Review of 2008: Most Popular Posts

This blog has been running for over six years and I’ve never done a review of the year before – so this is all very experimental. Today I’m going to list the ten most popular entries from this year (as measured by number of views) and tomorrow I’ll list my ten favourite entries.

So here are the ten most read entries. If nothing else, the list certainly demonstrates how much of my traffic is driven by getting high placings in Google.

1/ The BBC’s Merlin
My rant about the BBC’s terrible recent new version of the Arthurian Legend is incredibly high on Google. The entry was only published in September but but it has almost twice the number of hits of the next entry.

2/ Pub Quiz
3/ Derren Brown – The System
A couple of entries about Derren Brown took second and third places. In February I wrote about his TV programme, The System, and in April I wrote a description of a night I spent being an unwitting part of another Derren Brown show.

4/ Quantum of Solace
In January, the title of the new James Bond film was announced and I used that as an excuse to write about my dislike of Bond films and my opinion that the they’d be better if they followed the books more closely. It picked up a lot of Googlejuice early on but, of course, now the film is out it has been pushed out by sites with far bigger SEO budgets.

5/ Is Sarah Palin a Wiccan?
A Guardian office joke gets turned into a blog post. I can understand why it’s the first Google result for phrases like “sarah palin wiccan” (there aren’t very many sites containing that phrase), but what puzzles me is why so many people a searching for the phrase.

6/ Baby Bible Bashers
Something a bit more serious (at last). Channel 4 broadcast a documentary about some children whose parents had encouraged them to get involved with christianity at an obscenely young age. It was a deeply troubling programme.

7/ Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
A post about the massively backfiring publicity campaign for the creationist propaganda film. I’ve seen the film since and keep meaning to write about it – but it’s hard to find the right words.

8/ Proof of Residence
A pretty standard rant about my local council preventing me from doing something pretty simple.

9/ Recording TV Revisited
A follow-up to a 2005 post talking about the combination of technologies that we use in my house to ensure that we never miss a TV programme that we want to watch.

10/ Combining Google Accounts
A post which made it into the top 10 despite only being published in November. If I had treid to combine my Google accounts earlier in the year, this post would almost certainly have been much higher.

So those are the posts that you’ve been reading over the last year. Thanks for showing some interest in my witterings. Tomorrow I’ll list the ten articles that I like the most (and which, for some reason, weren’t popular enough to make this list).

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