This week I helped out Peter John Meiklem on a story for the Sunday Herald about the future of journalism. Amid all the job losses in the Scottish media, the piece looks at whether bloggers can step up to the plate and begin to supplant traditional media outlets.

My view has long been that blogging is best consumed as a complement to professional journalism, as you’ll see if you read the piece. But of coruse there are other views out there, which the article also represents.

There are a few points I thought I’d mention, just to expand on or clarify a few points. It’s worth remembering what we mean when we talk about web stats. It’s a thorny area, and there isn’t really a good way to accurately estimate how many unique visitors a website has. I tend to look at visits rather than unique visitors because I think it’s more unambiguous.

I was a bit vague on the telephone about how many visitors this blog gets. I knew that all of my blogs put together get over 10,000 visits per month (this is the number I keep in my head because it’s nice and round, and it’s also sufficiently large to sound relatively impressive). In this case, it’s bad luck that the number of unique visitors to this blog in the month in question was 8,465. Not quite the >10,000 mentioned in the article, though if you throw in the numbers for my F1 blog vee8 it nudges above 10,000 unique visitors.

Apparently 10,000 per month is a similar readership to many local newspapers. I don’t know if this refers to the circulation of the hard copy or the figures for a local paper’s website.

Certain bloggers, who regularly post indulgent stat pr0n posts, get quite excited about how many visitors they get. But it’s worth remembering just how meaningless most visits actually are. Okay, this blog gets roughly 10,000 visitors a month. But it would be pure delusion to believe that there are 10,000 people out there who just can’t wait to read what I have to say.

Only an eighth of those visitors came here directly (i.e. on purpose). Over two-thirds of the visitors to this blog come from search engines. Of these, 94% have never come across this blog before. And 86% of search engine visitors to this blog look at one page and leave, spending on average a paltry 40 seconds here. They will probably never come back again, no doubt having failed to find what they were looking for. All-in-all, only 13% of this blog’s readers are returning for a second visit. Kudos to the 1% who have visited 100 times or more.

Of course, as always, these statistics come with all sorts of health warnings. Then there is the fact that many people are able to read blogs without ever having to visit, thanks to the magic of RSS. For what it’s worth, according to Feedburner, 270 people are subscribed to this blog.

Partly because of all the problems of getting accurate figures, I don’t get as hung up on stats as I used to. I like to know where traffic is coming from if someone has linked to this blog, but the numbers don’t excite me as much any more.

It’s come a long way though. I remember when I started out blogging, I used to be a bit freaked out when I saw the blog had had 60 visits in a day. That must have meant that I had (accidentally) said something too controversial or someone had ripped me to shreds and linked to it. Given that I was so young when I started blogging, they were probably right to do so. Eventually, getting 60 a day was the norm. Now 300 a day is a disappointment.

In the piece I am quoted as saying, “The average age of a blogger is around 40.” I don’t think that’s quite what I said (and I certainly didn’t intend to say that). I think the average age of the readers of political blogs is 40. My impression — it’s just a guess — is that the bloggers themselves are generally younger than that. But the point about blogging is that it can be — and is — done by people from all sorts of backgrounds. The eclecticism of the blogosphere is, of course, one of its biggest attractions.

As for the idea that the average reader of a political blog is aged 40, this is something I heard or read a long time ago and the source is long lost. I do like to pluck it out from time to time though to illustrate that blogging is not just a young person’s game. A quick search has yielded this study (PDF) which found that the median age of a political blog reader in the USA in 2006 was 49.

Another thing I wanted to mention was that the piece says that Guido Fawkes broke the story about North Lanarkshire Council’s head of communications job. In fact, my post about it was published about an hour before Guido’s, though I understand if more people came to learn about it through Guido. It’s also true that Gudio went a lot further, by actually naming the people involved, which I was reluctant to do.

Anyway, it’s great to have been quoted so much in the Sunday Herald this morning. I don’t mean to come across as sniping — inaccuracies are always bound to creep in, and you certainly couldn’t say that bloggers are much less error-prone.

One of the great things about having a blog though is that it allows me to clarify a couple of things which I said when I was working from the top of my head. That is one area where the blogosphere definitely has the upper hand over traditional media. On an open blog, some pedant like me will soon be along to point out the mistakes in the comments section. But the newspaper will never be corrected.

I recently had to write an essay for university about changes in Scotland’s population since 1945. While I was writing that I happened, almost by chance, upon The Registrar General’s Annual Review of Demographic Trends 2004.

