Thanks to U.S. readers (and others)

The readership of this blog from the United States is increasing, and it is often exceeding views from Russia.  Many have said that Russian views are targeting low-readership blogs like this one.  They hope that the blog writers will click on the links which often are to sites that will corrupt the target site.  You can often tell some of these when the link has a long string of characters after “.com” or whatever.  This devious trick is called “reverse spam”.

I don’t know what has caused this increase.  My complaints about Trump?  But other articles get as many view or more.  Is it the cards that I’ve left in a Perk Place in Duluth?  Is it the readers of my former column in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, “Party of One”?  Is it more frequent posts?  Could be!  Though as the name of this blog states, they are still irregular.

BTW, I would have called this blog “Party of One”, but somebody else had already taken it.

If you do correspond with me or see me, please let me know how often you read this blog and what you think.

Another country whose readership has increased is France.  I only have three correspondents in France, and I’ve lost contact with two of them.  To the one left, “Merci encore pour ‘Astérix’!”  What am I writing that gets so much interest from France?

One surprise is that I get practically no readers from Canada.  Canadian readership once was second to U.S. readership.  And my wife has several relatives in Canada.

BTW, to them I say don’t watch TV, read the Globe and Mail.  You’ll get more information per minute.  This advice holds for anybody who has access to free and independent newspapers (printed or online).

Ten years of posting

Yesterday I got a “gold star” from Google AdSense for having a web site for ten years.  I have been posting to this blog for eight years.  I haven’t got rich from either and I don’t have a large or medium following.  I can’t even get my family to visit my blog regularly:(  But it has been fun posting my thoughts and observations; and once in a while somebody tells me they liked a posting.

For various reasons, I am winding down my website, http://www.cpinternet.com/~mdmagree.  My goodness!  It has been over five years since I updated the home page.  One reason is that I am limited to 200 pages; another is that the tools for posting on Google Blogger are a lot simpler to use.

For the Irregular Blog, you might find some of the statistics interesting:

Total posts - 2158 with this post

Top ten posts by pageviews

235  2012-04-17 Добро пожаловать в мой русский посетителей
197  2012-12-20 Mike Peters' "Twelve Days of Christmas" puns for 2...
90    2012-08-28 Can't corporations live within their means?
84    2012-04-19 The kleptocracy of corporate boards
76    2011-12-22 For word nerds only
73    2013-01-17 A clever but off-the-mark sign
70    2012-05-24 Why facebook's stock price went down after the IPO...
60    2012-11-25 Free market and the Internet
56    2012-02-10 Extremism continues on the Unfair campaign
53    2013-04-10 Why snail research is important

What does the most viewed post mean and how come it is the most viewed?  It is Russian for “Welcome to my Russian visitors” and it because I have a suspiciously large number of page views from Russia.  I suspect that these are reverse spammers who hope that I will track them down and make a click on their sites.  They are wasting their time and mine.

Page views since beginning

34260 Russia
32684 United States
2196   Germany
1752   France
1194   Ukraine
1072   United Kingdom
1013   China
674     Netherlands
417     Latvia
350     Turkey

and many other countries large and small.

Search keywords

125 magree.blogspot.com
69   first minority president
56   mother goose and grimm 12 days of Christmas
55   hyperbolic humor
15   facebog
14   bluestone commons duluth mn
12   corporate entitlements
12   glen post net worth
12   unfair campaign
9     bluestone commons duluth

If you got to the end of this post, thank you!  If you like what you read on this blog, please tell your friends.  Otherwise, thanks for visiting.

Readership is dropping, this might be good

Over the last few days, the number of page views of this blog have dropped considerably.

That might be a good thing!

Possibly the majority of page views are by reverse spammers, especially from Russia.  Although I have not been posting as much as I like, I would think the amount of reverse spam would not drop.  However, the number of Russian page views has dropped by a half, and the page views from known reverse spammers has also dropped.

As I am working a big genealogical project and doing more reading of novels, it might be awhile before I write as frequently as before.

I do thank my real, live viewers.  I may have some items soon from my long list of "Unpublished ideas".

Paper covers net, a readership comparison

Many of my acquaintances in Duluth ask me if I still write for the Reader Weekly.  Other than an occasional letter to editor, I haven't written any column since 2008.

After an article about some of the proposed mining in the region and the promises of no damage to the environment, I submitted my blog entry "The Invisible Adam Smith".  After all, the Reader often reprints material from the Christian Science Monitor and from Jim Hightower's web site.

With my using a wrong email address and the delay of having an open spot, the Reader Weekly published "The Invisible Adam Smith" in the 2013-04-25 issue.

Considering that hundreds of people in the region read most articles in the Reader Weekly, I assume more people have read my article in the Reader than have read my article on the web.  The latter count is 57!!  Since October when I posted it!

So, if you're an obscure blogger like me, you might have more readers if you write for some local print media than if you write a regular blog entry.  That is, paper can still be a more powerful medium than the internet.

Thanks for reading

I would like to thank all who have been reading this blog, whether long-time readers or recent visitors.  The number of page views per day has gone way up for the couple of dozen per day.  I don't kid myself that I'm writing better.  It's mostly the same old stuff.

I think there are two factors, one mine and the other the times.

I've been writing more entries per day.  Probably because of the other factor.  It is election time in the United States, and so all the political junkies are looking for as many opinions and I like to peck out my opinions

I thank you for your visit to the "Irregular Blog", and I hope you will come back often.  And if you like what you read, please tell your family and friends.