Philocrites

Meet your fellow Philocritics, part 4.

by Philocrites

There's good news and bad news. The good news — as I'll explain below — is that there's never been such traffic at Philocrites. Visitors and readers and new Philocritics galore! The bad news is, well, you know what the bad news is, so let's just say that Monty Burns is a very happy man.

Thanks for new links in October from Dissent into the Mind of a Teenage Pseudo-Intellectual (by "a 17-year-old Puerto Rican dude in the Bronx"), LDS Blog ("a latter-day blog dedicated to the standard of truth," chaired by my junior-high and high-school mate Brian Duffin), Living to the Left ("a heretical left-leaning political news blog"), and The Rational Radical ("Let justice be done, though the heavens fall," says this liberal Catholic with a moderate political bent; hmm, is the blog title ironic?). The Philocritics are all over the map, as you can see.

And now for the poll . . .

In this week's poll, I thought we'd pay homage to the medium I have neglected too much for the past few months: books! O bound paper, evocative covers, foreword and index and illustrious blurb writers, how I miss you! I did not manage to finish reading a single book in all of October, and I wouldn't be surprised to discover that I didn't make it to the last page of a book in September, either. Shame on me. So here's a poll focused on this week's New York Times Paperback Nonfiction bestseller list: Which of these books are you most likely to read? (Click the link and you'll be led to reviews of the books you don't know anything about.)

And, in the comments, please recommend guilty pleasures, new discoveries, and books you keep meaning to finish. (Incidentally, books you buy from Amazon.com following a link from Philocrites help fund this site. Try out the search box below!)

And now, last month's statistics: October saw a huge surge in traffic, almost all of it related to one Google search: "Christians for Kerry." I thought it was a dangerously telling sign that my blog entry from October 4 was the number 1 hit for this phrase.

Search Now:

There were 6,821 unique visitors in October (up 2,253!) with 17,041 visits overall. Of these, approximately 1,300 arrived by typing "Christians for Kerry" into Google or another search engine. (My "Christians for Kerry" entry had 930 visits in October — and another 648 visits in the first week November, with a terrific spike on November 1 and 2.) This surge in traffic started only two weeks ago, just after Kerry's speech in Fort Lauderdale about the religious roots of his commitment to public service. He should have given that speech earlier. He didn't need to pretend to be an Evangelical; he just needed to let voters see how his faith and his politics were related. I think it could have made the difference.

Other traffic tidbits from October: A lot of people are reading Philocrites using news readers (the .rdf feed was accessed 8,529; the .xml feed 1,114 times). And, just for fun, a poem made out of the top 25 individual search words that brought people to this site (used in order, exluding only a few "of"s and "to"s, punctuation added):

Kerry for Christians, the liberal?
Bush's church watch: religion poll!
Red Sox in Unitarian god blogs.
Is bible growing, senator?

Yes, that does seem to boil the site down to its essence for last month.

Copyright © 2004 by Philocrites | Posted 7 November 2004 at 9:46 AM

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