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Your favourite articles 2003-07 |
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Which is your favourite article? Let me know yours by emailing me at mark.fisher@self-willed-land.org.uk |
Blogging on the web (July-December 2007) I am not giving a breakdown of readership for this period, as the usual trends carry on. Thus the article Beavers and boars: a wild animal update continues to be the highest read (324 hits in the last six months). It has averaged a readership of over 50 every month since it was posted in September 2005, and almost always appears in the top ten “Entry Pages” in the web statistics. While the “Home Page” invariably is the entry page of most website users, an entry page other than the Home Page suggests that users have the link directly to an article, indicating that it is on some recommended reading list somewhere. Another facility of the web statistics is a listing of the site addresses of my website users, allowing me sometimes to recognise who is reading it. This listing is alarming though for the amount of traffic my website has from automatic indexers that crawl over it every month with names like livebot, googlebot, inktomisearch, and seekbot. While I am pleased that the website is promptly indexed and can thus be picked up in most search engines, I have this fear - what if my website is only read by automatic indexers, and never any real people? There is another indexing that takes place, but to which I was asked to give my consent. I was invited in 2006 by the Modern British Collections section of the British Library to have my website archived as part of a the national effort to archive representative websites from UK web space in advance of the introduction of legal deposit for digital materials. I’ve been archived twice now, with the archive sets available on the UK Web Archiving Consortium website ( www.webarchive.org.uk/tep/15110.html). I am indexed in the Archive in the Science and Technology section, coming in groups under the headings of Popular Science and of Environment. In the latter, it is also part of the British Countryside collection of related internet sites, which puts me alongside such organisations as the National Trust, Game Conservancy Trust, Meat and Livestock Commission, East Devon AONB, but also the UK Horse Shoers Union! Pretty august company for what some might dismiss as a ranting weblog of a website. I am usually amused rather than annoyed when a journalist in the “quality” press embarks on another attack against blogging, accusing bloggers of poor grammar, factual inaccuracy and the tendency to howl at the moon. It smacks of professional protectionism. Bloggers write because they have something to say, have a need to say it pretty much now, and don’t need a financial reward to do it. The open access of the internet means that bloggers are their own proprietor, editor, publisher etc., the test of their altruistic worth being the entirely voluntary readership that has to seek out their weblog, rather than stumbling over a journalist’s article in yesterday’s discarded chip paper. I blog using my own website. Some will say that I am just a frustrated journalist, given that I inveterately write for forums, newsletters, and the occasional newsstand magazine. But my setting up of a personal website in 2003 was emblematic of a much more serious purpose. The key role of the website is to enunciate my views on landscape. It is more than therapy – I do have an occasional feature that takes a poke at poor journalism on nature conservation, and I get great delight in pointing out the absurdities in professional nature conservation (see Ssenredliw) but the periodic articles (I aim for monthly) are a continuum of my developing thesis, and I complement that with a substantial wildland information resource posted up as well. For my articles, I walk landscapes and I learn, I read books/the internet and go to meetings and I learn – and what I have seen and learnt is explored in the articles. I am blunt by nature, and a website is not the place to hide criticism away, especially if it relates to an individual. From experience, I know that it only takes a few weeks after posting before word gets back to the someone I have traduced. The deal is that they get their say, posted up on my website and without comment from me (an exception was a response from the director of one wildlife trust who was too boringly long and self-serving). Who knows what influence a blog like mine has? I don’t have the reach of a Richard Mabey or a Peter Marren, but offered the chance I could give most of the rest a run for their journalistic money. Instead I do what is open to me, and I don’t believe I have done enough yet. The statistics of my website readership can only give raw numbers - it doesn’t much explain why some articles are more popular than others, or if I am just feeding the prejudices of a minority. I do know, because readers occasionally tell me so, that I fill a niche in outlook on landscapes that is under-represented in the mainstream. That’s enough to keep me going. Mark Fisher 13 January 2008 Finding equilibrium (December 2006 - June 2007) Seeing only the disregard that wild nature is held