The 10 least popular currybetdotnet posts of the year 2008

Last week, when I was posting my charts of the most successful posts from last year on currybetdotnet, Chris Applegate asked in a comment if there was "any chance we can see the least popular posts of the year?".

Always eager to oblige, I ran through the figures again, and had a rifle through the worst performing posts from last year. They can be grouped into roughly three types.

Announcements and side-projects

During the year there were lots of short posts about FUMSI, Chipwrapper and Fansivu, whether it was announcing or reflecting on how they worked for the Olympics or Euro2008, and pointing out public appearances or competitions. These have a short shelf life, and not much text to attract long tail searches in the long term.

Look...I took a photograph

A couple of the posts in the list are ones where pretty much the entire thing consists of me publishing a photograph I've taken somewhere like Gelsenkirchen or Amsterdam, and adding the exciting text "Look, I took a photograph of this thing. Tee hee!". I've no doubt that this recent post about relationship-related graffiti in the British Museum will suffer the same fate.

Perhaps I should just be putting these up on Flickr and adding a comment instead.

Taking the 'Ooh' out of zzzzzzzzzzz

I was initially shocked, horrified and dismayed that given the amount of work that went into it, four parts of my epic "Taking the 'Ooh' out of Google - Getting site search right" series were languishing in the bottom ten performing posts of the year.

However, on reflection it was a lengthy series that was published in 12 parts over the course of four weeks, which gave it quite a disjointed feel. Page views are not the only metric, and the posts have done well in terms of attracting links and views via RSS, and the original SlideShare version of my Euro IA Summit talk has proved popular with over 1,500 views. The full PDF of the blog series has also been downloaded hundreds of times.

It certainly served a purpose for me. It was a large chunk of content that could be pre-written based on some existing work I'd done, and could be scheduled to keep the blog ticking over whilst I extricated myself from Greece and got settled back into working in the UK. There is a lesson there, though, about the perils of not having an external editor to keep the format of a series like that more trim.

The bottom ten

Looking at the figures overall, there is quite a skew towards articles published in October and November, which suggests that, over time, they will pick up more page views thanks to long tail searches.

Here then, are the worst performing articles on currybetdotnet from 2008, with 'Son of a glitch' winning the dubious accolade of least read post of the year.

1. Son of a glitch - March 2008
2. Nominate your most useful FUMSI article of the year - October 2008
3. How was it for you? The Chipwrapper & Fansivu Euro2008 review - July 2008
4. Gelsenkirchen's scruffy World Cup legacy - October 2008
5. FUMSI at Online Information 2008 - November 2008
6. Taking the 'Ooh' out of Google: Getting site search right - Part 7 - November 2008
7. Taking the 'Ooh' out of Google: Getting site search right - Part 9 - November 2008
8. Introducing Olympic Fansivu - August 2008
9. Taking the 'Ooh' out of Google: Getting site search right - Part 10 - November 2008
10. Taking the 'Ooh' out of Google: Getting site search right - Part 6 - November 2008

Posted by Martin Belam, December 29, 2008    
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