Personal Reflections reader interests August 11

End month stats time. The graphic shows visits (yellow) and page views (yellow plus red) to this blog to end August 2011. 

The most popular posts on this blog in August were:

• Introducing Delos 167 page views
• Report of the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board, year ended 30 June 1940 140 page views
• Sunday Snippets - NZ earthquakes, Tomorrow when the War began, wild weather 79 page views
• George Negus, watermelons & the meaning of words 78 page views
• A few of my favourite blogs 68 page views
• The importance of cultural activities 68 page views
• Sunday Snippets - cultural differences between Indonesia and Australia, the wonders of Sydney tribalism 53 page views
• Threads in Belshaw thought 46 page views

Pleasing to see on of the Greek trip posts appear so strongly in the stats. I have about another half dozen posts to go to finish the series, then I can do a single post listing them all in date so that people can follow the whole trip and associated musings. 

Postscript

I have now finished the monthly review of reader interests across three blogs.

A gripe, first. The blogger writing/editing facility sure is clunky. I use Livewriter for most of my posts. If I need to edit using blogger, I seem to lose my formatting and have to reformat. Worse, the changes that have been made to blogger seem to have had a negative impact on the formatting of at least some previous posts. With over 4,000 posts now across blogs, re-editing is an almost impossible nightmare.

While I focus on the most popular posts in the monthly stats, I have also been looking back at posts from the dim and distant past to see what posts still get traffic, what posts don't, what old posts might be worth re-promoting. As you might expect, as you go back in time traffic falls away. In most cases, the posts are not worth re-promoting, although some do contain ideas worthy of development.

Interestingly given the current Australian emphasis on productivity, the first short post I did on productivity - On productivity: a short note - was back on 14 July 2006. There I said in part:

Corporatisation and privatisation of Australia's electricty industry saw large productivity gains. However, some of those gains were due to unsustainable cost cutting on the staff side.

In 2004 I chaired a seminar trying to attract trades people to consider employment opportunities in regional NSW. One of the speakers was from the electricity industry. He said in part that cut backs across the industry in the recruitment and training of linemen had created a major shortage. The industry was now struggling to catch up.

Link this to the productivity question. The initial cuts led to substantial apparent productivity increases. But the industry then had to pay lot more to try to attract immediately available linemen and to train new one. So productivity turned negative.

The point? Beware of apparent trends unless you understand what had happened before.

Now that's a point that's still relevant!

In the more popular posts area, the posts I wrote on Judith Wright's poetry and especially The Poetry of Judith Wright - South of My Days are featuring again because it is that time again in the school year. Many of those posts were linked in some way with posts by my long standing blogging colleague Neil Whitfield.

I went prowling across some of Neil's past blogs looking at those posts. I think that it would be worthwhile for either Neil or I to do a consolidation of the collected posts for they are clearly of continuing interest.

On the history blog in particular, posts linked in some way to Aboriginal history continue to score very well. On this blog, Report of the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board, year ended 30 June 1940 is the second most popular post since Google started to provide stats by a margin of 1,800 page views over number three. The most popular post is Sunday Essay - the importance of quiet time in a crowded world.

I am conscious that some of the Aboriginal posts that people are searching on badly need updating. Still, I fear that that will have to be for another day!