in, and constantly witnessing the flipside to nature conservation, can be soul destroying and needs to be balanced with some reason for optimism or the disequilibrium may not be recoverable from. My inspiration for articles does not always follow a course of achieving balance - I have to write about what moves me at that moment. Thus three articles in this recent period found me in a very black mood - Nature grooming, Four strands of barbed wire and They shoot foxes, don't they? - and it would not surprise me if their content was more than a little challenging. They did not provoke any vituperative response, but then where are the plaudits? The update on Blacka Moor - Four strands of barbed wire - was a collaboration with the Friends of Blacka Moor, and it received a share of its readership (182 hits in the last seven months) through linkages from their local blogs. Interest in the original article - Blackamoor in peril from conservation professionals (December 2005) - has remained high (327 hits), but must have gained a fillip from the update article. Two other articles were the result of encouragement. The Duddon Valley woodlands in the Lake District were a revelation to me after I became involved with people in Leeds University in looking at the regeneration with native woodland species of a Forestry Commission plantation at the head of the valley. The article on doorstep wildness was the result of the gentle chiding from Norma in London, who felt that I concentrated too much on the wild nature of open countryside, and wanted to see something about urban ecology. Woodland articles remain popular, with my explanation of the phantom forests on maps (the Norman hunting forests) being the most read of articles of the last year (407 hits) with the article about the extent and protection of Britain's woodland not far behind (350 hits). Of the older articles, Plant communities and natural pest control (June 2002) is the most popular (535 hits) followed as usual by the update article on wild animals from September 2005 - Beavers and boars: a wild animal update (386 hits). The Springfield Community Garden Technical Reference Manual heads the work-related reports (620 hits). New in this recent period is Heroes and Villains (85 hits) where I set out to balance what I think is good news with bad. The inaugural entry compares a meeting on wildland in Scotland from March with one in Wales from November last year. A second entry pairs the activities of the National Trust and the local group of the Marine Conservation Society in the Pembrokeshire National Park. The Links page consistently gets the most hits (825 hits) scoring more than 100/month, and 3,002 since it first went up in November 2003. I add new entries that I come across during research for my articles, and I guess some people may come back occasionally to pick these up. In the seven-month period of this review, the website received 16,102 visits (2,300/mo) and 31,616 files and articles were looked at (4516/mo). Since its birth in September 2003 with one article and the index page, there have been 46,514 visits to the website, and 102,913 files and articles have been looked at.
Mark Fisher 2 July 2007 Stats hit by migration (June - November 2006) The webhost migrated me over - twice - to a new server, with a disruption of webstats service and incomplete data for September and October. Fortunately, the full service was resumed by November, but it does mean that results for this period suffer. Web activity has settled back to the equivalent period last year, with only one older article - Plant Communities and Natural Pest Control (333 hits), and one old piece of work - Springfield Community Garden manual (427 hits) - getting any high activity in the last six months. Of the more recent articles, the one about the role of Wildlife Trusts and English Nature (now Natural England) in managing local reserves - Blackamoor in peril from conservation professionals (223 hits) - seems still to hold people's interest. There is now an Addendum which documents another example of unilateral action taken by a wildlife trust to instigate grazing and reduce public access, this time at St Catherine's Hill near Winchester. For some time now, I have pored over maps wondering why there are so many forest place names in locations where there are no trees. It all becomes clear when you know that a forest is a Norman term for a royal hunting area, and does not indicate a wooded landscape as it does today. The history of hunting forests is integral to the history of our landscape over the last 1,000 years. I wrote about this in September, and the article - Treeless Forests (144 hits) - has been the other front runner amongst articles written in the last 12 months (see the table below). Articles about animals always score highly, and Beavers and boars: a wild animal update (222 hits) has been up for 15 months but is still attracting attention. Two recent articles grew directly out of my admiration for the Pembrokeshire coast, and got me into thinking about marine protection areas. For many reasons, marine protection is a hot issue and it will be interesting to see whether those articles - Shooting grey seals..... and No take Zones..... - contribute to that debate.
