Once a year, I like to look at the most popular blog posts. The blog currently receives a little under 1,700 people a month, but 80% of the people who land on the site “bounce,” which means that they leave the blog almost as soon as they arrive. There are roughly 350 people a month who read posts. Most of these people are from the United States, although there are also readers in Canada, Brazil, Great Britain, India, Kenya, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Germany and Mexico. The top ten blog posts have certain common themes: book reviews are popular, as are posts on theory, literature and sports. I’m really not sure why the latter is the case. People are also fascinated by international mysteries.
Some of you may have also noticed that there is no longer a comment feature on the blog. Sadly, the spam filter was no longer able to deal with the overwhelming number of bots posting to the site. Sometimes there would be an attack, and I’d receive waves of posts to the blog. These would generate mass e-mail notices, each of which would ask me to approve a particular post. UNC decided to disable the comments feature, which has ended this issue, even though I miss hearing peoples’ comments on individual posts.
Here are the top ten posts, based on the most recent data from Google Analytics:
A book review of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe
Realism and Human Security: a map of U.S. Security Interests
Introduction to International Studies syllabus
A book review of Dave Zirin, Brazil’s Dance with the Devil
A book review of Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach
What is International or Global Studies?
Witches Broom: the mystery of bioterrorism and chocolate in Brazil
Broken Arrow: lost nuclear weapons in Canada
International Studies Quiz
Map of Mexican Drug Cartels
Shawn Smallman, Portland State University