Owain asked:
"Do (you) bloggers monitor how often your blogs are read and/or commented upon ? If so, please could a few people say how much traffic their blogs get? as a sort of indicative sample?"
Yes, most blogs, at least the more established ones, maintain some kind of tracking service that tells us how many visitors we get, where they come from (both where the individuals are located geographically and what internet source sites they arrive from), which posts are more popular, etc.
While it may seem impossible to follow all the good blogs that are out there, I find it easier than it is to keep up-to-date with listservs (too many emails!). Blog feeds deposit new posts into a feed reader, such as Google Reader, which sorts them into categories, lists them by title, etc. While browsing the posts, or just the titles, one can 'star' them or mark them for future reading, 'share' them (with one's 'followers', etc.). I have my shared links go directly to a place on my blog, for instance. And the best thing is that the posts stay up there indefinitely - they can be searched, don't clog my email server, etc.
Most of the reasons for blogging have already been articulated, and are summarized well by Austin's "I hope we can all appreciate the irony and humor of debating the value of internet blogs in *2011*. (Next topic: "is bipedalism is overrated?")" I trust David's original question was intended provocatively (if not ironically) (and one doesn't have to be pushing 50, like myself, to be a blogger).
The bottom line is that they facilitate and democratize communication. There are many bad blogs out there, but they harm no one, especially if we don't waste time reading them. The better blogs are easy to find and most of them link to other good blogs. Together the stronger links make up the knots and nodes of the networks that (to be a bit too Latourian-Darwinian here) survive, thrive, and help to move public discussion in the right (or wrong) directions.
I've articulated my own reasons for blogging here: http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2009/12/23/a-year-of-immanence/ - the details are out of date, but the arguments hold.
To answer Owain's more specific question: a good blog post on my blog gets a couple of thousand views over a couple of months time (e.g., "Books of the decade in Ecocultural Theory" - http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2010/12/19/books-of-the-decade-in-ecocultural-theory/).
GoogleReader tells you how many subscribers blogs have; that's a good start for finding the more influential and widely read ones.
Cheers,
Adrian
who blogs @ Immanence
http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv
http://immanence.blog.uvm.edu
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