The Wardman Wire

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I’ve posted a couple of times recently about the Slugger Awards, and the Slugger O Toole blog.

Here’s a nugget to chew on which throws some light on why Slugger is further integrated into the local political process than any other blog in the country: Slugger’s penetration of it’s local market is up to five times higher than any other site (to my knowledge, anyway).

A note on numbers: I am making the comparison by comparing Unique Visitors (representing how many individual computers have visited the website) for the largest political site in a country (England, Wales etc.) with the population of the Local Market. It’s not a perfect comparison, since the percentage of blog traffic from outside the locality (country) varies, but it is good enough for this broad conclusion.

Site / Absolute Uniques per Month / Population / “Market Penetration”

• Northern Ireland: Slugger O Toole ( 23,000 ) vs 1.75 million = 1.3%.
• Scotland: Mr Eugenides (~16,000 ) vs 5.2 million = 0.3%.
• (*) Wales: Ordovicius (~6-10,000) vs 2.9 million = 0.3%.
• England: Guido Fawkes (110,000) vs 51 million = 0.2%.

(*) In Wales there are several blogs at roughly the same level.

One of the interesting ways that Google seems to work is that new websites (or new articles for that matter) have a “period in the sun” to see if they will become heavily linked; they then vanish and may come back to prominence later.

One corollary of that, and of the way the internet works, is that most traffic to blogs usually comes through two routes:

a) Brand new articles.
b) Old archived articles.

In the case of the Wardman Wire, perhaps 75-80% of our traffic comes via the archives, rather than via either the Magazine Front Page or the Traditional Blog version.

This week Blog Platform is about a new group blog that is being launched about now. A number of bloggers with a technical background on the Internet have got together to start a new blog called poligeeks.co.uk. This is the description:

“A collective of geeky people that are into politics too. We help other bloggers like Guido and Iain Dale on the right as well as LabourHome and and others on both sides with their geeky stuff. We thought it might be nice to have our own collective blog where we could speak geek and share ideas.”

Here is the introductory article by Mike Rouse.

The Google Page Rank figure of the Economist has been reduced from 8 down to 5 - a huge reduction. It may be down to a punishment from Google for the Economist displaying questionable “paid-for” text links as “classified adverts”. Here’s my take.

From time to time Political Blogs are found to be inaccessible from within certain organisations. Here are a few ideas about how to get your blog to be accessible again.