TaxProf (Paul Caron) reports on the most-trafficked law professor blogs, of those that have public SiteMeter rankings. The five top blogs by visitor counts (all numbers are total for 2008) are:
| Visitors | PageViews | ||
| 1 | Instapundit | 98,787,026 | 103,482,564 |
| 2 | HughHewitt | 14,789,189 | 17,915,768 |
| 3 | VolokhConspiracy | 10,461,075 | 14,324,528 |
| 4 | Althouse | 6,245,764 | 11,055,083 |
| 5 | TaxProfBlog | 2,403,737 | 3,368,026 |
My question: What are the most-trafficked blogs written by academics, not limiting ourselves to law professors (and working in, if possible, people who have public counters but not SiteMeter)? I should note that I'm primarily interested in academic-themed content, but that's much harder to define and measure than the affiliation of the authors, so academic-written blogs are the best proxy I can think of.
UPDATE: A commenter points to Prof P.Z. Myers' Pharyngula science blog, which had about 18 million visitors last year, and the academic linguists' group blog Language Log (one of my favorite blogs), which had about 3.2 million visitors last year. Keep such data coming, folks!
If "law blogs run by embarrassing morons" were excluded, Volokh would come in at a cool # 1, and TaxProf at # 2.
Wasn't it obvious from the superior analytical and reasoning skills on display at his blog?
And I thought some of my liberal professors were bad.
Seriously, I hope the comments here don't get like those at Balkinization, which generally devolve into name-calling.
Was up for Best Large Blog Award. Lost to either Pandas or Jesus. Forget which one.
wm13, you are an ignorant idiot, and so's your momma!
Way to keep it civil.
So to be "civil" I should not only respect my fellow commenters, but everyone else in the world?
The National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation was yesterday, wasn't it? Time to move on!
Reynolds, Hewitt, and Althouse are contemptible hacks, and widely held to be so by a great many people. I do not see why I should pretend otherwise.
Anyone who has a similar opinion of me is welcome to express it (and usually does, come to think of it).
www.libertyandpower.org. That ought to do it.
pharyngula = 39,436,121 / 55,240 per day / 0:10 min:sec per visit
languagelog = 10,537,189 / 11,163 per day / 2:32 min:sec per visit
Yeah, that pretty much guarantees that it doesn't meet the "most-trafficked" criterion.
Here's a thought. Rather than forwarding a dismissive sneer and nothing more, try forwarding a cogent thought, perhaps even consider stringing a few together. Since you're referring to an academic whose policies and thinking you disagree with, a thoughtful, more cogent approach would seem apropos, no? Otherwise, you're emulating what you imagine yourself to be disdainful of.
Then again, forwarding a specific, cogent line of reasoning would have the disadvantage of exposing your own thinking to subsequent review.
Wouldn't mention it if the phenomena in question weren't so common, even pervasive.
Edge of the American West is probably the fastest-growing cocooned-leftist, historio-philosophical academic group blog. It desperately needs an injection of thoughtful outsiders—especially legally-, logically- and mathematically- inclined outsiders…
Seriously, I hope the comments here don't get like those at Balkinization, which generally devolve into name-calling."
We are fortunate that "Bart" visits here only rarely.
I'm a lawyer at a law firm who has taught some law school classes on an adjunct basis. If I had a blog, would that be a "law professor blog?"
If you have a comment about spelling, typos, or format errors, please e-mail the poster directly rather than posting a comment.
Comment Policy: We reserve the right to edit or delete comments, and in extreme cases to ban commenters, at our discretion. Comments must be relevant and civil (and, especially, free of name-calling). We think of comment threads like dinner parties at our homes. If you make the party unpleasant for us or for others, we'd rather you went elsewhere. We're happy to see a wide range of viewpoints, but we want all of them to be expressed as politely as possible.
We realize that such a comment policy can never be evenly enforced, because we can't possibly monitor every comment equally well. Hundreds of comments are posted every day here, and we don't read them all. Those we read, we read with different degrees of attention, and in different moods. We try to be fair, but we make no promises.
And remember, it's a big Internet. If you think we were mistaken in removing your post (or, in extreme cases, in removing you) -- or if you prefer a more free-for-all approach -- there are surely plenty of ways you can still get your views out.