What Survives from 2013’s Blogging?

Continuing the weekend theme of meta-blogging, one of the questions I’ve occasionally wondered about in doing top-posts lists for a given year is the problem of a bias against recency– that is, that posts put up toward the end of the year are inherently at a disadvantage because they’ve had less time to integrate up the slow trickle of traffic that every page on the Internet gets. Obviously, this isn’t a question that can be answered by data from 2014, but I have access to traffic stats back to mid-2012, so I can look at data for 2013. So, these are the top posts I put up in 2013 in terms of traffic during the calendar year 2013:

1. Time Is What You Measure With a Clock
2. What Does Negative Temperature Mean, Anyway?
3. Finding That There’s Nothing to Find
4. Malcolm Gladwell Is Deepak Chopra
5. Against Kaku-ism
6. The Theoretical Minimum
7. The Ultimate Alien Message
8. Homework Is Evil
9. Nobel Betting Pool 2013
10. Quantum Erasure
11. Trapping Neutrinos
12. What Does Science Online Want to Be?
13. Wrong, Wrong, Wrong
14. Physics vs. Chemistry: Nobody does Research on Newtonian Mechanics
15. Why Should You Think Like a Scientist?
16. Science Is Hard
17. The Physics of Wall Street
18. Physics of the Bouncy-Bounce
19. The Big Bang Theory and Social Science
20. Think Like a Physicist
21. Historical Physicist Halloween Costumes
22. How Deep Does Veritasium’s Bullet Go? (*)

That’s the usual mixed bag of stuff: some very good posts, some transient controversies. That’s a total of 22 posts, though the last one was actually the 27th highest traffic post for the year, included for reasons that will become clear later. 9 of these were from the first half of the year, so not much evidence of a bias against recency.

Here’s the same set of posts sorted based on traffic over the two-year span covering 2013 and 2014:

1. Time Is What You Measure With a Clock
2. What Does Neg. Temp. Mean?
3. Malcolm Gladwell Is Deepak Chopra
4. Against Kaku-ism
5. Finding That There’s Nothing to Find
6. Physics vs. Chemistry: Nobody does Research on Newtonian Mechanics
7. The Theoretical Minimum
8. Think Like a Physicist
9. Homework Is Evil
10. The Ultimate Alien Message
11. The Big Bang Theory and Social Science
12. Why Should You Think Like a Scientist?
13. Quantum Erasure
14. Nobel Betting Pool 2013
15. Trapping Neutrinos
16. What Does Science Online Want to Be?
17. Science Is Hard
18. Wrong, Wrong, Wrong
19. The Physics of Wall Street
20. Historical Physicist Halloween Costumes
21. How Deep Does Veritasium’s Bullet Go? (*)
22. Physics of the Bouncy-Bounce

You can see that the top five posts are the same, with only one dropping down two spots, but after that, things get kind of wacky. There’s no obvious pattern associated with the date of initial posting, though.

(This is the reason for the asterisk on the last post of the first list, by the way– that one jumped up several spots to get into the two-year top list, which is what I compiled first, so I included it for the 2013 only set, as well…)

The difference between these two is also interesting. Here are the same posts sorted by the number of pageviews within the calendar year 2014:

1. Physics vs. Chemistry: Nobody does Research on Newtonian Mechanics
2. Think Like a Physicist
3. Against Kaku-ism
4. Time Is What You Measure With a Clock
5. The Big Bang Theory and Social Science
6. The Theoretical Minimum
7. Malcolm Gladwell Is Deepak Chopra
8. What Does Neg. Temp. Mean?
9. Why Should You Think Like a Scientist?
10. How Deep Does Veritasium’s Bullet Go? (*)
11. Science Is Hard
12. Quantum Erasure
13. Historical Physicist Halloween Costumes
14. The Physics of Wall Street
15. Homework Is Evil
16. Trapping Neutrinos
17. What Does Science Online Want to Be?
18. Nobel Betting Pool 2013
19. Finding That There’s Nothing to Find
20. The Ultimate Alien Message
21. Physics of the Bouncy-Bounce
22. Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

The traffic numbers here are pretty small– the top post on this list would’ve just barely squeaked into the gap between the last two on the first list, while the bottom few drew only a few pageviews per fortnight in 2014. But it does give a bit of a sense of what endures from a year of blogging– the top post in this sorting is titled in a way that draws search engine traffic, and a few of the other high-ranking posts mention celebrities by name. “Think Like a Physicist” and “Why Should You Think Like a Scientist” benefit from internal links– I’ve cited those in more recent posts, and they get a few extra clicks that way.

Meanwhile, the very bottom post in this third category is just a statement about something that was a raging controversy when it was posted, but that has basically passed. It was important that I post it at the time, but outside of the context of those few weeks of chaos, it has little to recommend it, and so is little read. The other post from that time, “What Does Science Online Want to Be?” fares a tiny bit better, mostly because I brought it up again when Science Online folded last year.

So, anyway, that’s another way of looking at the “long tail” of old blog posts. I have one more angle on this, but it probably rates a post of it’s own, so we’ll save that for a little later…