Though each year the cluster map gets archived about the middle of October, and new hot spots start appearing in the sidebar display, it is still possible to see where previous visitors came from (ClustrMaps - archive of user maps). It will be interesting to see what happens this year.
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I didn't know about decrease of the number of visitors until I read your post. I was surprised to read that. I hope visitors will increase year and year.
ReplyDeleteHi Kyoko,
ReplyDeleteThanks for leaving a comment. I appreciate your interest in blog visitors. I was surprised to discover the decrease, and hope visitors will increase year on year, too. There are several plausible explanations for the decrease.
Around the time I added a cluster map to the sidebar, I was involved in online workshops with blogging educators from around the world, who may have visited the Writing Studio Blog frequently. Locations of several spots on the earlier map support this explanation
Another possibility is that previous visitors started using RSS feeds to get updates without actually visiting the Writing Studio Blog. That kind of readership doesn't show up on a visitor cluster map.
Also, for the past year, I've made fewer posts here than I did the year before (compare the proto-portfolios in the footer: 2008-09, and 2009-10), because I'm stretched quite thin among several blogs I have. The RSS FEEDS: PAB + WINK (pab's blogs) in the sidebar show most of them. Fewer new posts on this blog may have attracted fewer visitors.
Finally, an explanation I hope isn't universally true is that students, your classmates and peers, may have been visiting the Writing Studio Blog less than your predecessors did a year or so ago. Nevertheless, each of these explanations may account for part of a diminished number of visitors over the past couple of years.
Cheers