I Can't Possibly Be Wrong All the Time

Hey, it’s been over a year since I started blogging. Since there was such a low barrier to entry for tossing words on a website for the Internet to eyeball, I was hesitant to call myself a “blogger”, but I’ve been doing this for about a year and have over 100 blog postings (counting both my blogs), so I might as well commit to the term.

Blog of Thrones

I hadn’t originally expected this blog to be so Game of Thrones focused (or I might have named it more relevantly or something from the beginning) but that’s just the way things turned out once I started defending the allegedly bad decisions of the characters.

WARNING: There might be spoilers for Seasons Two and Three Game of Thrones once you get down to the Polls section of this posting. Fair warning.

Since it’s been a year, I thought I’d publish some stats on views.

Top Ten Posts (by Views)

• In Defense of Stannis Baratheon (1223 views)
• In Defense of Theon Greyjoy. WHAT? (1120 views)
• The Targaryen Candidate (817 views)
• In Defense of Robb Stark (747 views)
• Melisandre: Hot or Not? (712 views)
• In Defense of Bad Boyfriend Jon Snow (694 views)
• By the Old Gods and the New: Religion in Game of Thrones (684 views)
• In Defense of Sansa Stark (655 views)
• In Defense of Arya Stark (She Needs Defending?) (609 views)
• Who Are Those Guys Again? How To Tell Friend From Foe in Game of Thrones. (Usually.) (528 views)

I can’t help but include number 11 on the list, since  I was challenged to write it in the first place…

• In Defense of Joffrey Baratheon (Yes, JOFFREY) (509 views)

Now, I know views don’t really mean anything. I don’t even know how they’re calculated. Some of that might be driven by people searching on images that I have in my posts, and that’s counting. I don’t know. I can only work with the numbers I have.

The bottom 10 posts are almost all from my monthly #MicroStory collections. I totally understand, and agree.

Remember, SPOILERS for Game of Thrones below…

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Polls

For my own amusement, I like to drop in polls in my Game of Thrones opinion articles, without any serious attempt at crafting reasonable legitimate poll questions. Just because.

Here are the 10 most voted on polls:

• Stannis? Yeah or Nay? (297 votes) from In Defense of Stannis Baratheon (Most Popular Post)
• Who is the Worst? (129 votes) from In Defense of Theon Greyjoy. What?  (Second Most Popular Post)
• Robb Stark and His Decision to not Marry a Frey (127 votes) from In Defense of Robb Stark. (4th Most Popular Post)
• Jon Snow and His Decision to Abandon Ygritte to Warn the Night’s Watch (117 votes) from In Defense of Robb Stark. (4th Most Popular Post)
• Sansa Stark (97 votes) from In Defense of Sansa Stark. (8th Most Popular Post)
• Robb and Lannister Captives (85 votes) from In Defense of Robb Stark. (4th Most Popular Post)
• Theon and Stark Captives (83 votes) from In Defense of Robb Stark. (4th Most Popular Post)
• Arya Stark: Best Character or THE Best Character (68 votes) from In Defense of Arya Stark. (9th Most Popular Post)
• Melisandre (65 votes) from Melisandre: Hot or Not? (5th Most Popular Post)
• King Joffrey (61 votes) from In Defense of Joffrey Baratheon. (11th Most Popular Post)

The nice thing about the polls, the most popular polls by votes are from the set of most popular by view postings (more or less) so although I’m suspicious of actual view numbers, the ranking seems reasonable.

I’ve tried to come up with a normalization algorithm to weight views based on how long the post has been published, but since the number of followers I have has increased over time, earlier postings are less likely to have been seen than newer ones, so I gave that up entirely.

I’ve also not tried to weight the views for Jon Snow and Theon, who actually have 6 and 2 blog postings respectively.

Either way, Stannis the Mannis is a wildly popular feature of my blog. As he should be.

Big Picture

On the average, I get 143 views a day, which again is meaningless, but it’ll be interesting for trend analysis next year. Because I have another year of blogging in me.

I have 287 followers subscribed to the blog, which I’m pretty happy with, since most of them appear to be humans and not businesses (unlike my Twitter feed, which has a significant percentage of lawyers, dentists, and dry cleaners. It’s possible that they like my tweets… It’s Possible!)

Anyway, thank you to everyone who follows my blog, who leave comments, who’ve reblogged my stuff, and who’ve mysteriously clicked through to my secret double-probation invisible-to-searches backup blog where I have extra-long Game of Thrones support articles and other spoilery things.

Look, I have my reasons for a secondary Too Long; Didn’t Read blog.

Thanks for reading, I’ll not make a habit of stats presentations, although I will post some of the weirder Search Strings that have intersected with my blogs soon. Those are always fun. And odd.

Best regards,

The Patman.

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© Patrick Sponaugle 2014 Some Rights Reserved