The top ten posts of 2009 from These Digital Times

Here are the top ten posts of 2009 from These Digital Times. Twitter and social media dominate – not at all surprising for a blog in this area.

• Six types of Tweets if you Twitter every day
• The ten questions I ask myself before I publish any blog post
• Five people to follow on Twitter in 2009
• A list of social media habits I am stopping immediately
• What should a well designed website look like: part 1
• About John Welsh
• Tennis player Andy Murray’s Twitter goes dead!
• Guest post: top ten tips on how to manage a Linkedin group
• A list of companies using social media to market themselves in the UK – take two
• A list of ten Google Reader Shared Items to which you can subscribe saving you time

So what does the traffic tell us?

1. The two blog posts about Twitter in the top ten make up just under 10 per cent of the entire year’s traffic.
2. The top five posts represent just over 25 per cent of the entire year’s traffic while
3. the top ten posts represent 40 per cent of the entire year’s traffic.
4. All but ten of the 238 posts on this blog were looked at during 2009 although
5. the least popular 20 posts only managed 30 views in all, the bottom nine posts only one view each.
6. Three of the posts (if you include “About John Welsh”) date back to 2008, hammering home the point that people’s use of the web is blind to date but keen on relevance.
7. Only two of the posts predate the moment when These Digital Times found its voice providing lists for those acquiring skills in social media, and even one of those (“What should a well design website look like”) can be seen as a list.
8. Only one post (Tennis player Andy Murray’s Twitter goes dead!”) dates back to a time when I just used this blog to comment on what else was around. Little surprise that it is a famous tennis player’s name that keeps this post there.
9. Look how high up “About John Welsh” is in the list. It reminds you not to neglect an often overlooked element of a blog.

So the traffic follows the classic Pareto Distribution, a phrase used in economics to describe the typical distribution of wealth. This suggests that the wealthiest person in any town or country is likely to be twice as wealthy as the second most wealthy person who, in turn, is likely to be twice as wealthy as the third most wealthy person and so on. Such distribution, plotted on a graph, is a steep curve away from the vertical axis then continuing almost parallel to the horizontal.

It is a distribution often seen in social media and digital. The activity of the most active member of any community, for example, is likely to be twice as much as the next most active and so on. And think also about something like Amazon where the most popular book is twice as popular as the second and so on.

I’m rather chuffed that These Digital Times follows this pattern.