Like the plumber's hot water, the electrician's house-wiring and the dressmaker's children's clothes - my love of blogs has only led to rack and ruin on my own site. But I don't really care - with 7 blogs under my watchful eye (what do you call a collection of blogs?), I get great pleasure from seeing them emerge and sprout.
Here's the top-scorer in the blog family - my Dad's Woolshed 1 blog. Check out the Google
Analytics' stats from today (above) - he finally cracked the 1,000 visitor mark for a month. Nearly 400 posts, traffic from 70 countries, Google driving 70% of the users from search using 640 different keywords, an average time on site of 2 minutes, plus nearly 80% of the traffic new each month.Coupled with his multiple knols, he will probably see 15-20,000 web visitors to his work this year - with a range of interests from the often hilarious history of Northumbrian agriculture in the 1950s, to unique texts on sheep, goat, pig, cat, dog and cattle behaviour, animal welfare, NZ agricultural history and farm economics.
He has been awarded a 'Top Viewed Knol' award by Google, and one of his popular animal behaviour knols has become part of Gogle's beta program for text to voice translation - which is scarily amazing technology by the way.
As a scientific and technical writer for 50 years, Clive has had a lifetime devotion to the little © for copyright symbol in his work. Now, he publishes under a creative commons license (non-commercial, attribution requested) and marvels at people still attempting to write technical non-fiction for a readership adept at web searching and RSS feeds rather than the Dewey Decimal system of their university library.
He's also dragged in a range of co-contributors to his blog, mostly in the field of the priceless memories of Northumberland's farming history.
In his spare time he maintains a blog for the Waikato Guild of Woodworkers. To my utter chagrin, they're an easy second on the league table in the blog family! From a tiny base of Hamilton, New Zealand this blog goes out to over 30 countries.
And that's why I love the internet.
