Crooked Timber’s Greatest Hits

In the course of the recent “great database fiasco”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002042.html, I took a look at the history of traffic to this site. The AWStats program gave me a the number of unique visitors for every day from our launch last July through to June 16th this year. I was interested in which posts had made the biggest splashes. Now, if I just looked at the posts that got the greatest number of visitors, there would be a bias towards posts from later in the year, because we get far more visitors these days than six or ten months ago. How can we get a fair estimate?

It’s possible to statistically “decompose”:http://www.jos.nu/Articles/abstract.asp?article=613 a time series into three components. First, there’s the _seasonal_ component: in this case, it’s the regular ups and downs caused by what day of the week it is. Generally, traffic will dip every weekend, regardless of how many visitors we’re getting on average. The average number of visitors from week to week net of the seasonal ups and downs is the second, _trend_ component. This has grown consistently over the year. And finally there’s the _remainder_ or “irregular” component, which is whatever spikes and dips are left over once seasonal fluctuations and the underlying trend are accounted for.

The nice picture above shows CT’s unique daily visitor series decomposed in this way, with the raw data at the top and the three components underneath. (You can also get this figure as a “higher quality PDF file”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/ct-decomposition.pdf [only 34k].) As you can see, the trend is one of healthy growth. These days we typically get about seven to nine thousand unique visitors a day. But what about those spikes in the lowest panel? Which posts brought in the crowds? *Read on* for the Top 10 list. The punchline is that, even though we’re known for being a bunch of “pointy-headed academics”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/week_2004_01_25.html#002424, the out-of-the-ballpark hitters on our roster are not the ones with Ph.Ds.

Before counting down through the list, I should make an *Honorable Mention* of two posts that are just outside the top 10 and have nothing to choose between them in terms of impact. “Stories”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000426.html, by Ted, took on the controversy about MeCHA and Cruz Bustamente (remember him?). And “Bats Aren’t Bugs”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001810.html, by John Holbo, showed that despite his self-conception as an empirically-driven pragmatist, “Steven Den Beste”:http://www.denbeste.nu/ is in fact the Hegel of the blogosphere.

*Crooked Timber’s Greatest Hits*
*10*. “Grrr”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000801.html, by Ted. Ted reproduces an essay about the meaning of the September 11th attacks that itself might have a further CT connection.

*9*. “DC 5/11: Day of Inconvenience”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001483.html, by Ted. Speculating about what the President’s testimony (“I only plan to talk for an hour, that’s all you’re getting”) before the September 11th commission would be like.

*8*. “Books I Did Not Read This Year”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001011.html, by Kieran. A Top 10 list makes the Top 10 list. Probably got in because it got a relatively large number of hits during the relatively quiet week before Christmas.

*7*. “Left-Wing Conspirators”:http://crookedtimber.henryfarrell.net/archives/001337.html, by Kieran. The bizarre bedfellows in David Horowitz’s database of Left Wingers.

*6*. “Air MILES!!!!”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001614.html, by Daniel. Dsquared satisfies all your Friedman BS-detection and debunking needs. One day Daniel really is going to run into Tom in a frequent flyer lounge somewhere. I hope they are both drunk when it happens.

*5*. “Bright is as Bright Does”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000239.html, by Kieran. Brights are the MENSA dweebs of the new century. This makes the list because it was the first CT post to get a lot of coverage after we launched.

*4*. “Why I don’t like Mickey Kaus”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001783.html, by Ted. Why Ted doesn’t like Mickey Kaus. It’s a good reason, too.

*3*. “All Gone to Look for America”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001904.html, by Daniel. “There used to be a shining city on a hill … what the hell happened to it?” Indeed. As someone might say.

*2*. “Punk the National Review”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001255.html, by Ted. The NRO’s practice of publishing anonymous letters is killed. Dead. By Ted. You thought it was impossible to force Jonah Goldberg to raise his standards, but all that’s really impossible is getting him to admit that you did.

*1*. “Tomorrow’s Kerry-bashing Today”:http://crookedtimber.henryfarrell.net/archives/002020.html, by Ted. Looking into future misdirection and smears about the Kerry campaign. Coming soon to pundits everywhere, seen here first.

So the pattern is pretty clear: On this measure, Ted and Dsquared bring in the punters. Daniel mobilizes the foreign policy crowd and Ted has a terrific knack of capturing the left _zeitgeist_ in U.S. politics. If I were a Democratic party strategist I would consider hiring Ted. (As a consultant only, please: we want to keep him.)

Of course, the method I used isn’t the only way to make a list like this. Some posts are slow burners, attracting sustained attention over a longer time period. If we look at the number of visitors posts get once they are up, the posts in the top-10 list still dominate but some of the slow-burners also come to the fore. These include:

* “ETA/Al Qaeda: Who did it?”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001509.html by Maria.

* “Singer vs Bush”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001297.html by Brian.

* “Gambling with the Devil”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000763.html by Chris.

* “Conservatives in Academia”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001304.html by Kieran.

* “Susan Moller Okin”:http://crookedtimber.henryfarrell.net/archives/001486.html by Harry.

* “Some Unsolicited Advice for John Kerry”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001454.html by John Quiggin.

I still like the time-series decomposition, though, in part because I get to produce a nice graph but mostly because it gives me an extra reason to like CT: Crooked Timber has a bunch of literate academics from all over the world who do high-quality research in the social sciences and humanities and who write lots of interesting stuff — but the great thing is, they aren’t even our most popular draws.