STATS

I've been doing this for a little over three years now, and have seldom been inclined to check out things like page views, traffic sources, you know, the type of information that may be of commercial interest if I were doing this to make money. Information that may be reassuring if I were trying to be the most popular wine blog on the internets (I'm not), or indicative of a steady upward tick in readership (tough to tell, I cannot seem to access page view stats for anything further back than May 2010). You get the picture, when it comes to this blog I guess I'm not much of a numbers guy.

That does not mean, however, that I cannot mine the "stats" link on blogger for some pretty interesting factoids about the readership, popular posts and the like.

MOST WIDELY VIEWED POST

Old School Funk - TOP 10 songs in the rotation at work

Apparently many folks viewed this, which even elicited one slightly vexed comment:

"Do you mean to tell me that the original shuggie otis song [Strawberry Letter 23] is superior then the Brothers Johnson Version? You must ate [sic] shit when you said that. The Shuggie Otis version is weak and Brothers Johnson totally remade the song which made the song popular around the world. you need to check yourself."

Why, yes! Perhaps I SHOULD check myself, lest I wreck myself. Anyhow, the next two most widely viewed pages were this one involving a night at Terroir, followed by my Top 10 of 2010. Though it has less than half the views of the old school funk playlist post, it is encouraging that one of the top 3 is also a more recent post.

TOP REFERRING SITES

Google by far takes the cake here. A distant second is Facebook, though hot on the social network's heels is actually one of my favorite blogs devoted to wine and food, that of the indefatigable Brooklyn Guy. Thanks, Neil. Now keep that link up, would ya? Sneaking in at the bottom of the list of referring URL's would be the Dog jacket site. Huh?

PAGE VIEWS BY COUNTRY (most views first, fewest last)

United States
Brazil
Germany
United Kingdom
France
Netherlands
Canada
Spain
Russia
South Korea

Of course US views outnumber the others by a lot, nearly 20 times. What I cannot quite grasp is...why Brazil? I know there are 150+ million people there and all, but I did not think it to be a huge wine consuming (and by extension, wine blog reading) populace. At any rate, obrigado, Brasil! With all the mention of wines from Spain, I'm surprised that there are not more views over there? Spain, why you sleepin' on Old World Old School - DORMIENDO, os digo! Finally, while I am pleased to see Russia and South Korea rounding out the list, I am disappointed to not get a single view from Italy or Japan (could that be correct?) Maybe I should use this as motivation to drink more Italian wine (wines that I admittedly do not drink very often) and, for Nippon (maybe that will work, use their country name instead of ours), expand the coverage on natural wines and Opus One.