The Morning Brew

In keeping with Morning Brew tradition, the 31st December sees me putting together some statistics about the content of The Morning Brew over the past year. This year is no different, and I’ve followed the format (and statistics) from last year’s post.

Website and Feed Traffic

This year The Morning Brew has opened its doors to 236,658 visits, in what has been a very consistent year in terms of visits. This year’s only major spike occurred on the 10th March when Scott Hanselman gave The Brew a plug on Twitter. Grows this year can be considered to be steady, with the baseline number of visitors on a publication day rising by 200 visits across the year.

Once again the returning visitors and recency statistics are very encouraging with a peak around the 100 visits in the year mark, and large numbers of visitors checking the site on a daily basis.

Returning Users

Similar steady growth has been seen in RSS Subscriber figures too with this year breaking through the 6000 barrier.

The Content

This year there have been 4090 links included in The Morning Brew, spread across our three standard headings of Software, Information and Community and the special feature categories used for major events with lots of posts. This year these included:

• DDD8
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate
• IE9
• OData
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release
• ASP.NET MVC3 Preview
• ASP.NET Security Vulnerability
• Windows Phone 7 Release
• C#5 Async CTP and PDC2010

Once again, the Information category leads the way with the number of links, with software seeing a small increase on last year, however the community section has almost doubled in number of links, mostly down to my connecting with more of the UK .NET community.

Once again, the Morning Brew has been pulled together from over 500 RSS feeds, some of which being ‘firehose’ feeds from aggregate and search sites. This has resulted in around 100,000 RSS items which have been reviewed for inclusion, along with links mentioned on Twitter and suggestions from readers.

Blogs vs Number of Links

Similarity to last year continues in the number of blogs linked to with over 550 distinct blogging sites being included and 1200 distinct blogs being linked to. As usual the long tail effect has been in effect with the vast majority of blogs having only 1 or 2 links. The Big .NET blogging sites once again featured heavily with this year’s top 10 being:

1. blogs.MSDN.com – 930 Links
2. weblogs.asp.net – 365 Links
3. GeeksWithBlogs.NET – 167 Links
4. Los Techies – 136 Links
5. CodeBetter – 128 Links
6. Devlicio.us – 91 Links
7. MSMVPs.com – 48 Links
8. Elegant Code – 43 Links
9. blogs.microsoft.co.il – 37 Links
10. Simple Talk – 28Links

The Individual Blogger chart for this year looks like this:

1. Oren Eini AKA Ayende – 99 Links
2. Greg Duncan – 90 Links
3. Scott Guthrie – 84 Links
4. Eric Lippert – 69 Links
5. Mike Hadlow – 61 Links
6. Scott Hanselman – 59 Links
7. Phil Haack – 57 Links
8. Gunnar Piepman – 46 Links
9. Rob Ashton – 45 Links
10. Matthew Podwysocki – 44 Links
11. Internet Explorer – 42 Links
12. Derick Bailey – 40 Links
13. Jimmy Bogard – 40 Links
14. Eric Nelson – 35 Links
15. Jon Skeet – 34 Links
16. Davy Brion – 34 Links
17. Jon Sonmez – 30 Links
18. Miguel de Icaza – 27 Links
19. Mike Taulty – 27 Links
20. Mark Needham – 27 Links

Attempting to work out a pattern for the type of topics that have been included in this year’s posts reveals Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 joining ASP.NET MVC and C# as major topics on the blog.

Number of links per Post

The average number of links per post has remained roughly constant throughout the year, with an average of 16 links per post. Notable high link days were 9th August (Morning Brew #660) which featured the discussions of the future of the Iron* projects along with a healthy software section, 1st June (Morning Brew #611) a large post Public Holiday edition, and 6th April (Morning Brew #573 the bumper post Easter edition.

The Final Word

The key word to describe this year has been consistency – The Morning Brew readership has continued to grow steadily, and I’ve managed to keep up the publishing schedule of the previous years. On a personal level this year has been a good one – recieving an ASP.NET MVP award in April (announced in Morning Brew #573) and undertaking the delivery of my first major conference session at DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Southwest being the highlights.

All that remains is to wish you all thanks for your continued readership, and to wish you a happy and healthy new Year.

Other 2010/2011 Wrap up and forecast posts:

• Michael Crump
• Phil Haack
• J.D Meier
• Andrew Stopford
• Gill Cleeren

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