With the beginning of March, 2009 we mark our second year of blogging here at Racism Review and this seemed like a good time to note a few milestones. Given that most blogs fail after not very long, we’re happy to still be in the blogosphere.    We’ve managed to not only survive but succeed on a number of measures, and that success is the result of a collaboration with all of you.   Together, we’ve recently passed some big numbers worth noting, including: 500 posts, 30 blog co-authors, 2,387 total comments.    While Joe and I continue to write the bulk of posts here, we are grateful to the 30 co-authors that blog here and we’re always looking to add people to that roster.   And, we deeply appreciate the people who “de-lurk” to post comments and thus enliven the conversation here.   Of course, we’re thrilled with those of you who come here to read regularly, and so you’ll pardon a little shameless self-congratulations in the form of a Webalizer bar graph:

The upward trend here is the big story.   The trend also looks a little more dramatic because it reflects the time we’ve been with our new host, Liquid Web (long-term readers will recall the horrible server crash of June, 2008 – thanks again to Jon Smajda for his help during that time).   We had our highest month of readership (or, web traffic) so far in February, 2009.   Those numbers look like this:

• Total Hits:   307,470
• Total Files: 239,454

Of course, the Webalizer FAQ recommends subtracting the difference between “hits” and “files” to get a more accurate sense of the traffic.  So, for February that still means approximately 68, 016 unique visitors here.    In terms of daily traffic, the numbers look like this:

• Average Daily Hits: 10,981
• Average Daily Files: 8,551 (difference: 2,430)
• Max Daily Hits:   17,253
• Max Daily Files: 13,803 (difference: 3,450)

Even if we take the smallest number from all the above (2,430),  this is still more readers than the audience for the majority of academic books and substantially more than the readership of most academic journals.    Nicely done everyone that reads, writes and comments here!   And, once again, many thanks to all our readers, commenters and co-authors!