What’s so special about 2004? It was the 150^th anniversary of civil registration (which began in 1855, in case your arithmetic isn’t too hot). So the Registrar General took the opportunity to delve into the statistics and produce lots of interesting analysis on this historical trends of Scotland’s population as far back as records go.

While I should have been writing my essay, I found myself perusing the graphs. I’m that sort of person. Obsessed with graphs. I’ll share a few of the most interesting ones with you.

Sorry about the illegibility of some of these. I have to confess that I am stealing the Registrar General’s bandwidth (although this does not vex me because the public is paying for that bandwidth, and something tells me they won’t get me with the goatse treatment). The original images are huge (much bigger than they appear on the PDF), so I have had to crudely reduce them in size to fit in these pages.

Immigration

Immigrants flooding this country! Er, or not.

Literacy

The Registrar General used the number of people signing by mark while marrying as a crude measure of literacy up until 1915.

Marriages in Gretna

They are a much more modern phenomenon than you might imagine.

Divorce

I bet if you got divorced in the nineteenth century it was national news.

Death

My favourite topic! You can see the general long-term decline in the number of deaths. But more interestingly, the peaks a troughs become much less extreme, signifying improved medicinal technology and ability to cope with epidemics.

These are just a few of my favourites, but I could have included twice as many (to be honest, you’re lucky I didn’t). But if you’re interested in Scotland’s modern history and demography I’d definitely take a look at the full document.

The other day I came across another interesting website from Spatial Literacy (you know them, they did that Surname Profiler). With this new website you type in your postcode and it tells you where you fit into ‘e-Society‘ (via Ben Metcalfe).

Apparently people in my postcode fall into categories “D : E for entertainment and shopping” and “D12 : Small time net shoppers”.

Group D : E for entertainment and shopping

This Group includes a number of moderately well paid blue collar workers for whom the Internet and personal computing provide important leisure activities. This Group tends to use the Internet not for obtaining information about products or for learning, but rather to provide access to music, games and general entertainment. People in this Group are smart enough to learn new methods of accessing what they want but they are not necessarily interested in technology for its own sake. Besides providing a form of personal relaxation they also see the computer as a resource for family entertainment…

Type D12 : Small time net shoppers

This Type comprises many younger and middle aged men who particularly rely upon the Internet to buy music, books and videos. They are also active Internet purchasers of computer games and of fashion wear. This Type is happy to undertake a wide variety of transactions on the Internet but tends not to be professionally involved in the development of information technology when at work.

It’s all true. There are no decent music shops around here, you see. So I buy a lot of CDs from the internet.

Internet shopping has its dangers though. On the plus side there are no bored / suspicious shopkeepers who pry on your every move. But you never physically see what you’re buying. This makes accidentally ordering an LP instead of a CD is a clumsy click away.

I thought I had got past that stage. I almost always double- and triple-check which format I’m buying. I was looking forward to receiving the goods that I had ordered from Boomkat’s fine summer campaign. But today I woke up to find a 12″×12″ parcel. Doh! I must have been rushing too much when I ordered it.

It’s not that I dislike vinyl. I don’t hesitate to buy a record if it has come out on vinyl only. I do own a turntable, but it’s hardly audiophile stuff. It plays everything too fast. You wouldn’t know unless you had already heard the track. It doesn’t feel faster, but the pitch is noticeably higher. Which is a bit of a pain.

I discovered that I can change the speed of my MP3s in Audacity, but it’s takes bloody ages. Plus I have got used to simply owning my whole music collection on CD with the exception of vinyl-only releases. All of my vinyl tends to be of obscure Team Doyobi 7 inches and Analords and whatnot. Hanne Hukkelberg will stick out like a sore thumb!

Plus, as I say, my record player is crap — I tend to avoid it if I possibly can because listening to it is like looking at a blurry photograph.

So now I have a dilemma on my hands. I could just send the album back and ask to exchange it for the CD, but that’s a pain for several reasons. Firstly, for whatever reason, the CD is actually £1 more expensive than the LP. Then there is the cost of postage (if I understand the explanation on their website, the Royal Mail would make 385 pretty pennies?!?). Add on top of that the plain old hassle of sending it back, and I’m really not sure I can be bothered.

But there it is. A mint, unopened record that I don’t really want. I could sell it on eBay and buy the CD separately. But music is so pretty.