Dry Ice Factory

This is basically navel-gazing, but I guess that's what I do.

So on Monday I got something I've long coveted: a link to my film blog from one of my favorite film bloggers. I think this is the first time I've actually sent a direct link to one of my blog posts to a favorite blogger, although when I comment on other film blogs, I always give the URL to my site as part of my signature. I don't know whether anyone has ever followed one of those signature links, but I always figured an actual link by another blogger would mean more to a casual reader.

So Google Analytics tells me I've had exactly six people arrive at my site via dvdtalk.com, where this link was posted. Meanwhile on Wednesday I had the biggest spike of visitors I've ever had: 224. Another 74 visited the next day. (Typically I get somewhere between 20 and 40 visitors in a single day. I think 79 was my previous daily high.) Almost all of these visitors looked at my post about Madam Satan. Google Analytics tells me that most of this traffic came via Facebook, although it doesn't tell me whose Facebook in particular. Probably somebody found the post via Google and then posted a link to Facebook.

The only point, really, is that I'm amused that the coveted link has done less to drive traffic to my site than a random Google search. For the most part the biggest spikes in interest in a specific post have been for current or contemporary films, often right after the DVD is released, but there's always a low level interest in the posts about older films like Madam Satan. This is the first time interest in an older film has gone through the roof. Granted that my roof is pretty low!

Tim Lucas, who publishes the film magazine Video Watchdog, has blogged about whether blogs are killing print magazines. It's interesting to see this discussion happening outside of SF fandom, particularly when his references to fanzines are clearly to non-fannish fanzines (i.e., movie fanzines). Even so, some of the comments apply across the border as well: "Michael Weldon is blaming rising costs of paper, postage and gas for PSYCHOTRONIC going under, but surely irregularity of publication was also a factor; after his first issue was published in 1989, he produced only 40 more after nearly 18 years in business. That's an average of slightly more than two issues per year, which is a good rate for a fanzine, but hardly a frequency that can sustain a business or a living."

Or perhaps even moreso: "Blogging has certainly made me more attentive to what other bloggers are doing and the Blog-A-Thons that sometimes occur are a testimonial to the proposal that, to some extent, bloggers are writing for each other -- not unlike the days when people would start a fanzine for the sole purpose of trading with another fanzine publishers."

An interesting parallax view from a different fandom.