TYWKIWDBI welcomes our 500th Google follower

This morning, Swan-pr became the 500th person to follow this blog using Google Friend Connect.  We've been watching this phenomenon with some interest, trying to figure out what it all means.  The graph above shows the number of people following this blog at about 2-week intervals for about the past year.  As far as I can tell, there has been no particular event that has driven people here - just a gradual accretion, probably through word of mouth, email recommendations to friends, casual encounters after Google searches - whatever.

This apparent growth stands in a bit of contrast to the data from Google Analytics, which shows that the number of visits to TYWKIWDBI and the number of pageviews stopped increasing about a year ago and has been about constant since then.  Apparently browsing via a Google Reader doesn't register as "traffic," which must be a source of some annoyance to commercial blogs; for this one it doesn't have any practical effect.

When I started getting "followers," I used to check their profiles and look at their blogs.  This is becoming increasingly impractical, but I do have to say that some of you have quite interesting (and rather odd...) blogs of your own and some totally bizarre ones that you follow.

Very interesting.