Blog Hits By Age

I was going to give a Top Ten Blog Entries By Number of Hits listing but I suspected it would not necessarily be that insightful under the hypothesis that hit numbers are partly a function of the age of the entry.

So I took the number of hits for each entry and graphed it against the age of the entry in days:

There definitely appears to be a linear baseline which the entries "rise above". To make this clearer, I graphed the hits per day against age:

Notice that the two entries from 250-300 days ago lower in significance while the entry from 50 days ago rises considerably. Which entries were these?

The older two are Eclipse is the next Emacs and Eclipse GEF. Both those get a lot of their referrals from Google searches.

The entry from 50 days ago is, funnily enough, another Eclipse GEF-related post, Six Snapshots of a Simple Eclipse GEF Application. Note that that entry is linked to from one of the older ones.

So, what effect does using average hits per day instead of just hits have on a Top Ten Blog Entries?

Here is a list of the top 10 just by hits:

And here is a list of the top 10 by hits per day (ignoring the last couple of days):

Is the second list more representative? I think so. It includes some extra entries (in bold) that were popular (judging by incoming links and del.icio.us citations) but didn't make the first list because they hadn't been around for as long.

How does any of this match up with what I consider my own favourite entries? I'll save that for another entry.

Created: Dec. 23, 2004
Last Modified: Feb. 8, 2005
Author: James Tauber

JAMES TAUBER
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