My colleague Nick Reynolds (who, until recently, I’ve always called “Nick Reynolds-AM&i” owing to his previous name on the internal email list) posts a rather plaintive comment after reading his Wordpress statistics…

Wordpress‘ stats give me a live update of how many hits I’m getting and where the traffic is coming from. And because the numbers are very low it’s much easier to get a quick snapshot sense of what’s going on. And when I say low I mean low. My blog really is at the very end of the long tail. Somedays the tail doesn’t wag at all, and I get no hits whatsoever. My best day ever has been 350 hits (mainly due to a link from Biased BBC). Tiny numbers.

Hmm. Some people post their stats every month in all their gory detail. I’ve shied away from this so far; but Nick’s post made me go and take a peek.

The stats for this blog, in case you’re interested, were 11,000 page impressions in the last month; and the highest day was 543. That’s not much different from Nick’s highest, frankly - and I’ve had a blog for years! However, items in my RSS feed has been read a further 8,000 times (there have been 2,250 clicks from my RSS feed to my content). Combining the two, I therefore had 16,750 “unique views” in total, so that’s an average of 558 ‘hits’ per day. Just like radio’s multiplatform, so are blogs, too.

So it seems that I’ve got 550 people reading my blog every day. They’re clearly the 550 cleverest people in the world. Or, more likely, they can’t get onto any other websites. Call your IT department, quick, people.

Photo: Heather. Used under licence.

In a post today, Martin Belam makes mention of the BBC’s dodgy blog infrastructure, and says, in part:

James Cridland and I had to continue a discussion about a post on our own sites, since neither of us could manage to get a comment submitted and published. He’s BBC staff and I was trying to reply to an article I had authored!

First, the BBC -is- upgrading its blog infrastructure. I’m involved with the work because of my involvement with the Social Media team, and I have also invited myself to one of the ‘Blog Platform Refresh’ meetings. The work seems sensibly worked-out, and also uses a pan-BBC approach which should reap dividends. You’ll see changes during the second quarter of this year, as it’s currently planned.

Secondly, Martin says that I posted a comment on my blog because I couldn’t get a comment published at the BBC Internet blog because of the technical troubles. This isn’t actually true.

I didn’t publish a comment for a purpose: because I don’t actually like, particularly, leaving comments. I’m not alone in this - Dave Winer doesn’t like comments in blogs either.

I’ve three main reasons for not really liking comments.

First, this reply is going on a bit, and it would be quite difficult to leave this in Martin’s blog comments anyway. (Because I’ve used more than one link here, it probably would be regarded as spam, too). A reply in my blog affords me the space to reply.

Second, by my blogging here as a reply to Martin’s post over there, it means that those that read my blog are aware of Martin’s posting. If I’d have just posted on Martin’s blog, nobody would be aware of Martin’s posting. The extra addition of Google Juice, etc, also is a good thing for both of us.

Third, this is just as relevant a posting as many of my others here; if people really want to read my witterings here (as apparently quite a few do), then it’s probably just as useful to them to read this reply.

That’s not to say I don’t think comments have a place. I’m more likely to reply to a negative post with a comment, than linking to it from my website, naturally. But generally, I’d be happier with posting a reply on my own blog, not commenting: as my reply to Ashley Highfield’s love-in with DAB Digital Radio shows.

Photo: Daniel Greene. Used under licence.

For those of you who wonder what’s going on within the BBC, I keep a blog aggregation list of all BBC staffers’ blogs.

Thanks to Alan Connor, who works on the BBC Internet Blog, I’ve been able to get rather a few more people…

Removed: Nic Price
Added: Karen Loasby (FMT)
Added: Jem Stone (FMT)
Added: Mark Simpkins (FMT)
]Added: Sarah Mines
Added: Thomas Davies (Research)
Added: Kevin Marsh
Added: Ant Miller

You’re welcome to add it to your reader: it’s on this page, and naturally it contains its own RSS feed, so you can add the lot into your own feed reader of choice. Enjoy…

Photo: Andy McMillan. Used under licence.

Photo taken this week by mike138. Used under licence. Photos for my Delicious postings like this will be taken from Flickr’s ‘interesting feed’ for the day concerned. Seemed like a good idea.

Postalicious
One of the reasons I stopped posting my Del.icio.us links to this blog was the unpleasant way that it rendered, and the lack of any control I had with regard to timing. This hopefully fixes this.

Meet Mr. TechCrunch UK - ScobleShow
In the latest of my “let’s mention Robert Scoble because he normally adds your mention to his linkblog”, a serious one - Robert interviews the excellent Mike Butcher, who’s looking very well in this video. I last saw Mike a good eight months ago.

Ubuntu
Recently added it to my normal workhorse laptop (an HP Compaq tc4200). I wouldn’t say it worked totally instantly out of the box, but after a little tinkering, it’s doing everything I want except print, which is a good start, and I’ve still Windows on the machine if I need it.

The UCC Journalism Society Conference 2008 (my speaking events)
Delighted to be speaking on “the place of traditional media in the Web 2.0 world” at this conference for University College Cork: under the auspices of my Media UK work.

An ego blog-search
I wanted to see who was blogging about me, but I had problems with Google Blog Search returning my own blog entries. I’ve worked out how to stop that with -blogurl, like so: “James Cridland” -blogurl:james.cridland.net -blogurl:www.flickr.com

v-moda “Vibe Duo” headphones for the iPhone
My Christmas present to myself was an iPhone: and these are just excellent headphones - way better sound than the original crappy ones, and with a headset mike, so I can still use it as a phone. Mind, damn expensive.

ShinyRed - 10 blogs to read in 2008
Nine blogs you might actually want to read; and one ridiculous suggestion. But it’s very nice of them, so thank you, ShinyRed.

‘Follow me’ by Kitten Betty from Flickr. Used under licence.

Back in 2005, Google announced a way to ‘prevent comment spam’.

The idea was to specify a “nofollow” attribute to all external links from “any link that a user can create on your site”.

Wordpress followed suit, and added code to use this tag in all comments in blogs. I use Wordpress (I recommend it, indeed) and therefore have been automatically adding “nofollow” to all comments on my blog.

However. I also only allow authorised comments. Leave a comment here, and you’ll find that it’ll spend a while before appearing, as I hit a button to accept it, assuming it’s not spam and not off-topic.

Therefore, given that I’ve specifically allowed all comments - including URLs - to appear on this blog, I am therefore standing by those comments and the URLs they post; and therefore, I see no reason why Google can’t use the links on this website to calculate page rank.

So, I’ve added the DoFollow plugin, and all external links from this website are now visible to Google, and other search engines.