What Are You Up To These Days?

Every once in awhile a commenter (usually anonymous) on a blog post will make some assumption about blog readership like “…, these blogs are only read by a few hundred people very few of whom are regular voters.”

I’m not so sure about that. While I can’t claim to know for certain how large the readership of this blog is or whether or not they are registered voters, I have employed three different measuring devices to help get a better picture of who you are.

The most public measuring device I use is Site Meter. This device is also used by The Hedgehog Report and HoCo Rising. By simply clicking on the Site Meter icon at the bottom of this page anyone can see how many visits a blog gets on an hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Based on this measurement tool Tales of Two Cities currently receives around 490 visits a day.

But what is a visit and how does that relate to actual people?

In an attempt to figure that out I added the Quantcast tool to the blog last year. Quantcast refines raw visit data with some sort of algorithm and determines how many people those 490 visits equate to. For Tales of Two Cities it currently works out to an average of about 143 people per day.

The third measurement device is Google Analytics. Among other things Google Analytics provides data on what cities the visitors come from, which individual posts are the most popular, and where the visitors to Tales of Two Cities originate from. The top five cities that visitors come from are Columbia, Ellicott City, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Laurel (in that order). I do know that at least one comes from Sykesville.

The top five blog posts are Three Things about Food, Top Dog, Marc Fishers Last Column, the most recent Scene This Week In…, and Another Day in Paradise. It seems to reinforce the observation made by HoCo Rising that food is the most popular local blog topic.

The top five referring sites are hocoblogs, HowChow, Free Market, HoCo Rising and Columbia Talk. This seems to say that if you like reading one local blog you are likely to read others as well.

I think I can say with relative certainty that local blog readership is growing and with the addition of relatively new voices like HoCo Rising it is likely to continue to do so.

Thank you to all who visit and comment here. If you keep reading, I’ll keep posting.