Everytime I add a new article to this site, my site gets listed on Movable Type’s homepage in their “Recently Updated” sidebar. It’s one of the benefits of paying the one-time $20 “donor” fee for using their software. (Mind you, the software has been benefit enough and then some). I never go over there and check to see my site listed, but I usually get one or two visitors from MT’s home page so I know it works. But tonight, out of curiousity, I thought I would follow my site link and see how long it managed to stay up on the list of 15 recently updated blogs before it fell off the bottom.
The results: after my recent post on “More Japan-based Sites…”, this site managed to stay up on the list for 11 whole minutes. Now I have no idea how many visitors MT’s site got in that period, nor do I care very much, but it would be interesting to do some calculations on the data (perhaps). I do know that when I started the watch, it was 3:50 in the morning of February 27th, here in Tokyo (yeah, yeah, I’m going to bed in a minute, just let me finish this). At that time, it was 10:50am (on February 26th) in San Francisco (where presumably MT’s servers are located), and 1:50pm in New York. I would hazard that this would be a relatively slow period for posts, though what do I know. (It certainly wasn’t slow for Instapundit, during my brief 11 minutes of fame he popped up twice, the bastard!)
Last May, before I even started this site, I read a post on Mike.Whybark.com about a similar experiment he did, and I pulled it up just now. A good 9 months ago, after Mike updated his blog, his site remained up on MT’s “Recently Updated” list for a good 35 minutes. Leaving aside a myriad of factors, it’s fanciful but fun anyway to extrapolate that in 9 months time, the blogs in the MT “stable” have increased over 200%, or at least their “posting power” has. Of course, this is all “inside baseball” in the extreme, and therefore this nonsensical post will come to an end, and I will trudge off to bed.
(Okay, that’s enough articles about blogging I think. I promise to return to regularly scheduled programming post haste).
Kurt, man, we’ve got to stop bumping into each other like this on the net. I read your post on Kiyo’s page talking about the “recently updated” list – so I ran the same test maybe two days ago. 15 minutes.
-Jason
I recently ponied up, and MT overtook you as my leading referrer pretty quick.
Yep, 8 minutes…that’s when I watched it at 8:32 AM Central Standard Time.
M-
only 8 minutes…I wonder if that’s because there’s a lot of blogging over coffee in the morning? 🙂 Interesting that Jason got 15 (almost double), and I got somewhere in between. Of course, none of it’s scientific….
nils,
i wonder why so many people visit your site from mine (i’m flattered to send so many folks your way)….i wonder if it’s because you come first in the blogroll?