Mark Fisher 22 December 2006 Wild by Design (December 2005 - May 2006) Readership peaked in March this year, at 2342 visits, falling back to 1759 by May. The two articles on wild animals continue their overall leadership (see table below) but the astounding performance of the last six months has been interest in my design for the landscape for the Ecology Building Society (EBS), downloaded 894 times during that period, and 376 times in May alone. At 1.5Mb in size, the demand for this file has finally caused me to top up the data transfer for the website. The manual for Springfield Community Garden is not far behind at 613 downloads, and at 1Mb has also eaten into data transfer. I wrote an article about the EBS design for Permaculture Magazine, a quarterly newsstand publication. The edition in which the article appeared came out in May and included a link for the design. However, I doubt that the article explains all the demand in that month - my design for a community garden at 3Mb scored 284 hits so perhaps I'm on some college list of design examples (good, I hope, rather than not what to do?!). I try to write one article a month for the website, but there has to be something useful to say. Often, an event or news article will set off a train of thought that ends up as an article, and I tend to file away snippets and ideas with the aim of getting around to using them when they fit with the context of an article. If you note some development path over the scope of the articles, then that is also an aim. One article, about Blackamoor at the edge of the Peak District near Sheffield, arose from someone contacting me and asking for advice. It came at a time when I was pretty fed up with the dead hand of conservation professionals and their arrogance of presumption that they are the best stewards of land. The Blackamoor situation seemed to parallel many others around England, where the local users/enjoyers of public landscapes were having their wishes over-ridden by these conservation professionals - and it was the local people who had a much better appreciation of the natural state of their landscapes. The resultant article at 307 hits is up with the articles on wild animals, and must have hit a similar sympathetic mood. Sometimes I start an article with a specific aim and then it grows large on me as the research I do as I write throws up fabulous new information. I love that the internet connects me with reference sources from around the world and through time. Readership is the only judge of whether my great satisfaction is just an indulgence. Thus I do await the impact of an article after posting, as revealed by the trend in the monthly webstats. Some take off immediately, and some build slowly despite my best hope that there is something compelling about them. If I had to pick a recent disappointment, it would be the low readership of Mountain lions and eagles - the place of humans in nature.
Mark Fisher 17 June 2006 The puzzle continues (June - November 2005) Webstats reveal the most popular pages on a website, but they don’t tell you why? I set up this website to be a window onto self-willed land, but it is the output from various jobs that continue to hold most interest. Thus a landmark was passed when the report on the aspirations of Bradford District’s rural land use community was downloaded 500 times over the last six months, taking it past 1000 in total. Rural life in Britain has been comprehensively trampled over in recent years and so it is surprising that this minor piece of research holds such interest. Other work reports scored high: Springfield Community Garden (356 hits since June (hsJ)) and farmer’s markets (295 hsJ); followed closely by my design for the landscape around the new HQ of the Ecology Building Society (291 hsJ) (the groundwork is substantially completed and tree planting now starts – weather permitting). Only the Links page (410 hsJ) gets in amongst these work-related high scorers. A new feature since May – news about the newly formed Wildland Network (249 hsJ) has attracted more interest than the highest rated article (see table below). The Network came together for the first time in May this year, and followed up that successful meeting in Leeds with another in Cumbria in October. My notes from those meetings are perhaps more animate than the Network’s own write-ups. The last two months have seen other innovations: a page on Wildland Information (101 hsJ) points to the reports, policies and strategies on or related to wildlland that can be downloaded from the webs of British organizations and agencies. More personal is the Wildland Bibliography (54 hsJ) where I hope to share my enthusiasm for certain books. A particularly frustrating weekend gave rise to the Ssenredliw page (75 hsJ) which is my poke in the eye for those in the media who abuse the word wilderness (the page title is wilderness spelt backwards!). In the main, new articles have a flurry of readership in the months after posting and then tail off as they are superseded. Some articles buck this trend: The dignity of wild animals (215 hsJ) was written 22 months ago and yet it out-rates all others, including those written before the website. Perhaps the plight of wild animals evinces greater emotional pull than landscapes, since a follow-up - Beavers and boars: a Wild Animal Update (182 hsJ) - has also scored highly (see below). Of the earlier written, Doing the sums: does organic farming stack up? (140 hsJ) has had a new lease on life, and has provided one of those rare times when I actually find out why people read my articles. I picked up a referral to the article in a discussion forum on the Farmers Weekly website. The explanation of a forest garden (199 hsJ) is one of the few pages in Learn about Permaculture that receives interest, perhaps due to its iconic status for land use in British Permaculture Design. I have a page for reader feedback - Your contribution, 232 hsJ - but few people contact me with their thoughts. Grateful to those that do, I am left wondering for the most part: especially when I leave myself exposed to spam email by having my email address on every page. I gave up trying to install an online comment system when nothing seemed to work. Activity dropped by 20% during August and September, rebounding to new highs in October and November of 1500 visitors a month and 4000 hits. Does this drop represent a sizeable student audience, lacking internet access during the summer break? Geographical readership may support this. The web was accessed from 39 countries in November, each continent being represented, but with the English speaking areas of the world understandably predominant. By reading this, you are following along from the 136 that have done so since June.
