Why you come here
I have between thirty and forty readers via Feedburner and eleven of you took my survey (now closed). What the results tell me is that most of you come here to read about topics pertaining to religion. I asked you to tell me if you have read, commented, or linked to a topic in a variety of categories. You can see the full survey results at this Google Spreadsheet. Some highlights are below the fold.The top three categories were religion, newsworthy/politics, GLBT/sexuality. Of these, though, by far the most interactive is religion (82% of you will comment on those posts). Philosophy–the topic that I tend to write about most often (182 entries compared to 104 in “religion”) is the fourth most popular, at 81% of people reading. About half of you who read my philosophy posts will comment.
By far the least popular category is “reference/quotes”, turning only four of your heads for reading (and no one wants to comment or link on those). They’re probably most useful for me, as a sort of intellectual history. My guess is my writing is least engaging on those in comparison to philosophy and religion problems or stories.
UU and Education categories were in the middle of the pack–fairly popular (70-80% of you read them) and regularly commented (about a third of those who read comment).
The sample size is small, like my readership, but the survey confirmed my hunch: if I want to get some good discussion going here, talk about religion. If I want to kill the conversation, post some summaries of philosophy articles.
This doesn’t mean I won’t keep on with those postings, but it does mean I may rethink how I write about philosophy and demonstrate its applicability to other topics.