1¼million: Sometime today, probably early this evening, diamond geezer will receive its million and a quarterth visitor. Actually that's not quite true, it'll just be the million and a quarterth time that my slightly ropey stats package has registered a unique visit, which isn't the same thing at all. And not in the slightest bit correct. Thanks to the relentless rise of RSS feed reading, it's now more commonplace than ever to read a blog without visiting it. Indeed I suspect that only about one in three of my current readers are actually visitors, which makes my blog's visitor numbers increasingly meaningless. But, all the same, wow.
So it's time once again for an update of my regular 'league table' of top linking blogs, ordered by volume of visitors clicking here from there. I've also included the 'highest climbers' since my last update (at 1 million) last April. Thank you all for linking. Go on, go check out a few of the following and return the favour...
The underlying figures hint at the steady demise of the blogroll. It used to be really important to be listed on as many blogrolls as possible, because people discovered other blogs by seeing what their friends were recommending. Not any more. Blogrolls are now increasingly irrelevant, progressively sidelined, rarely updated, and completely invisible to anybody reading via RSS. Everybody sees a blogpost, but only a fraction of you see a blogroll. Which is a shame, but that's how it is.
The underlying figures also hint at the steady demise of the linking blogpost. Bloggers used to link to one another far more frequently ("I see Camden Queen has something to say about that") and now they don't. They generate their own content, or they link to big news stories, or they rant about perceived political idiocy, or they recycle press releases, or they post pictures of their kittens, or else they've buggered off to Facebook. Blogging's now part of a wider aggregated social network, which makes blogs themselves increasingly isolated. To be honest it's a wonder anybody gets any visitors via anybody else any more. So I'm more than grateful for my million and a quarter, thanks. I wonder how things will have evolved by a million and a half.
