Wikio rankings for science blogs are out for July. I was concerned that time spent on my Australian tour and the reduction in posts might knock us out of the #1 slot.
This is testament to the people who kept the blog operating in my absence.
Special thanks the Charles, DBS, Tallbloke, Evan, Mike Lorrey, Steve Mosher, Steve Goddard, Willis Eschenbach, and many others for keeping the home fires burning.
And, my thanks to all the readers that spread links to other blog sites, provide tips, and provide comments. – Anthony
conradg says:
July 7, 2010 at 2:59 pm
How exactly is this administration anti-science? Do you have any real evidence to support this? Or is it just another trolling line of ideological nonsense?
————–Reply:
Since when does a particular religion get any special treatment when it comes to science? Or when does a particular race get any special treatment when it comes to ideology? Or votes? Do you really need specific examples? There’s the Internet you can use if you’re fact challenged.
Sounds like you’re coming from an ideological perspective that is irrelevant and anti-scientific.
BTW: I’m not a Republican. I’m an Independent, leaning scientific and engineering.
Since nobody else on this thread has followed your lead, add my compliments to the moderators. An essential, but little recognised and thankless, task.
Thank you Anthony, glad I could contribute beyond being just one of the mallcops.
CP seems to have suffered a severe meltdown in readership in late May, according to Alexa.com (look at overall ranking, pageviews, pageviews per user, and time on site). CP readers are spending less time there and reading fewer pages per visit, and total readership is dropping. CP’s bounce percentage (the percent of viewers reading only one page) is more than twice that of WUWT.
Now, despite Joe Romm’s claims to be focused on “subscriber driven traffic”, Alexa says he’s lying. In fact, the “search %” stats on Alexa say that CP consistently receives significantly more visits via search engine listings than WUWT, despite getting significantly less overall traffic than WUWT does.
This is simply another example of Joe Romm ignoring the data and making up his own preconceived conclusions.
What CP’s Alexa stats say, compared to WUWT, is that Joe Romm depends heavily on search engines to drive traffic to his site, but that in the last month and a half, most readers (85%) get turned off by what they read on CP in less than one page view, and given his dropping readership numbers, people tend to not come back to his site again. Wonder why…
Congrats Anthony and all.
Just curious, but when I decide to go to sleep and leave my computer up, in the middle of a thread, does all that time go to “time on site”? I may have been a large contribution. 🙂
“Based on internet averages, climateprogress.com is visited more frequently by females who are in the age range 25-34, are graduate school educated and browse this site from work.”
Dang, that’s my target demographic.
Anthony Rules!
As for anti-Obama views being right-wing, who here is stupid enough to believe otherwise? All leftist anti-Obama detractors raise your hands.
False dichotomy. It’s the center he’s lost.
(And he never even had 100% of self-described liberals, either, myself included.)
TimM says:
July 7, 2010 at 3:40 pm (Edit)
““Based on internet averages, climateprogress.com is visited more frequently by females who are in the age range 25-34, are graduate school educated and browse this site from work.”
Dang, that’s my target demographic.”
Whereas WUWT readers are generally over 40, male, graduate school educated, and browse from home.
Thinking about the alexa stats more, I suspect that the pre-June traffic at CP was all college students doing research for papers (which explains the high percent of traffic from search). When they all went home for the summer, we then see CP’s real readership.
Conversely, since WUWT has a far more diverse readership, we’ve not seen any post-semester slump.
For WUWT to improve its search performance, we should look at how sites that reach AGW demographics are found, what their hot search terms are. The fact that we don’t have “climate” in the domain name or blog title is a negative, thats the top search term that readers of CP and RC find those sites with. Some of that page ranking has to do with the sorts of words that people link to direct people to those sites from elsewhere, as these sort of links affect search engine pagerank. For instance, if more of our readers linked to WUWT via text on their sites like “best climate blog ever” (and not in blogrolls), then WUWT search ranking when people search for “climate” would rise. (hint hint, wink wink)
Ha!
“First, complains about politicisation of blog.
2nd, incites the same political argument on another thread.
Threadjacking.”
You know, even though I’m just responding to others, you’re right. I made my point to Anthony, and I think I’ll leave it at that for this thread. My best wishes for the success of this blog, which will only be helped by de-politicization.
Question: How exactly do the Alexa and similar people “know” all those things about those who visit blogs? I’m sure that the vast majority of people who read blogs never leave comments or ask questions, so apart from an IP address, what information do they have that allows them to estimate demographic details like age, education, etc.? How, for example, would they know that this computer isn’t shared by me, my mother, my cousin, two teenagers, and an occasional visitor?
/dr.bill
Congratulations Anthony. I hope you were able to shine some light in the darkness.
wrt the WUWT ranking all is as it should be.
Condrag that is your opinion only and I think everyone will give it the attention it deserves which is none.
We the people of the 4th district of SC have expelled a warmist in the primary.
His replacement is pretty much a straight shooter and an honest guy. I hope he doesn’t succumb to Potomac fever. Based on my conversations with him I don’t think he will.
dr. bill,
Very good question. The simple answer is that it is a bit fuzzy.
Alexa collects its data from browser toolbars that use Alexa data. For instance, Yahoo’s browser toolbar can report on your demographics based on what you’ve entered into your yahoo account ID, as well as what search terms you use and what sites you go to based on those search terms. So, it’s not based on IP address and no information is collected about the owner of your computer. Alexa has their own toolbar here, it stands to reason that their most accurate data is collected from that. So, its like the Neilsen Ratings System, rather than SWAG from thin data.
