Posted on by Stilgherrian

Most popular posts of 2013

As we approach the end of 2013, I’m going to do my usual series of blog posts looking back at what actually happened on this little planet. This is the first, being a list of the most-read posts on this website.

There hasn’t been a lot to choose from in the last couple of years, because most of my writing is done elsewhere these days. That means some rather mundane pieces of writing, such as Weekly Wrap posts, end up on the list. That’s possibly an argument for abandoning this little exercise.

  1. Catchup posts within 36 hours was the most popular post of all, which makes no sense whatsoever because it’s routine administrivia. I suspect the visitor count has been artificially inflated somehow, though supposedly the traffic generated by spambots has already been removed.
  2. My tweets from TechEd Australia 2012’s keynote sessions, a post that was linked to from news stories that reported me having been banned from attending Microsoft’s TechEd conference. My own blog post on this issue is coming up at number 5.
  3. Guardian Australia not the droid you’re looking for, being my reaction against all the excitement generated in January 2013 by the announcement that there would soon be an Australian edition of this news masthead.
  4. My fish are dead: the black dog ate them (an explanation?), being my rather idiosyncratic announcement and discussion of the fact that I’d been dealing with a severe depression episode, published in July.
  5. Microsoft has banned me from covering TechEd, which is self-explanatory.
  6. Choosing my next media directions: you’re doing it, OK?, from May.
  7. Vodafone Australia’s new 4G network ain’t bad, being the write-up of my trial of the network which led to that conclusion.
  8. Weekly Wrap 152: LulzSec, Optus, radio and thinking stuff, which I suspect is only in the Top 10 because it mentions LulzSec.
  9. Weekly Wrap 155: Chemtrails, elitism and much thinking, ditto, chemtrails.
  10. Sydney Harbour “giant gambling den” bullshit reportage, from January.

And here are the 10 most-read posts of 2013 that weren’t written in 2013.

  1. Right, Google, you stupid cunts, this is simply not on! Even though it was written in 2011, this post was viewed some 245,000 times in 2013, up from 115,000 during 2012.
  2. Exhausted by the Future of Media, which is another routine piece of administrivia. From 2008.
  3. MOAR PANELZ: Board with Security?, being administrivia from 2011.
  4. Script Challenge: can you figure this out? I first posted this puzzle in 2007, but there was renewed interest starting in 2012 leading to it’s eventual solution.
  5. Weekly Wrap 130: Storms, sunburn and a two-hour cruise, being a routine thing from December 2012.
  6. The Great Firewall of China: how it works, how to bypass it. Given that this post was written in 2008, it’s probably giving people very bad advice.
  7. Twitter Discourse 1: Fuck off, swearing is my birthright, from March 2012.
  8. How do you treat your staff? Like 37signals, or like this prick? This is from March 2008.
  9. My new hero: Hideki Moronuki, being a bit of a troll aimed at anti-whaling folks.
  10. Live Blog: Internet censorship forum, an event that was held in 2008 but which still seems to attract an audience.

If you’d like to compare this with previous years, well, you can.

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