Stephen Hayes's Blog, page 92

Tell them what you think

I received the following message from Technorati:

Since 2004, Technorati has been tracking the Blogosphere through our State of the Blogosphere study. The goal of the study is to create a complete snapshot of the activities and interactions that make up the Blogosphere by asking you, the bloggers, to share some information about your habits. The survey includes questions like how, when and why you blog. Is this a side business, full time job or something you do for fun?

Please feel free to send this link to other bloggers you know. And be sure to check back on Technorati.com in November for a summary of the results.

I urge all my blogging friends to participate in the survey.

Why do I say this?

Well if you look at the Technorati site you find the following categories:

Technology — Business — Entertainment — Lifestyle — Sports — Politics — Videos — Blogging

And none of thse really caters for my interests.

And I suspect that any blogger who finds my blog interesting will also feel that there are huge gaps in that list. I'm interested in history, culture, society, religion. I'm interested in politics to some extent too, but I don't expect to find that under headings like "politics" on sites like Technorati (and Digg is even worse). I'm interested in political principles and policies, but not in personalities, or in political infighting, and who'e in and who's out and who matters.

Among the things they ask in the survey is where you get information from, and I had to enter "Books" under "Other".

The people who compile these surveys seem to be either technogeeks or celebrity cultists, or at least to assume that everyone who reads or writes blogs is one or other of those things. And I suspect that most of my blogging friends, like me, are neither of those things. So if all my blogging friends participate in the survey, it might help to restore the balance, and show that there are other things in the blogosphere than they are plugging. They gave a long list of celebs, and the only one I recognised was Barack Obama.

So if you have a blog, and if you blog about the humanities, or something other than technology and tentertainment, go here:

http://research.opinionguru.com/mrIWeb/mrIWeb.dll?I.Project=A17275

and take part in the survey — and urge your blog readers to do the same.

What makes people read this stuff?

Last week the BlogCatalog widget disappeared from my blogs. I use it (and the MyBlogLog one) to see who visits my blog, so I can pay a return visit to them.They are both social blogrolling sites, which let you connect to blogs and bloggers that you find interesting. Apart from the usual spammers who misuse the system, they provide a good way of marking interesting blogs for return visits.

The BlogCatalog one is back now (apparently they were changing servers), but I thought I'd check the statistics to see how many visitors it brought to my blog. The answer is quite illuminating:

Referrers for 90 days ending 2010-09-29 (Summarized)
2010-07-01 to Today



Referrer
Views


sergesblog.blogspot.com/
104


methodius.blogspot.com/
99


avowofconversation.wordpress.com/
89


alphainventions.com/
70


stumbleupon.com/su/1mUVSR/khanya.word…
61


google.com/reader/view/
57


stumbleupon.com/su/8GnxYv/khanya.word…
55


avowofconversation.wordpress.com/2010…
50


stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=http://…
46


WordPress Dashboard
43


reddit.com/
42


google.com/
39


carpenters-shoes.blogspot.com/
34


stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=http://…
33


christianforums.com/t7483705/
32


search.conduit.com/Results.aspx?q=the…
30


stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=http://…
29


blogcatalog.com/blog/khanya
25


vagantepriest.blogspot.com/
24


google.co.za/
24


stumbleupon.com/su/3UXO9b/khanya.word…
23


jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/21469.htm
21


obama-scandal-exposed.co.cc/vids
18


stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=http://…
17


stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=http://…
17


frmilovan.wordpress.com/
17


apos-archive.blogspot.com/
15


stumbleupon.com/su/8GnxYv/khanya.word…
15


student-loan-consilidation.com/
14


reddit.com/r/Christianity/
14


google.ca/
13


google.com/reader/view/?hl=en&tab=wy
12


stumbleupon.com/su/7vbZmW/khanya.word…
12


internetmonk.com/archive/convince-me
12


ancientchristiandefender.blogspot.com…
12


healthfitnesstherapy.com/
11


stumbleupon.com/su/9ho7dO/khanya.word…
11


mattstone.blogs.com/
11


methodius.blogspot.com/2010/06/are-ro…
11


sbarnabas.com/blog/2010/07/20/check-t…
10

Notice what is not there: no Technorati, no Amatomu, no Afrigator, no Twitter and no Facebook. Also no MyBlogLog. BlogCatalog is there, but quite low down.

It seems that the thing that brings most visitors to this blog is links from other blogs.

