Explicit and Implicit Comments…

I didn't realize how many comments by blog collects until I had to migrate them back to my blog...manually, all 28 from my last 10 posts.  They are all back now, unfortunately the dates are incorrect..oh well.

As a blogger, comments are the single most important piece of feedback that I get.  If a person takes the time to comment it means they engaged with my blog on some level.  The second most important thing I look at on an almost day-to-day basis are my Lijit statistics..  Not everyone takes the time to comment, so to figure out what people like and don't care about I get that in a more subtle way from my Lijit Statistics.

I like to see how readership is trending..  Down apparently, as I have not posted anything new in the last week.

Not surprising, I mostly have North American appeal and when readers are not from North America, they generally got here from doing a search on 'something'.

While its no surprise that the largest portion of my audience comes from Google, I didn't realize such a large portion of my audience comes from Lijit.  Also surprising to me is the almost 20% of my traffics comes direct (browser bookmarks?).

Clearly, my rants on Comcast get a lot of play out there..  In fact I often get contacted by mainstream media doing stories on HDTV, Comcast, DVR's, so that makes sense.

And once people are here, they mostly stay for the technology stories.  I have had a run on aerospace seaches lately, probably do to my Stacking the Shuttle story.

While most searches result in content I have written about, clearly the things I bookmark are interesting as well.  I clearly exchange traffic with other blogs in my blog roll also..

It's always funny (at least to me) what people look for when they are on my blog.  Do I really seem like the kind of Rush fan that has Geddy Lee's mail address?  Well maybe.  I have to going looking to see what a "H2b0DTV" is?  Maybe I want one for Christmas :-)

In the next few weeks Lijit is rolling out even more statistics and reader intelligence items for publishers.  Although comments are my favorite items to get I really enjoy the rest of the story as well.

Comments

[yancyfox]

I agree with your statement, "Not everyone takes the time to comment...". I think one reason for this is that TypePad's interface for comments is crude; e.g. it only supports limited text and formatting is difficult. Aside from the interface, my suggestion would be to create a widget on your blog where a reader could suggest the topic for your next post or maybe create an interface where the readers could vote on a list of topics. Just a thought...

-y

[mark]

I'm loving lijit. The ability to search Google and social-networks is brilliant! Plus, stats tracking! Very Nice. I just blogged about lijit on Search-This.com. I also like that lijit is a Boulder company - Go Buffs!