This is a simple and easy two part survey for our readers. We hope to accumulate both the answers of our regular commenteers (richard, rayyan, jennie and bensix all spring to mind) and the numerous lurkers who’ve been reading but we haven’t yet heard from (and there are quite a few of you). Please don’t be shy, we know you’re already busy and lazy so we’ll make this as swift and painless as possible:

• 1) Who are you?
• 2) What do you want from us?

We’re keen on getting this place as satisfiying as possible for our readership and also on creating something as akin to a “community” in our comments section as we can manage. All assistance towards these ends is deeply appreciated.

After intermittent negotiations between the SES team, the following list in our annual exercise in outright pretension has emerged. Note that negotiations were, in fact, still ongoing at the point of the post, so it may suddenly change. But it really needed to go up today:

Funniest Moment: Gordon Brown saving the world.
Saddest Moment: Too many.

Best Political Decision: Mandleson brought back into Cabinet.
Worst Political Decision: David Davis’ resignation.

The Stephen Fry Award for Unbounded Eloquence: William Hague on EU Treaty.
The Prescott Award for Gobbledegook: Sarah Palin.

Best Photograph: David Miliband and the banana.
Worst Photograph: David Miliband and the banana.

Worst Video: McCain’s “Celebrity” Ad.
Best Video: Paris Hilton’s response to McCain’s “Celebrity” Ad.

The Sarah Palin Memorial Award for Political Flops: Sarah Palin.

The Robin Cook Award for Most Principled Action: None this year.
The David Miliband Award for Political Spinelessness: The Israeli government, for timing its slaughters to provide election boosts.

Event of the Year: Obama’s victory across the pond.
Catastrophe of the Year: The recession.

Scribo Ergo Sum Person of the Year: Barack Obama.

We welcome suggestions for almost anything. Particularly best and worst albums of the year, as we just haven’t discussed them yet…

Douglas is presently encountering a minor political crisis (not on an ideological level, fear not) & Ali is presently engaged with web-designing work (…and Uni term still hasn’t finished).  James still has 14 & 1/2 books to get through before the end of the holidays.

Whether any of these situations shall be resolved before Christmas is up in the air, but tomorrow a write-up or two of the Left New Media Forum, chaired by the excellent John McDonnell MP, shall be posted; so fear not.

We appear to have returned. Excpect normal service for at least a month.

Douglas and James leave for university tomorrow; Ali also goes shortly afterwards. Posting may therefore be light for a while - we’ll try our best to keep up, but that may be overly optimistic.

September Statistics

• Absolute unique visitors: 1767
• Pageviews: 3881
• Time on site: 00.02.24
• New / returning visitors: 68.96 / 31.04

An Explanation

September has been our most popular month, on paper.  In reality, James’ brief paragraph on Preachers and Poles gained us rather a lot of attention.  Rather takes the sheen off a best-ever month, doesn’t it?

August Statistics

• Absolute unique visitors: 1120
• Pageviews: 3352
• Time on site: 00.03.00
• New / returning visitors: 26.28 / 43.72

Notes

Down compared to last month, but still our second best.  Considering various holidays and absences from the team for one reason or another, and a general August lull anyway, the readership is encouraging.  But, of course, Scribo Ergo Sum (not because people read) so this stat porn malarkey is a bit of a red-herring anyway.  Doug’s piece on Kingsnorth was the most read item, although the comments thread was alive with talk of the blog’s recent redesign.  Typical.

Also, lots of people seem to be reading only Doug’s blogposts.  We graciously facilitate such selective reading with dedicated author links at the top of the sidebar.  On this reckoning, Doug is well over twice as popular as James, and three times more than Ali.  And about 13 times more popular than Gerry, who has apparently been absent all month.  But it doesn’t do to dwell on popularity, does it?

Keen not to cause grave concern among our avid throng of readers, we can assure you that the Scribo Ergo Sum team is ready to see in the autumn.  A week’s break over the Bank Holiday weekend is arguably not a bad time to take a breather.  James and Doug went to Reading, while Ali was busy working on other web projects of a non-blogging nature.  Gerry’s whereabouts, as usual, are something of a mystery.

We enter the autumn with more of the same: British politics, American election coverage, funny videos, reviews, some Boris bashing, and the odd bit of blogging about blogging.  As ever, the comments section is open for all to use (within reason - we have had to delete just two comments in the last 9 months, both of which were direct threats from known criminals).

James is heading off to Reading today in an effort to obtain a festival ticket at the gate. Douglas is also going there tomorrow, having somehow manged to land himself a job in a socialist beer tent. This means that Ali is, once again, holding the fort.

Normal posting shall resume some time next week but (given how wasted two of our contributers are likely to get over the weekend) no promises as to when.

July Statistics

• Absolute unique visitors: 1586
• Pageviews: 5156
• Time on site: 00.04.03
• New / returning visitors: 60.77 / 39.23

Breakdown

By far our best month since starting the blog in December 2007.  Liberal Conspiracy was the highest referrer, beating Google for the first time.  The most popular pieces of the month were James’ reviews of Marxism 2008.

Note on new design

A few days ago, we changed the design of the website.  The new build includes certain features that readers have requested (such as the option to be e-mailed if a comment thread is updated).  It also load much quicker, and is clearer to read.  The theme was designed and built specifically for Scribo Ergo Sum by our resident webmaster, Ali.  By simple absent-mindedness, the Google Analytics software was not loaded onto the new design for several days.  In other words, our best month ever was actually rather better than it seems.

Note on Stat Porn

Debates rage over the nature and motives of publishing stat porn on a monthly basis.  We have published four bullet-pointed key statistics each month, along with comment on the general running of the blog, each month since we started.  It lets our (growing ;)) readership know where we are, and allows us to take stock in a single “housekeeping” message once a month instead of drip-feeding belly-fluff inspection throughout the year.