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regarding Dwell Time

Monday,  09/30/24  11:29 AM

EOQ!  Wow, can't even believe we are at the end of another third quarter.  And you know what that means: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years', bam bam bam bam.  And poof another year in the books.  Happens faster and faster every year.

I've been ruminating on the "dwell time" of an online post.  When you post something to a blog, on X, on Facebook, wherever your friends / followers / whomever see it for as long as it is your "current" post.  As soon as you post something else, it gets pushed down the stack a bit, and people are less likely to see it.  This is independent of the relative value or importance or length of the post.  I could post a lengthy diatribe with incredible analysis, and then immediately post something trivial, and that diatribe will become history while the trivia might live on a long time.

Frequent readers will know, I like my blog's "flight" feature, in which it displays what I've posted on this day each year past.  If there's no post for this day, it backs up into recent days to show the most recently posted thing from that year.  So items that had a big time gap after they were posted "last longer" in the daily flights, a most evocative illustration of dwell time in action.

Some blogs (and some social media) have a "keep at top" feature, which artificially boosts dwell time.  I used to do this myself, every once in a while, but haven't for a while.  I have mentally played with the idea of recording inbound traffic (hits) for each post, and sorting archived posts by "max hits".  That would make reader interest a part of dwell time, which would be good.  Presumably if something was of interest to many or externally linked it likely would be of interest to the next reader.

Or I could just keep posting whatever whenever and let the chips fall where they may.  Heh.

{Update: added digression: whoever wanted Google's .webp images? Why do they exist? Someone spent all that time inventing a new image format just so we all have to convert them back to JPEGs. What an incredible waste of time.}

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