Some of those are annoying spam links like "student loan consilidation [sic]", which have nothing that interests me. And one of them that is quite high up is another of my own blogs — that's because when I write there about something I've written about here before, I often link to it rather than repeating stuff I've already said. So that doesn't really count.

But most of the other blogs that link write about things that interest me.

And apart from those, the thing that brings readers is Stumble Upon.

I find that interesting, because what I post there automatically gets passed on to Twitter and from there to Facebook, yet very few people seem to come from those places. Or perhaps they do, but are shown as coming from Stumble Upon, because SU provides the link shortener, which works automatically, though that should not apply to the Twitter daily paper, which provides a daily digest of the best of Twitter, and is the way I follow Twitter most of the time. The daily paper has direct full links, rather than the shortened ones.

About 4-5 years ago I used to use Technorati a lot. If I was about to write something on my blog, I'd check that subject on Technorati yo see what others had written on it, and if necessary link to them. But, as is common on the Internet, the people at Technorati never heard the saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." You could log in and see everything on one page — like the top tags and the top subjects. But I think they got greedy, and decided that if they made things hard to find, people would spend a lot of time looking for them, and the more pages they looked at, the more Technorati's ad revenue would be. So by making the site more difficult to navigate, and hiding things, they hoped that visitors might have thirty page-views where previously they had only had three. But if others are anything like me, they don't go there at all any more. I used to visit every day, but now I only visit when I'm writing things like this and want to check to see if it's still as bad I remember it. And it is. I search for stuff I know is out there in the blogosphere, and Technorati doesn't find it. But Google does.

So I see that things like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog are mainly useful for me to find other blogs, but other people don't seem to use them much to find mine. And social networking sites, like Twitter and Facebook, are pretty much overrated. And though BlogCatalog wasn't broke, they are busy trying to fix it right now, and lots of things that used to work no longer do so. I fear they are going the Technorati route, making the site harder to navigate, hiding stuff that you used to be able to see at a glance. It looks ominous. And what those sites lack most is a way of getting rid of unwanted "friends". Not blocking them, but just saying, in effect, "I don't know you, and you obviously don't want to know me, so don't 'add' me to your friends." Friends are those who read my blogs and make intelligent comments — that indicates that we share common interests. And that's what blogging is all about, to me, at any rate — sharing thoughts and ideas and experiences with people who have similar interests.

Visitors from Romania and Australia

We've been fairly busy the last few days, with several visitors and more expected.

On Wednesday last wee Fr Ciprian Burlacioiu arrived from Germany. He is Romanian, but teaches church history at a university in Munich, Germany.  He came to South Africa for the purpose of academic research into the history of the African Orthodox Church, and especially the role of Daniel William Alexander, who started the African Orthodox Church in South Africa, and spread it to Uganda and Kenya. If it weren't for D.W. Alexander, the Orthodox Church in East Africa would have been a lot smaller than it is today. So I took Fr Ciprian to the state archives, and showed him how the system worked, so he could check the source material held there. D.W. Alexanders personal papers are held by Emory University in the USA, and very few researchers have been able to consult both those and the material in the South African archives, so Fr Ciprian's research is quite important for the history of Orthodoxy in Africa.

On Saturday Chris Morrow arrived from Australia. He is involved in veterinary work among poultry farmers, which takes him all over the world. We are both interested in family history, and our common interest is the Cottam family that came from Lancashire in England, though we haven't managed to find a common  ancestor yet, so we are "almost" cousins. So we took Chris and Fr Ciprian on a quick tour of Pretoria, had lunch together, and took Chris to Skeerpoort, the next stop on his itinerary.

Fr Ciprian Burlacioiu, Chris Morrow, Steve Hayes

On Sunday Fr Ciprian came with us to the Hours and Readers Service at Mamelodi, though as it was a long weekend, many people were away.

Back: Fr Ciprian, Val Hayes. Front: Mary Nthite, Alinah Malahlela, Miss South Africa, Grace Malahlela.

Then we took Fr Ciprian to St George's Hotel in Centruion, where Fr Razban Tatu holds Romanian services in the hotel chapel.

Fr Ciprian Burlacioiu and Fr Razban Tatu

It was the first time we had met Fr Razban and his family, though we knew some of the members of the congregation who had sometimes visited St Nicholas Church in Brixton when we had a Romanian priest there.

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