Saturday, January 10, 2009

Who Reads, Who Doesn't?

And now, to end the day's postings with a lighter piece, some ruminations on the data my stats counter shows me about the readership of this blog.

Who reads Bilgrimage? Who doesn't?

I’m fascinated with the picture I see when I open my stats counter—the picture of where readers are concentrated in the United States. (There are readers across the globe, but my concern here is with the U.S. map.)

Within the U.S., the heaviest concentration of readers in the past month has been in the following states:

New York, Massachusetts, California, Florida, North Carolina, Washington (state), Arkansas

A second tier of states with significant numbers of readers:

Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, Texas, South Carolina

The remaining states (with the exception of “no-read” states mentioned below) read the blog less intensively.

States with no hits in the past month:

Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Montana, Idaho, Vermont, Maine

Fascinating. I wonder what to make of those results? The no-read results from those upper midwestern and western states are pretty consistent, month by month. There are months in which the no-read map looks, fact, pretty similar to the map showing states that went red in the last election . . . .