Holy cow. This joint is jumpin’, folks. This week was our biggest ever – over 10,000 unique visitors, the first time we’ve cleared that hurdle. Comments and user posts are off the charts. Over 60 new registered users just in this past week. We had over 100 comments on the caucus open thread – by far the most comments we’ve ever gotten on a post – and, to my knowledge, that post remains the best single source of information on what happened in the caucuses that is publicly available.
And you can bet that people are starting to pay attention. According to my visitor stats, the Tom Reilly and Deval Patrick committees check in pretty much every day, and even the state Republican party drops by periodically.
It’s fantastic. Thanks to every one of you who visits, posts, reads, lurks, whatever. Keep it up! Tell your friends!
bob-neer says
Kudos to h20town for all the pictures. Please fell free to link to photos of events, caucuses, etc. so folks can see what is going on. There is no way to post images here as yet, unfortunately, but it is pretty easy to link to a free photo sharing site or a website. And check out h20town.info.
cos says
So naturally, after the caucuses, there’s a lot of chatter among the local DFA/PDA groups around the state. We had it last year too. Several groups organized for these – for example, DFA-Boston made individual calls to its entire membership on Thursday and Friday; PDS worked out joint slates with the mayor. So Saturday late afternoon, I send out emails to a whole bunch of DFAish groups (Berkshires, Boston, Newton, Somerville, Acton…) with a link to the caucus open thread and an invitation to post their caucus stories here.
charley-on-the-mta says
I don’t think you can count the unique visitors per day, add them all together, and say that’s how many uniques we get per week, since many of them are the same day to day.
david says
A “unique visitor” is someone who has either never been here before or has returned after being away for a couple of hours. Pretty standard usage, AFAIK. It’s all based on cookies anyway, so (for example) people who bar all cookies from their computers don’t get counted. Meaning that we probably have even more traffic than what statcounter can measure.
bob-neer says
You’re right, Charley, but so is David. Standard practice, such as it exists, is to list unique visitors per day (see viewership claims at TruthLaidBear, Neilson, etc.). This is comparable to the circulation of a daily newspaper. Some argue for unique visitors per month, but that is not standard practice. Of course, websites are available all the time, so there is no clear answer — perhaps it depends, in a post-modernist sense, on how we see ourselves … as a daily, weekly, monthly, whatever. By posting our traffic reports, we provide far more data than most sites, which I think is great. I personally think average uniques per day, with a week being the averaging period, and also average uniques per week, is best for the time being because it allows people to compare us to other daily and weekly political news and commentary sources.
lynne says
Is it a free external service or something on the hosting server? I need better stats.
david says
the free service (and invisible counter) at statcounter.com. It’s the same service we used at typepad. The “sitemeter” icon at the bottom right-hand corner of our front page is for the entire Soapblox network and doesn’t give us any information specific to BMG.