Every year the print media, and now the Internet media, regurgitate old news by putting together top ten lists of the most important, or best, or otherwise most relevant articles of the previous year. Most of the blogs I read are coughing up a top ten.
Blogger, the web-based software I use to crank out my blogs, provides stats so you can see which of your posts are most popular this very instant, or over the last 24 hours, seven days, month, or all time. I does not provide you with information for the past year. To do that you have to hop into the editor, scroll through everything you've written over the past year, and note the tally of pageviews that each have had.
Oh, and ignore the fact that a lot of those views were likely made by robots: Search engines like Google that want to know what they can find on your page, or spambots that will search for certain terms, then either try to sell things to you, or manufacture webpages using popular search terms in the hope that anyone looking for you will run into them, and they can sell something. What, you didn’t know about any of this? Oh well.
For a while I was tempted to produce a top ten list for my other blog, More Christ, but I’ve since decided not to waste my time. Waste it any further, anyway. I know which stories over the past year are the most popular; more than a thousand have read my take on fake Christians, and a surprising number have read my bits on the “I-suck-at-prayer” prayer and the Deuteronomistic history.
But that’s only the folks who have read these posts so far. A thousand people didn’t log onto the fake-Christians article on the day I posted it; nor on the week, or even month. People were drawn to it over time. People are still drawn to it; whenever someone tries to Google “fake Christians” apparently More Christ pops up, so they go there. Nice.
That puts it in the top ten for 2011 now. What about later? Suppose one of the pieces I wrote last week—the last week of 2011, natch—goes viral and gets thousands of views, blowing everything else comparatively out of the water? What happens to my short-sighted top ten list?
This happens in the music business all the time. At the end of the year, they list their top ten, or top 40, or top 100, and base it on existing popularity. Any of those songs have any future once the fad of liking them dissipates? Some do. Some don’t. As a result, when folks watch nostalgia shows like I Love the ’80s or I Love the ’90s, there’s a fair amount of mockery: We can’t believe we loved these things. What were we, stupid? (No; immature. Kids have no taste. That’s what the Disney Channel and MTV are banking on.) Short-term popularity means nothing. Staying power is what counts.
Same with the top ten lists in the newspapers or on the blogs. Years from now, certain events will be in the history textbooks. Others will be, “Oh yeah; that happened” memories that bubble up whenever anyone decides to put down a history text and read some actual history. The blog posts that have staying power will be the ones that are still relevant years from now—and while I’m trying to make all the posts on that particular blog relevant, we just won’t know yet. That’s why it’s premature for me to speculate—based on pageviews, of all things.