Blog 2.0

An overview

So, what would Mountain State Matters look like if neither time nor money was an object?

Mountain State Matters 2.0 would be different from the first version. My mission statement would remain the same: to provide news, commentary and opinions on issues that are important to the state. However, I would ultimately like to see it as a site with several contributors, in order to gather news about a variety of different subjects and ensure different opinions.

My community remains people who are interested in West Virginia and the state’s culture, whether or not they currently live there. By adding on other contributors, the blog could become more of an overall West Virginia news source, picking and posting the state’s most interesting news. This wouldn’t be to the exclusion of commentary; the site’s most popular pieces have been the ones that are either very opinionated or about softer, non-newsy issues.

As of June 9, 2008, about one-third of my traffic is from the Chicago area, where I currently live. Of the remaining two-thirds, a good chunk of it is from West Virginia, and the rest is from all over the country and the world. My community is comprised of three main groups: my friends and classmates, those interested in West Virginia/Appalachian issues and culture, and those who ended up on my page after a random Google search Sometimes these groups overlap.

Although at first all of my traffic was direct or referred from our class blog, it morphed into a fairly equal three-way tie. 34.28% of my traffic was direct (meaning the user typed my URL into their web browser), 38.05% was referred (meaning the user clicked on a link on another page and was transported to my website) and 27.67% of my traffic found the page after a search. Of these searches, the vast majority were through Google.