Alexa is an Amazon.com company, so it also stands to reason that there is data shared between those two organizations, though I cannot say for sure what their respective privacy policies are, you should check with those websites for more info on that.
Most people who have multiple users of the same computer, at least with Windoze based machines, have set up different user accounts for each user on the machine, so Alexa should know the difference between different users for anybody other than those who don’t set up such user accounts.
Alexa says that for rankings below 100,000, their data is generally unreliable due to insufficient sample sizes, but anything above that becomes pretty accurate, with accuracy increasing as you approach #1 rank. So, for instance, given the respective ranks of WUWT and CP, it is at least twice as certain that more WUWT users are over 40, male, graduate students or degree holders, than that CP users are actually females in their 20’s and early thirties, and in grad school.
My experience studying virtual world user demographics tells me that 28% of all internet users who claim to be female are actually males…
I like WUWT and I applaud Anthony’s efforts and all the mods.
(I realize the above note added nothing of real substance but I wanted to ensure WUWT got another hit to keep it #1).
Thanks for the information Mike. So I guess it wouldn’t help their accuracy if the one studying Thermal Physics is a teenage girl, while her older brother is doing Art History, but their grandmother kicks them off the machine so that she can look at stuff on 4chan, or that all the visits to the fashion sites are generated by the cross-dressing cousin, that Dad is the one who reads all the cooking blogs, and none of them uses a toolbar. ☺ Sounds like a pretty fuzzy system indeed.
/dr.bill
[snip, sorry, even though your comment is reasonable I have to draw the line somewhere on Obama/racism discussions – no more by anyone for this thread – Anthony]
Note, toolbars like Yahoo and Alexa do, in fact, report back to their creators on ALL of your browsing habits, not just what you search for with them. For this reason many privacy advocates consider them all to be malicious spyware.
The examples you cite would be extreme outliers in any statistical pool…
Congradulations Anthony and thanks for your hard work and the hard work of the Mods and guests.
conradg says:
July 7, 2010 at 1:46 pm
Congrats. Love this blog for the science, but I gotta mention that the thread yesterday on “NASA FAIL” was a complete embarrassment and a disaster….
[REPLY – I would have to say that NASA policy statements are of legitimate concern for this blog. I will also note that lack of agreement with presidential policy does not necessarily equate to racism. ~ Evan]
________________________________________
Normally I would agree but in this instance Evan is correct. NASA is supposed to be the National Auronautics and Space Administration. To find its original purposed so badly scewed is a major talking point here since we have so much interest in the sun. It also shows how much science has become a political plaything.
congratulations from down under
@ur momisugly Anthony
I understand clipping my comment. Controversial and off topic. I moderated a popular controversial blog for several years and know how much time, effort, and patience it takes to maintain decorum in the peanut gallery not to mention some semblance of everyone staying on topic.
Congratulations on #1 to you and the rest of the WUWT team. It’s hard earned and well deserved.
morgo,
I just installed a Moon phase widget and noticed they have a Northern Hemisphere and a Southern Hemisphere setting. When I click on the S.H., the Moon is… upside down!
Then I started thinking, if the Moon is upside down, then maybe the Sun is, too. …Maybe everything is upside down!
Then I thought… what if the down under Moon is really right side up! That means our Moon is upside down… and our Sun… and everything… help!
°
OK, I think I’m better now. It was the same Moon after all. Close call there.
And re: the Evan & Gail Combs NASA comments.
Congratulations. Are you still having fun?
Congratulations Anthony on an excellent BLOG!
I like this particular BLOG site of the many that I visit because your thrust has been to carefully evaluate the quality of the temperature data and other scientific findings that relate to temperature. If the data are questionable, small changes based on a statistical correlation are unreliable. The climate BLOG sites on both sides of the global warming issue appear at times to be trying to “out science” each other with definitive statements based on selected pieces of information to prove that they are correct. However, until you came along the quality of the temperature data has been tacitly assumed to be free of any systematic errors as one might expect from temperature measuring equipment and specifically associated with the site. Worse, until you can along there did not seem to be any question about what the readings from the thermometric devises were measuring. Somehow in the heat of debate questioning the data was not a major concern.
Of course your efforts and the many people that have evaluated the sites that are used to establish the temperature data base to evaluate global temperatures have found numerous concerns about temperature measuring sites. Of particular significance are the errors introduced due to urban heating effects and site changes with time. It would be interesting to create an error band on the temperature data that accounts for the systematic effects at a significant number of sites. Of course that would be a formidable task. As with the case of the BWI, what appears to be a site free from urban heating turns out to have unknown temperature effects that are not insignificant. Until there is significant evidence that the temperature measurements are not tainted by extraneous effects, I remain a skeptic. It appears to me that there currently is no reliable way to numerically estimate how much the temperature has changed without a carefully evaluation what the temperature readings at every site used to evaluate an average temperature increase..
Number of comments for the past few months.
Of course, not all comments are created equal, and increases in visitors leads to increases in duplicate comments and piling on, but there are also more good comments.
At any rate, I can do this easily, ala:
Looking at past years and this year:
Anthony – Good for you & your team of mods and regular contributors.
You are still the new MSM in my view.
John
I once successfully posted a dissenting view on Joe Romn’s blog without getting flamed by J.R. The trick seems to be to couple your counterpoint to his argument with an ambiguous statement making it difficult for him to discern whether or not you agree with his world view. It seems to help that the source of his argument is someone else (shoddy) work.