The first post I’ve nominated for assessment is “We are the Web”.
This post was created in response to Heironymusix (a fellow NMPer) on the readings for that weeks tute. It illustrates a dialogue between him and myself and to be frank is the only bit of contact I actually received from a classmate. In this post I analyse the readings and elaborates on connectivity, technology and human relations within the context of these two. You could say that my first project “This was the future” is an elaboration of the ideals in this post.
The second post is “Lies! Liar!”
This post has not much to do with anything let alone networked media except that it is post that received the most responses of all posts posted. This only really demonstrates how devastatingly unpopular this blog is, and the only people who are interested are close friends and even then they only care about meaningless rants when I’m overseas and out of my mind with self-loathing. This is probably more an indication of the loyalty of my friends rather than the awesome power of online publishing.
The third post is “This was the future”.
Just an example of project planning for project A, it outlines my idea and details why a blogging platform was my medium of choice. It also refers to some existing examples of sites that I used as references for layout in my project.
The content of my blog is a split between course related posts and personal posts. Halfway through the semester I left for an international exchange in Japan, and while away I continued using my blog as a forum for personal updates, for the most part created as a means to keep in contact with friends back home in Australia. Several posts were also created recently and dated back to fit within the timeframe of the 2008 semester.
So to begin, let’s review the stats!
The most distinctive trend within the data corresponds with the timing of my student exchange. In October, 2008, I packed up shop and left for Okayama, Japan. At this time NMP course related content ceased and my blog was flooded with non-sensical personal ramblings. Interestingly enough, traffic spiked and within that month and I received over 240 hits, with an average of 8 hits per day. Contrasted with August of the same year where content was, for the most part, unit based, the blog received only 88 hits with an average of 3 hits per day.
Most of this traffic had been referred from either the Icelab unit website or from facebook where I had been personally referring the blog to friends. Prior to that I had made no particular effort to tag posts or refer others towards the blog.
Supporting this trend is the data from my top posts. Excluding the home page, the most visited posts were from personal rather than unit related posts. The exception is a reposted news item about Golden Gate bridge jumpers, which had the second highest number of hits. This is because it is neither unit related or personal, but a generic news item that was picked up and referred to by search engines.
Over the course of maintaining this blog, the main lesson that I’ve come away with is that the amount of attention the blog receives is directly proportionate to the amount of time I invest in promoting, maintaining, and networking with other blogs. The periods in which I had the heaviest traffic flows were not only when I had the most posts, but when I had promoted the blog (either on facebook or by encouraging friends to subscribe to rss feeds) and had taken the time to tag and categorize each blog posts. Online interaction with other students also proved rewarding, though there were few instances of it happening whenever I did comment on other students posts they would generally oblige by commenting on mine.
They seem like very crude lessons but I did take the time to apply them to my production projects, especially project A where the navigation of my website was directed by tags and categories. The success of the project also managed to direct traffic towards this blog.
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