(In)significant Digits

A bit late on this, but a few days ago, CLM received it's 50,000th hit. Yep, a lot of those are for "anal moves," but still, after a year and a half or so on the net, I'm surprised my little piece of self-indulgence has received as much traffic as it has.

Speaking of traffic, as regular readers know, one of the things I do here is post recordings of poems, albeit sporadically. I've been doing this with the assistance of archive.org, an excellent creative commons site that lets users upload content in various media. Visitors to the site can then view/hear site content and can download it. They don't count the people who just look at or listen to content, but they do keep track of the downloads. It's interesting to see what's more or less popular. The runaway hit, of the poems I've posted in audio format, is Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," which at the present moment has been downloaded a whopping 3,097 times since I posted it on January 8 of this year. Next up, a distant second, but surprisingly popular given how contemporary a poem it is, Richard Wilbur's "Security Lights, Key West," with 1047 downloads since September 19, 2006. In third is my reading of "The Ballad of Eskimo Nell," downloaded 591 times since March 4, 2007. A few others have topped 100. So there's supposed to be no audience for poetry, eh.