All roads lead to nonsense

SF and Nonsense, that is. And, of course, some roads are more heavily traveled than others ...

In an April post, I looked at which posts and topics on this blog attract the largest audience. Funny thing: that self-referential post quickly became one of the most frequently viewed items here. Today I'll analyze SF and Nonsense another way: where viewers come from. (Not individually. I don't know that, nor would I want to. But I'm delighted when visitors comment here or email me.)

Since Blogspot began sharing statistics with their bloggers, they've accumulated a year's worth of information. First up, mining that trove of data: popular referring URLs.

Dramatic drum roll ...

The winner by a mile: Asimov's magazine SF-authorial blogger list. For the past couple months, SF and Nonsense has been one of Asimov's featured blogs. (If that's what brings you, then ... howdy, Asimov's reader! But SF and Nonsense won't be a featured blog forever ... if what you see sometimes piques your interest, here's the link to bookmark.)

The runner-up source link is the Analog magazine blogger list. Because I'm in the MAFIA (as in: Making Appearances Frequently In Analog -- see my membership buttons), I'm not surprised. And though it's been a while, SF and Nonsense has twice been an Analog featured blog.

Coming in third as a source of referrals, also not a shocker: my own website.

And a few honorable mentions:

• the news page at the unofficial (fan-maintained) website of Larry Niven, with whom I  collaborate on some novels.
• my January cloud-computing post translated to Dutch (with my blessing) by the Netherlands website Computerworld.
• The front page of popular SF news-and-reviews website SF Signal.

Looking at referring sites rather than individual referring URLs, the Analog and Asimov's websites remain prominent. Also high on the list is the Science-fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA)  website that  -- among many other things -- hosts my (and many other) members' webpages.

The most frequently referring entity -- by far -- is Google. (I see queries from Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines, of course, but Google is the 800-pound gorilla of search.) Many of these referrals involve queries on aspects of Known Space (the scary-smart aquatic alien Gw'oth being a popular search) and, quite often, various of the Fleet of Worlds series novels. Lately I'm seeing bunches of queries for another sequel. (That will be Fate of Worlds, apt to be released in mid 2012.) And there are searches on my name and the name of this blog, of course.

How about geographically? Ways exist to block that information, and some visitors have. (As you might expect, given how often I blog on the topics of privacy and network insecurity, I'm fine with that.) With that caveat, it looks like about three-fourths of page views originate within the US, about 4% each come from Canada, the UK, and Germany, and about 2% each come from the Netherlands, Russia, and Australia. The rest comes from ... all over the place. (See image at left.)

So, bottom line, what do I conclude? That viewers arrive here by intent, whether from SF-related websites or via science/tech- and SF-related searches. That this blog reaches eyeballs across the globe.

For an SF author, there are worse things :-)