knight shit his armoured breaches back then. A lot of us seem to have forgotten this, and seem to border on being apologetic for being Welsh. Wales is not England’s bitch.