As another quarter ends, I am monitoring my online presence to see what sticks with readers. I’m currently active here, on Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Mastodon, Threads and to an extent on Substack and Medium. I can’t easily measure impact on Mastodon or Threads, and I am not systematic enough on Substack or Medium to make it worth checking. But for the others, I can so some analysis.
The top three posts of the last three months on this blog reflect my visibility in discussions of the Hugo Awards. I am pleased with the success of the fourth, which is a summary of a series of posts reflecting a personal obsession. The fifth is on a topic where there is considerable interest in fandom.
1) Where to get the 2026 Hugo finalists
2) Hugo final ballot: Goodreads / LibraryThing / StoryGraph stats
3) Best Related Work eligibility for the Hugo Awards
4) The best known books: the top 100 countries
5) The newly recovered Doctor Who episodes, and the foolish commentary of Gareth Roberts
This blog is mainly about reviews, and my top book review from the whole history of this blog, as visited by readers, was as usual of two books about William Wordsworth and his French daughter. My top review from Q2 was of The Hugo Short Story ballot.
You can check your Bluesky metrics at http://www.blueskypulse.io and while they don’t let you segregate by date, you can drill down and see which posts had the most views, viewers, replies and quotes.
My top Bluesky post of the quarter, on all metrics, was this sad piece of news; I think I combined being early to the story with a good photograph.
The post with the second highest numbers of likes and reposts was a grumble on the day of Keir Starmer’s resignation.
The post with the second highest number of replies was one that was engineered to get a large number of replies.
And the post with the second highest number of quotes, coincidentally also from my birthday, was one that was engineered to get a large number of quotes. (I am amused by the alt text, which I should have checked before posting!)
Now that I have declared myself a “digital creator” on Facebook, I get access to all kinds of useful stats which can be broken down by date.
My most successful Facebook post on all metrics in Q2 – which I think must have somehow slipped into being reposted in a car enthusiast community – was this trivia inspired by a car sticker I spotted while out giving F a driving lesson:
Second highest numbers of views, viewers and impressions was poor Ian Watson again.
Second highest number of engagements, third on views and viewers and fourth on impressions, was a much happier note, which I originally posted as friends only, though in fact it’s substantially the same as the equivalent blog post here so I have made it public now.
Second highest number of comments, also third on impressions and fourth on views and viewers, was another happy post:
Babies are always good material.
My two top LinkedIn posts were about old friends doing new things – and I tagged them, so their friends will have also seen my posts and had a chance to react. The top one celebrated the professional success of a college-era year-mate who got gonged in the King’s Birthday Honours:
The second was a guy who I knew in my Bosnia days, who was running for the US Senate (and eventually got creamed in the primary):
Third was one of my grumpy posts, highlighting a really important piece by Paul Krugman on the myth of European economic decline.
Fourth was another grumpy post with a pithy quote from Cory Doctorow, nailing what I find to be one of the most annoying things about the growth in popularity of LLMs:
And fifth, for once, a happy piece about reading comics.
To finish on the wholesome note that Instagram often is, I simply went through my stream and counted the likes on each photo. My top five posts of the quarter were:
Top, my cousin’s baby (I guess also a cousin) again – Instagram loves babies.
Second, me and my namesake:
Third, a surreal bit of Thursday art:
Fourth, a chap I met in Germany last month:
And fifth, a bug that I found on my jacket as I caught the train one morning.
I wrote only two Substack posts during the quarter, only one of which got a single like. Likewise I only posted twice to Medium, and only one of those two stories was even looked at by other users.
No Mastodon numbers, I’m afraid; the MastoMetrics site doesn’t give me the data that I need. And no Threads either because my engagement there is almost zero.