As of June 9, this blog has had visits from 13 countries including locales as exotic as Uzbekistan, Malaysia and Sweden. However, the only visitors who spent any significant amount of time on the site were from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Japan.
In the United States, the bulk of my traffic (109 unique visits) was from Illinois, specifically the Chicago area. These are likely people in my class or people who frequent my class’ website and came across my blog.
In second place, however, was West Virginia, which is my intended audience. I had 31 unique visits from the mountain state, and those readers spend an average of 2:09 on the site. I also had high readership from the District of Columbia, Michigan, New York and Minnesota, which I can chalk up to friends from out-of-state and people interested in West Virginia or Appalachia who came across the site.
The posts that generated the most interested tended to be the less-serious ones. A post about a high tech beer pong table designed by engineers at West Virginia University was by far the most popular. Second was my video about preventing child abuse in West Virginia, which probably owes some traffic to the subject of the video sending out the link to her friends and family. My post on moonshine was also popular.
After posting a survey on my blog, I received 12 responses via comments and e-mail. Several of them are from or live in West Virginia, several are classmates, and the rest are friends from elsewhere in the country. All are between age 20 and 30.
Of those surveyed, Facebook was by far the most common online group or community. Several also reported they use Yahoo! Groups, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, Jambase, Livejournal, Flickr, Linkedin and Last.fm. From word of mouth, I learned that one of the most common discussion sites (at least for those in southern West Virginia) is Topix, where threads appear about everything from community gossip to politics.
Because my intended community is so large, it’s hard to get a handle on the whole thing. West Virginia isn’t made up of one particular kind of people who get their news and information from one place. The goal of the website is to be a portal to news and information interesting and accessible to students, coal miners, legislators, lawyers, doctors, social workers, hairdressers, tollbooth workers and everyone in between. Now, as far as I can tell, news isn’t necessarily online, but often print newspapers, television and radio.
There is definitely a West Virginia blog community, though. Throughout the term I’ve been reading other blogs from the Mountain State, and trying to link to them frequently. Ultimately, having all the blogs connected would probably be the most useful way to provide information about West Virginia to West Virginians.