Mark Fisher, 5 December 2005 The first twenty one months (September 2004- May 2005) Readership has built steadily since the website was first published in September 2003. There are now an average of 900 visitors a month with nearly 3000 hits a month. Based on the frequency of entry and exit pages, it would seem that a number of the documents and articles on the website are requested through direct links rather than from general browsing of the website through the front door (i.e. home page). It may come as a surprise (as it does to me) that the most read document on this website (nearly 600 downloads) is not from any of the articles on self-willed land – or farming or Permaculture – but is a report from my past worklife with Business Link for West Yorkshire on the business support program for farmer’s markets in the Yorkshire and Humber region. The next two highest hits are more expected - the Travelogue (574) and the Links page (550). However, a research report crops up in fourth place from one of my various periods of working with Bradford Council i.e. Rural Aspirations: Some Impressions And Observations From Bradford District’s Rural Land Use Community (505 downloads). In general, the work reports seem to be of more interest than I had expected, including my design work. The manual on Springfield Community Garden has been downloaded 263 times. The un-used design for the edible garden in the centre of Bradford - the Motte and Bailey Garden - has been downloaded 273 times. I am currently implementing my design for the landscape around the Ecology Building Society HQ, and that design report has been requested 93 times in the four months since it was posted. The most requested article is the manifesto – Self-willed Land: The Rewilding of Open Spaces in the UK. At 370 downloads it just shades the score for the homily about myself (About the Author - 364 hits). The article on self-willed land was the first to be posted on the website, but it appeared in another guise before it was turned into the portable document file (PDF) of the manifesto. The original version can be found in the section of articles on Self-willed land and it is still active (280 hits). Combining the two scores would make it the most read document. Many of the articles were written before the website first went live and were collated onto the site from their different publication avenues i.e. email discussion groups, membership newsletters, and newsstand magazines. One newsstand article vies with an article written specifically for the website in being the most read after the manifesto: Natural Plant Communities and Pest Control was first published in Permaculture Magazine (under a different title) in the autumn of 2002 (308 hits) versus The Dignity of Wild Animals written for the website in February 2004 (325 hits). Other older articles also score highly, such as those challenging the validity of organic farming and the substance and style of its promotion (Doing the Sums: Does Organic Farming Stack up? – 280; Stealing the Clothes off our Backs – 252; Legends and Myths in Science - 215; The Hoe and the Plough - 197; The Whole is Not the Sum of its Parts - 168; All the News that's Fit to Print - 154; Food Chain and Crops for Industry - 143); and the one-off article on Approaches to Problem Solving (232). The Introduction to Permaculture is also well read (381) but few of the individual pages on Permaculture Design are requested, often having achieved no more than one or two hits a month. Exceptions are Forest Gardens (273) Urban Ecology (258) Futures - Searches, Visions, Scenarios and Foresight (142) and Enspirited Visioning, Future Searches and Guided Visualisation (111). The first two are given as illustrative links in About the Author, and the last two are consecutive links from the Urban Ecology page. Thus users of the website do seem to follow hyperlink threads through the pages. In the main, the more recent articles – written specifically for the website – start slowly after posting and then build to have a steady readership each month of between 10-20 (overall totals from first posting are tabulated below). Three articles rise above this background and score more heavily: at 20-30 a month for A Season of Orchids; and at 30-40 a month each for The Dignity of Wild Animals and Wildernesses of the Mind.
Mark Fisher, 13 June 2005 url:www.self-willed-land.org.uk/your_favourite_03_07.htm www.self-willed-land.org.uk mark.fisher@self-willed-land.org.uk |