[Pops]

#100,000 With a Bullet!

That little blip on the left is our traffic after the the BP Spill, the blip on the right is the last month...

Traffic rank for peakoil.com:
Traffic Rank Change
1 month 108,469 -57,016
3 month 150,434 -34,088

Now you might think that being one of the the top 100,000 websites in the world aint' no big deal, except that there are over 175,000,000 active sites on the net!


That puts us in the .01% Baby!

[Plantagenet]

Congrats to you, Pops.

Thanks for all your volunteer work moderatin' and starting interesting threads and keeping this site going.

I've got a feeling that "Peak Oil" (and peakoil.com) are going to get a great deal more attention as this very interesting year rolls on.

[Pops]

Thanks Plant, congratulations to us all.

It really is the effort of the membership that makes the site interesting and informative. Only a small fraction of readers ever join and only a fraction of them ever post. It's easy to forget that we have an audience and are basically making up content each time we post.

Hopefully we can take advantage of the spike in readership to entice some lurkers to speak up.

Any takers?
:^)

[mmasters]

Thanks Plant, congratulations to us all.

It really is the effort of the membership that makes the site interesting and informative. Only a small fraction of readers ever join and only a fraction of them ever post. It's easy to forget that we have an audience and are basically making up content each time we post.

Hopefully we can take advantage of the spike in readership to entice some lurkers to speak up.

Any takers?
:^)

Perhaps a more modern message board would help, the board looks so vintage!

[IndigoMoon]

I've been around awhile & lurk more than I post. Getting ripped without provocation will do that though. I have noticed in various threads, on more than one occasion, where a poster will get torn to shreds. Not everyone here has the same skill sets or intelligence. People come here to learn and end up getting ostracized. It really is no wonder that there is only a handful who do actively post.

[Rod_Cloutier]

What happened in the last month to cause such a jump in general interest?

The deepwater horizon was a major disaster, worldwide news. What could it be that has changed recently? The Baltic dry index falling off a cliff? A possible war with Iran? Cid's January methane mixing chart? Something else?

What is the most viewed thread here from the last month??

[JohnRM]

In general, I'm seeing a real spike the number of conversations involving possible calamity for human civilization. People are feeling uneasy and a huge part of that is the high cost of petroleum. 'Peak oil' is a phrase that comes to the lips of just about anyone who talks about the rising cost of oil and when you do a search, this website is among the first to come up, so...

Hopefully, more people start preparing. That will mean an easy transition.

[SeaGypsy]

What happened in the last month to cause such a jump in general interest?

The deepwater horizon was a major disaster, worldwide news. What could it be that has changed recently? The Baltic dry index falling off a cliff? A possible war with Iran? Cid's January methane mixing chart? Something else?

What is the most viewed thread here from the last month??

Every time there is a crisis resulting in a spike in oil prices, there is a corresponding jump in people trying to 'figure out' what's really up. A good thing.

I've been around awhile & lurk more than I post. Getting ripped without provocation will do that though. I have noticed in various threads, on more than one occasion, where a poster will get torn to shreds. Not everyone here has the same skill sets or intelligence. People come here to learn and end up getting ostracized. It really is no wonder that there is only a handful who do actively post.

This is a really tricky issue. On one hand when things are 'quiet' the site narrows down to a fairly tiny bunch of active posters. When things pick up again, there is a lag before 'crisis regulars' get posting, probably because when they come back they have a fair bit of reading to do. On the other, every cycle brings newbie posters of a mostly predictable set of stereotypes. This makes everyone's job here a lot harder. The moderators have to try to deal fairly with posters under the CoC. They have an agenda to keep the site informative, entertaining and balanced. They don't want a bunch of drivel spilled all over these pages. A very few of the moderators do the bulk of the work. A very few posters are steady through the cycles. Many (like your's truly) change like the wind.

What we do have in common is the belief that what we are talking about here is the key issue of our times. That peak oil will become one of the most talked about subjects of our time. That these facts warrant attention and respect.

The most common mistakes I see in new posters here:

1/ making it totally obvious they are in peak oil kindergarten, in which case what can anyone say except to suggest some learning mechanism?

2/ dogging regular posters as if they know them frrom reading a few dozen posts. I cop this one a lot, due to my rapid changes of life and perspective. Regulars here over the last few years know me well and I feel I know many of them reasonably well also. There is a core respect here between opposing viewpoints most of the time, which is very refreshing when compared to many related sites.

Over time this will become one of the most important sites on the net.
The more intelligent, contrasting views, lifestyle responses and concepts usefull towards discussion of what is happening the better for the site, the regulars (who there hopefully will be many many more of) and readers/ besides making our poor moderators lives easier.

[vtsnowedin]

They are running a new show on NatGeo channel called Doomsday preppers. I expect we will get mentioned there and it will generate another flood of interest. I wonder if the producers of the show have someone trolling here looking for episode ideas?? They admit to using Twitter for input. The shows website shows they are going through all the popular doom senerios and tease peok oil saying conventional crude peaked in 06 as per IEA.
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/c ... -preppers/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... y-outlook/

[Pops]

What happened in the last month to cause such a jump in general interest?

There is that VT, and there have also been several articles in "serious" peer-reviewed journals lately, Science, Energy and Nature. I'm surprised we haven't seen them mentioned here.
Here are Gail Tyverberg's reviews

And of course, every news outlet is talking about a surge in gas prices - already at a record high for this time of year, not to mention Iran spouting blah–BlaH BLAH!

The proverbial perfect storm just made for a spike in referrals. At the same time the number of views we get from search are really low, 15% or 20% it used to be 50%+. That tells me readers already know we're here and just type in the name.

[Pops]

I've been around awhile & lurk more than I post. Getting ripped without provocation will do that though. I have noticed in various threads, on more than one occasion, where a poster will get torn to shreds. Not everyone here has the same skill sets or intelligence. People come here to learn and end up getting ostracized. It really is no wonder that there is only a handful who do actively post.

We're going to fix that, Moon.

Thanks for speaking up

.

[PrestonSturges]

Does that count filter out the web crawlers?

[IndigoMoon]

I've been around awhile & lurk more than I post. Getting ripped without provocation will do that though. I have noticed in various threads, on more than one occasion, where a poster will get torn to shreds. Not everyone here has the same skill sets or intelligence. People come here to learn and end up getting ostracized. It really is no wonder that there is only a handful who do actively post.

We're going to fix that, Moon.

Thanks for speaking up

.

It's the posters who are afraid to post more that I worry about. I don't let it bother me personally- I keep my big girl pants on and ready
But thank you Pops. I'm sure if lurkers are reading this, there are a few breathing a sigh of relief.