The Serendipity35 Review For 2008

Posted by Kenneth Ronkowitz on


Serendipity35 has been getting a pretty consistent one million plus visitors per month during the second half of 2008.
That both pleases us, and makes us wonder if we shouldn't have gone commercial rather than the non-profit route!

Our Top 10 visited articles
  1. Personal Video Online: YouTube and Beyond 49103 visits
  2. Public iTunes U Sites Still pulling in visitors at 43837
  3. Online Socializing: How Are Schools Reacting? 40804 visits
  4. This conference is only online 39676 visits
  5. Back to the Future Must have been that title that brought in 36370 clicks
  6. Google Page Creator 35073 visits - though Google dropped this in favor of Google Sites
  7. About Us 2.0 35010 people must be curious.
  8. Bookmarklets and Favelets 34129 visits
  9. Personal Broadcasting: Podcasting and beyond 32672 visits
  10. Classroom 2.0 Live: A Free Meetup 32395 visits

Proving that there is a long tail in blogging when you have an archive of entries, an early one about the writer William Gibson brought in 31913 visitors, and even though the news is outdated about Tim & I and About Division 35 at NJIT  31494 inquiring minds wanted to know. 

New entries on the blog usually take about a week to get about a hundred "direct hits" on them. Those come when someone find that particular post's URL via a search engine. When you visit our home page, you could read all 11 posts that show up, but it wouldn't be recorded as anything but a general hit on the site. We added the counter to each entry to see how much attention individual posts were getting, but we realize that those numbers are probably low. I myself read most blogs that I follow in my Google Reader application and I'm not sure that those reads count as anything other than another "subscriber" to the blog's owner.

I continue to get email about presentations that I have done at conferences that have accompanying entries on this blog. I did one on Social Computing at the NJEDge.Net Faculty Best Practices Showcase in 2006 when I was pretty new to blogging, wikis and all that, but a lot of other educators were even more Web 1.0 then. That post has pulled in 31369 visits.

I'm always tempted to delete old entries that seem "dated" - like What is this thing called Web 2.0? from early 2006 - but with 30131 reads, I suppose it has "historic" value too.

Some entries get a push because of other sites linking to us or for less desired reasons. My original 2007 post about Randy Pausch unfortunately needed to be updated when the man behind The Last Lecture died 8 months later.
Serendipity35 received 540 comments which might sound like a lot, but is quite low based on our visitor count. Some of the best blogs get that many comments in a month. I haven't figured out the secret to getting readers to comment. More controversy as with talk radio and TV?
We have been averaging 4.54 entries posted per week. And the statistics machine keeps calculating: Total amount of characters we have typed = 2,591,164 characters with an average characters per entry of 3,772 - though the 2006 "A Serendipity35 Year in Review" swelled up like my stomach after the holidays to 25,352 characters all by itself. (That's because I was using tables, so most of the those characters are hiding in the code.) That's a lot of keyboard action for my two fingers.
We get a good amount of traffic from outside the United States - the top 10 other countries that visit the blog the most are:
  1. Germany (Ken would like to go back and visit again, but his knees can't handle those ski trails anymore.)
  2. Russian Federation (thanks, but stop the spam comments and trackbacks please!)
  3. Canada (Hello to our friends from the north!)
  4. Netherlands (We appreciate your windmills, tulips, cheese, clogs, delftware, bicycles, and social tolerance. Any good conferences in Amsterdam that we can work up a presentation for in 2009?)
  5. Sweden  (We realize that the Swedish Bikini Team was really an advertising ploy that used American actresses, but we are still open to a paid conference invite.)
  6. United Kingdom (Love you guys.)
  7. Brazil  (We are ready to visit your beaches! No conference necessary. Send airfare.)
  8. Romania  (Wasn't Sibiu, in Transylvania, chosen the European Capital of Culture in 2007? Sure, we'll come and speak.)
  9. Italy  (Ken has been trying to get his wife to take him to Italy to visit her ancestors... give him an formazione o technoloy excuse to visit!)
  10. Australia  (That's a long plane ride. I may need to get a Kindle.)

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