Top Blogging of 2010, Then and Now

The final bit of meta-blogging I'll do this weekend is another look at what survives from past years. Unfortunately, when National Geographic took over, they broke our Google Analytics access, so I can't see blog stats from before mid-2012 any more. I do, however, have this old post listing the top posts of 2010, traffic-wise, which serves as a snapshot of what was popular at the time. It's interesting to see how this compares to the current list of top posts from 2010-- the approximate rank of 2010 posts based on traffic in 2014 is in parentheses:

1. A Lot of Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing (2014 rank: 51)
2. Trapped Antihydrogen (2014 rank: 103)
3. Scientist-Approved Beach Reading (2014 rank: 170)
4. When Should You Open Your Car Windows? An Experiment (2014 rank: 6)
5. The Astrophysics of Bedtime Stories (2014 rank: 20)
6. Conceptual Physics Costumes for Halloween (2014 rank: 10)
7. The Faulty Fluid Dynamics of Hotel Environmentalism (2014 rank: 129)
8. Measuring Gravity: Ain’t Nothin’ but a G Thing (2014 rank: 24)
9. How Do I Kill the Squirrels Who Are Eating My Car? (2014 rank: 1)
10. Protons: Even Smaller Than We Thought (2014 rank: 72)
11. Seven Essential Elements of Quantum Physics (2014 rank: 4)

So, four of these stuck around in the modern top 10, while the rest dropped down significantly. A few fell completely off the map. What rose to take their place? Here's the top 11 posts from 2010 in terms of traffic in 2014:

1. How Do I Kill the Squirrels who Are Eating My Car?
2. How Does Light Travel Through Glass?
3. Electron Spin for Toddlers
4. Seven Essential Elements of Quantum Physics
5. What’s a Topological Insulator?
6. When Should You Open Your Car Windows? An Experiment
7. How Do superconductors Work?
8. Should Doctors Have to Take Physics and Chemistry?
9. What's a Photon, and How Do We Know they Exist?
10. Conceptual Physics Costumes for Halloween
11. 1491 by Charles C. Mann

It's not that hard to figure out how most of these ended up where they are-- they mostly have search-engine-friendly titles, and end up drawing lots of traffic from that. I know that the topological insulator post draws a bunch of views because somebody added it to the Wikipedia entry on the subject; I would like credit for valiantly resisting the temptation to go add a bunch more links to my stuff to the relevant Wikipedia pages...

So, what to make of this? Well, as much as we'd like to think that cream rises to the top, um, no. I mean, the modern top-posts-of-2010 list isn't awful, but if you gave me the choice of these two lists as something to represent the best of what I do on the blog, I'd go with the top posts list from 2010. I'm much happier with the ResearchBlogging posts that drew traffic back in the day than the accidental clickbait of the 2014 list.

There's a significant random element to both-- the top post from the year itself is a silly poll that became huge because of... Slashdot? Digg? One of those aggregators, I no longer remember which. The 2014 top post is there because it taps into a rich vein of rodent hatred in the Google-using public. Neither of those is a particularly good decider of merit.

If there's a lesson from all this, it's probably the depressingly obvious "If you want long-term traffic, title your posts like you're writing for a clickbait site." Which, you know, I would probably do if I were relying on the blog to make my rent payments, but I'm not, so I won't.