Birthday Blog - 3 Today!

It's ridiculous to think that three years ago today I sat down and wrote my first blog post. And how the time has flown. Back then Tony Blair was still on his throne, neoliberal hegemony ruled unchallenged, and the notion there would very shortly be a black bloke in the White House was far fetched. But I'm not going to celebrate the 3rd birthday with a review of political, social and economic developments since December 8, 2006. No, it will be marked in the traditional way - with a smorgasbord of the filthiest hardcore stat porn imaginable! Are you ready?

From December 8th 2008 to yesterday, myself and my occasional mysterious co-blogger, Brother S, managed to publish 250 posts. Of these just five passed without comment - obviously we're doing something right! Furthermore, these 250 posts have elicited 2,574 comments (as of this morning), which gives an average of 10.3 comments per post. The median is seven. Over the blog's life span 4,939 comments have been left, yielding an 8.3 comment average (I can't be arsed to work out the median).

The five most popular posts in terms of comments received are:

Move Over Labour? (82 comments)
Wildcat Strikes: The Media's Silence on the Cost (62 comments)
Populist Politics, the BNP Way (53 comments)
SWP and SP Debate Left Unity (42 comments)
Remembering September 11th (42 comments)

Has that whetted your appetite for more? I hope so. Have a look at the pretty graph for the last year:

For the blogging year 2008-9, the blog attracted an average of 504 page loads, 297 visits and 69 returning visitors a day (though it should be noted the page loads are skewed by an irritating zombie computer that visited the blog at 17 second intervals a few hours a day through September and early October). This compares very well with previous years. 2007-8 saw figures of 218, 157, and 44, and 67, 45 and 17 for 2006-7. This gives an all time average of 263 page views, 166 visitors, and 43 returning.

If you want a better representation of the blog's fortunes, here's the month by month graph from December 2006 to November 2009:

At the moment AVPS is linked to by 193 active blogs and websites, and who knows how many defunct ones. I've had posts plugged by the man who invented blogging, Socialist Unity, Dave Osler, Stumbling and Mumbling, The BritBlog Round-Up, The Carnival of Socialism, Pits 'n' Pots, and dozens of other blogs and twitterers. Cheers for the boost!

And that's it for another year. AVPS will continue to deliver its usual fare over the next 12 months, time and broadband connection permitting. So many thanks for sticking with it.