global culture (beta)

Over the last few weeks I’ve been daring to dream about taking the Global Culture project to the next level. For almost a year I’ve been blogging consistently while interest from the community has grown at a good pace, but can’t help but think that I could be doing more with this idea. From the very beginning I knew the blog would be an excellent medium to fine tune the idea and have it cross examined by people with far more knowledge on the subject. I believe that much has been accomplished: some of the ideas have been nurtured while others discarded.

But with so many good ideas being tossed it is a shame to leave their execution to chance. This is why I’ve been running a few experiments:

polls to measure how much interest there is to interact with the blog, which led me to realize that people respond very well to trivia type of questions but hesitate to participate when questions are a bit more complicated
the Global Culturati community which has attracted very few but very passionate people, already engaged in deep discussions about measuring cosmopolitanism and other digressions. The technology is a non-issue [...]

first quarter 2007

Having a growing readership is very important to me. Knowing that people return to the blog after their first visit tells me the discussion continues to be relevant. The curse of technology is that there are many different metrics that attempt to provide an idea of how well a site is doing: pageviews, unique visitors, and a few others; however deciding how to interpret the numbers is critical to decide on future growth strategies. I’ve settled for a combination of 3 groups of readers and a measurement for each one, obtaining the following graph for the performance of this blog since inception:

Feed Subscribers: these are visitors that will keep coming back for more. Since the number varies day to day, I take the maximum number for each month. This accounts for the fact that not all subscribers read their feeds every day, but when they all do, you get the best snapshot of their size. Since they are reading every article I multiply their number by the total number of posts in a given month. This number is equivalent to each one of them visiting the site once to read each article. They [...]