Comments on: Linkblogging for 14/07/09

By: Alix

Alix — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:01:49 +0000

Ew. That will have weirded out quite a lot of their readership, I would think (not least the section that watches the Wire).

By: Andrew Hickey

Andrew Hickey — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:27:09 +0000

Can’t find my copy, but they say you were completely unfair about the expenses thing (“unlike the other four editors”) and about half the thing (about a column or so of the page, as I recall) is about an aside you made about watching The Wire, and they were saying things like “We just have to hope that nothing else disturbs Ms Mortimer while she is watching her crime dramas”, etc.

Really quite petty stuff, and rather out-of-place I thought. Nothing for you to worry about, but I harumphed a bit…

By: Alix

Alix — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:14:49 +0000

Say wha’? Who, where, when, why? I can’t afford Liberator to find out, alas.

By: pillock

pillock — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:15:19 +0000

Actually I’m quite pleased with my most popular posts — or, I was a bit more pleased when the top one was, by a good margin, the Kirby Zodiac that RAB and I cooked up. Always pleasant to consider that Jack Kirby is a lot more well-known and appreciated than we insular comics folks think he is! I got people looking at that one from all over the world, it was just great. Unfortunately it got bumped by the “art-comix crowd” thing I wrote, that got linked from The Beat, Journalista!, and CR. It could still catch up, though!

And my third top post is still the Time-Travel Meme, a wonderful thing because so many people submitted such genuinely impressive work on it. I’m still really, really gratified by that one.

By: pillock

pillock — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:23:02 +0000

You know, I used to have big passels o’ hits, on occasion…got linked from WFA once and had zillions, but they all only stayed for about six seconds apiece. Then I got linked from Pretty Fakes and had a couple people sit on the site for an hour, going from post to post! So I know what kind of traffic I like — the high numbers, they’re not satisying because they don’t represent anybody engaging with what’s been written, much less engaging in the way I’ve become accustomed to. We’re very lucky to be able to write stuff in an environment where you get your own kind of readership, a readership that suits you, pretty much without having to do anything to find them. Quality traffic, yeah…I’ve got Jonathan Burns occasionally writing three thousand words of PKD/GKC crossover fan-fic in my comments, it’s bloody thrilling. So at this point I think I really would turn up my nose at a million visitors a day — what am I, Time magazine? No thankee.

By: Andrew Hickey

Andrew Hickey — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:36:52 +0000

Oh absolutely – and you’re one of those whose writing I like and who I respect mentioned above. The dozen or so most frequent commenters on here are, give or take, the dozen or so people whose opinion I’m most interested in anyway – if the only people reading this were the handful of regular commenters, I’d still consider this worth doing.
Obviously I’d *like* to have a million readers a day – if nothing else so I could give up work and live off advertising revenue – but I’m amazed that *anyone* reads what I write – let alone people I actually respect and like – so I’m fine with things as they are…

By: Zom

Zom — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:17:25 +0000

I always read your site. Every day.

Okay, I don’t read everything you write about Dr Who, but then I only have a passing interest in that subject

The thing is, you might not get millions of hits, but the hits you get might be in some sense high quality: decent bloggers, smart readers, creators, etc…

By: pillock

pillock — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:53:36 +0000

Oh, heck, Andrew: you’re on the Firefox start-up list, you know. I read every damn thing you write.

Ha! Blogger Compliment Wars!

By: Andrew Hickey

Andrew Hickey — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:08:27 +0000

I suepect they’re just clicking the first link then reading both…
As far as I can tell I’m not at all popular – I get a pretty steady average couple of hundred visitors a day to the site itself (not sure how many of them are the same people coming every day), and maybe another fifty or sixty a day syndicated views. By contrast a site like, say, Liberal Democrat Voice (a groupblog about the Lib Dems I read) gets a thousand unique visitors a day.

What *is* nice though is that a lot of people whose writing I like, including yourself, occasionally let me know that they’re reading and enjoying at least some of what I write. I’d much rather have a few people I respect reading this than a lot of people I don’t…

By: pillock

pillock — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:39:34 +0000

Hmm, most people coming on from here seem to prefer Alien Legion to Wednesday Comics…at least, to read me blathering about them…

Quite a few people, actually, Andrew! I think you may have become quite popular without knowing it.