Political

My ten most read posts of 2010

Here in ascending order are the ten posts which got the most readership on this site during 2010:

10. £50 for a charity of your choice: a charity got a donation as I made a point about the exam result clichés the media still love.

9. A guide to understanding opinion polls: written for our clients at work (MHP Communications), it’s no surprise that during such a heavily polled general election this post did so well for readers.

8. The triple lock: Liberal Democrats and deals with other parties: sometimes providing a few simple facts makes for a post that becomes a widely used reference source.

7. Birds of a feather: how the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Party shapes up: an article I wrote for Parliamentary Brief about the truth behind the clichés about the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Party.

6. BBC leak: Iain Dale to star in Doctor Who: the post itself says it all.

5. Mid-season finale: is that it? Flash Forward episode 10: normally you would expect a TV science-fiction series to have its online coverage dominated by official channels and the large, well-established SF and TV fan sites. However, in the case of Flash Forward the official channels were not search-engine savvy whilst the SF fan sites were fairly quiet. And so this enthusiastic amateur got a slice of the action.

4. Free gift from PoundSaver: legit or not?: when I received this questionable postcard I couldn’t find information about it online – and so put up my post to help inform anyone else in a similar position. The search traffic stats show there were plenty more who got and doubted this offer too.

3. How the internet is changing British politics – and what 2010 will bring: based on a lecture I gave at Nottingham University, this was my ‘mega post’ bringing together most of my pre-polling day thoughts on the internet and British politics. Post-election, the predictions and expectations still look pretty good.

2. Vodafone Sure Signal: customer service calamity meets faulty instructions: a classic lesson in customer service in the online age. Take one unhappy customer and one blog, put together and you have a steady stream of customers Googling for information about your products getting negative information for months and months afterwards.

1. General election and local election timetable, 2010: this beat both the BBC and the Electoral Commission in search results such as “election timetable” for much of the first part of this year, bringing in a large amount of search engine traffic to this site. It is a good example of how regularly updated, early content can win out over big sites that would normally eat you for breakfast in the search stakes. In my case blogging about the topic first, regularly updating the timetable and having a very detailed set of information got better search results than later, shorter information on bigger sites.

However many of these you read, or even if you read none of them but generally stick to reading my posts elsewhere, thanks for your readership and the feedback (especially on Facebook – which seems to have mostly take the place of comments on this site) through the year.  It’s much appreciated and I hope in return my posts have given you something to think about, laugh at or learn from along the way.

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