There’s no reason at all, as it happens. And believe it or not, I don’t actually look at the site stats for Futurismic very often, as I prefer to judge the material we publish by the feedback it receives. But as the title suggests, everyone’s doing retrospectives of the year at the moment, and it got me to wondering what the twenty most popular URLs on Futurismic have been in 2009. [image by kevinzhengli]
So, for the sake of my curiosity (and perhaps yours too), here’s the rundown. I’ve removed any blog index pages from the list (ie. the homepage/root URL, and the second and third pages of most recent content) so that it deals only with unique pages of real static content and specific categories.
- A cure for radiation sickness?
- AN EDUCATION OF SCARS by Philip Brewer
- Futurismic fiction submission guidelines
- Futurismic fiction index
- Stephen King, Amazon’s Kindle and the death of publishing as we know it
- Where are the sexy computer games? (this one explains the high click-through on the search terms “sexy games”; heck of a bounce rate there, I’m happy to say)
- World’s largest nuclear explosion video (a classic post from 2007 that still brings people in on a daily basis… maybe more video of big explosions is the way forward?)
- Those hacked climate e-mails: Good scientists, poor conspirators (no prizes for guessing why this one did so well on pageviews…)
- Looming digital dark age
- 2009 – the year the physical bookstore lays down and dies? (written almost a year ago to the day, and oddly prophetic when read in parallel with Seth Godin’s post from a few days ago)
- Futurismic fiction submission form
- WiFi flu (another oldie whose popularity holds up well)
- Dune roleplayers in Second Life squelched by IP takedown notice
- One-way ticket to Mars, redux
- Futurismic columns index
- Nietzsche on science fiction
- Alpha Centauri ’should have an Earth-like planet’ (check the comments for some bizarre Christian nutjobbery)
- SPIDER’S MOON by Lavie Tidhar
- ‘Ghost’ Photos through Quantum Physics (nothing like vaguely-explained speculative science to rake in the spiritual techgnostic demographic, it seems)
- Moore’s Law gets a new lease of life
So, there you have it. It would be interesting to compare these stats to similar data for material read via the RSS feed (which doesn’t show up on Google Analytics because the content is stored on other servers), but sadly I can’t seem to find a way to do that with Feedburner… so we’ll have to do a sort of straw poll!
What was your favourite (or least favourite) post, column or story of 2009 here at Futurismic?