Saturday, July 20, 2013

The dictatorship of the proletariat, or How Green Was My Valley?

Here is a map produced by Blogger showing the distribution of this blog’s readers by country. Dark green countries indicate higher numbers, medium green countries indicate lower numbers, and light green countries represent the lowest numbers of all.


Specifically, according to a list that accompanied the map, here are the 10 highest countries in terms of readership of this blog:

...Country.......Pageviews
United States..........1044
France......................167
Russia.......................161
United Kingdom.........92
Ukraine......................48
Germany....................38
Australia....................26
Poland.......................24
Turkey.......................20
China.........................17

I have no idea when this snapshot of my blog was taken (today? last week? last month?) or what period of time the figures are supposed to cover (a day? a week? a month?), but one clear fact emerges nonetheless:

Outside my own country, I’m a hit in the former Soviet bloc!

I mean, I really am! Add together Russia (161), Ukraine (48), Poland (24), and half of Germany (38/2 = 19) and the total comes to 252, leaving France (167) and the United Kingdom (161) and everyone else in the dust.

The map surprises me, however, because I frequently see the flags of Canada, New Zealand, Indonesia, India, and even those of Italy, Mexico, Norway, Argentina, Viet Nam, and the Union of South Africa in that Feedjit Live Traffic Flow thingy in the sidebar. Where are those readers? Huh? Huh?

Perhaps Blogger’s algorithm is a bit faulty, producing flawed results.

But until we know that for sure, our advertising director has suggested that we reconsider where we will be spending our advertising dollars, not to mention our travel/vacation dollars, in the future.

After all, the squeaky wheel ought to get the oil.

To help you get the sour taste of dry business charts and statistics out of your mouth, here, from 1941, in ever-popular black and white, is the motion picture How Green Was My Valley, complete with subtitles in Spanish (1 hour, 54 minutes, 13 seconds), and I’m not even kidding.

11 comments:

  1. "How Green Was My Valley" was a lovely novel and the film was also most enjoyable. Thank you for reminding me of it. Regarding your World Map, you don't seem to go down too well in Africa! Perhaps you should make some posts that have an African bias - elephant hunting, chimpanzee language, the lost kingdom of Zimbabwe etc.. Then African readers would surely flood in like the Congo River and you would be the new Doctor Livingstone I presume. You look like him anyway!

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  2. Neha Sharma, I don't know whether you are a real person or a corporate conglomerate, but it was very thoughtful of you to drop by.

    Yrkshr Pddng, my collection of saved flags from visitors to this blog includes the flags of Algeria, Angola, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Union of South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, all of which are in (or, in the case of Madagascar, near) Africa. However, there have not been enough of them to be identified on Blogger's map as being in darkest Africa. Perhaps I will take up your suggestion (and perhaps not).

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  3. P.S. -- Central and South America could do a little better too. What concerns me more than either Africa or Central and South America is the decline in readers from Canada and Mexico, considering that my country made trade agreements with both of them under the NAFTA treaty.

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  4. It's quality that matters, not quantity. You've got me and you've got YP ...

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  5. Elizabeth, a valid point! I also have 1 hour, 54 minutes, 13 seconds of How Green Was My Valley, complete with subtitles in Spanish! Maybe we could all watch it together...

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  6. I'm new to blogging with nothing like the numbers you sport but the ratio is similar. A few days ago I posted something similar saying I welcomed my Russian readers. The response? Nothing. Not from any Russians. I did however get some interesting responses from non Russians. All said basically the same. It is bots running from Russia trolling. This made sense to me so I did not question it. I do now, at least a little. Why would the number of bots go up with the number of readers?

    The main difference in the ratios is I have a much higher number (ratio wise) of readers outside the U.S. I think I can explain that. I read a lot of non U.S. blogs.

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  7. Welcome to my blog, David Oliver! Now you have burst my bubble -- bots? I guess I've been dragged kicking and screaming into the real world. Thanks bunches. I also read a lot of non-U.S. blogs, so maybe that has nothing to do with it.

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  8. Thank you Mr. Brague. I don't know where the name came from, I guess because they are computer programs that emulate humans doing something on the internet. My first encounter with them was playing online games where sometimes a player (his avatar) wasn't real...it was just a computer program.

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  9. I think bots (which ought to be 'bots) is short for robots.

    I knew an Englishman 45 years ago who was so scrupulous about the use of apostrophes that he wouldn't write bus but 'bus instead -- for omnibus. I think today that is called OCD. Present company excepted, of course.

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  10. These numbers would no doubt interest Eugene McCarthy. Let's just hope that don't interest Barack Obama.

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<b>Always true to you, darlin’, in my fashion</b>

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