There’s a pattern to my visitor stats, as you can see. April appears to be a busy month. In part this can be explained by the cycle of the academic year: busy in the autumn (fall); quiet in December; busy in the spring; quiet in the summer.
Raw statistics aren’t very interesting, and they’re not a justification for a blog like this. I’d write for no readers because it’s a useful adjunct to my teaching. But Google PageRank is a key measure, so it’s worth noting that Alex got up and running and achieved a similar PageRank of 5/10 within three months.
Here’s a direct comparison with a year ago on PR Studies:
April 2006: 25 posts; 46 comments;
April 2005: 13 posts; 8 comments.
Though the visitor numbers are similar, I’d suggest this shows I’m ‘getting with the converstation’ much better this year. (Other commentators helpfully suggested that the decline in visitors in May and June last year coincided with the widespread adoption of RSS). Given all these variables, is there any value to measurement and which stats do you care about?
UPDATE: Trevor Cook’s approach is to list his most visited posts for the month. Excellent.
PR Studies 
Although I do check all my stats (call me vain) I tend to take precedence with my feed subscribers.
Probably because I know people have taken the time to physically subscribe, so there’s a chance that they could actually be reading what I write, which is always good.
Oh, I like to count how many comments I’ve received too.
Sidenote: Do you have an idea of how many people are subscribed to this blog Richard? In Bloglines alone you have 147. The popularity of Bloglines usually means it makes up one third of total subscribers, so I’m guessing about 450. Which is pretty amazing!
I tell a lie. It could be considerably more.
Good advice. Memo to self: catch up with feeds. Get up to speed with RSS, Atom, OPML… Isn’t it great that there’s all this technology to make life simpler!