Not Much to Say

I want to write something, but I don’t have much to say. Rice’s testimony is big news, but it’s been well-covered elsewhere. Ditto for the insertion of Iraq into a handbasket headed (but hopefully not unswayably so) towards Hell.

What do most people talk about when they’ve got nothing to say? Themselves, of course. So here’s some navel-gazing.

  • Traffic continues to grow nicely. It’s a rare weekday that we don’t get more than 1,000 unique visitors and weekend traffic hovers around 600, for an overall average of about 965/day, which is more than I ever expected. What’s the secret? Mostly, persistence I think. There’s a clear relationship between the age of a blog and its traffic, with Wonkette being the exception that proves the rule. However, this is not a purely causal relationship. There’s selection bias: we don’t observe the old blogs that failed to generate traffic and then vanished. More likely, good blogging — or at least blogging that appeals to a certain audience — causes both high traffic and longevity. Also, the political season that is upon us and secular growth appear to be increasing traffic across the board. Still, Angry Bear is growing relative to other blogs. If my readers could convince about 400 of their dearest friends to read the blog every day, we could break into N.Z. Bear’s top 100, as measured by traffic (the currrent ranking is 135.)

    Links only seem modestly proportional to traffic; based on that measure, this blog is currently rated #279 and it would take about 150 additional unique links for us to evolve from a “large mammal” to a “playful primate.” Gaining a pair of opposable thumbs would take about 500 new links.

  • We’ve raised $3,176 for John Kerry, putting us well on our way to the cumulative goal of $10,000 by the convention. Thanks!
  • I’ve been pretty busy lately, which explains the dearth of in-depth posts about economics and policy (I made a modest attempt to rectify this in this post.) It’s much easier, and often more fun, to point out that either God or nature is about to send a plague of locusts to Washington. Hopefully, things will slow down in a few weeks. Kash has similarly been busy of late, but I think he’ll be back to full speed soon as well.
  • I had high expectations when I invited Karsten to post from Europe on Fridays. I am very happy to see that my expectations have been exceeded.
  • The RSS feed appears to be fully functional, at last.

AB