Mark Liberman at Language Log has some nice words to say today about phonoloblog. It’s been just two days since I announced the existence of phonoloblog on Language Log, and already the number of site visits has jumped from a small handful a day (about 70% of them by yours truly) to an average of 66 a day (as of this writing). This is nowhere near Language Log’s current average of 1,382 site visits a day and we’ll probably never really catch up, but it’s a promising leap.

Even more interesting to me are the time zone, OS, and domain/organization stats:

• Time zone. Before my announcement, about 90% of the site’s hits came from UTC-8 (the West Coast — mostly because of me, obviously). Now that’s down to about 20%, and UTC-5 (the East Coast) is almost at 40%. The rest of the country’s time zones account for only about 10% more, so that means that at least 30% of the site’s hits come from elsewhere in the world.
• OS. Used to be over 70% “Macintosh MacPPC”, now down to 23%. The various flavors of Windows add up to 65%; Linux and FreeBSD together account for the remaining 12%.
• Domain/organization. I do a lot of blogging from home, so my ISP (pacbell.net) was way up there. Now it’s at only 4%, and .net addresses altogether account for only 38%.

But the best part has been the response. I haven’t exactly been flooded with e-mail or anything like that (thank goodness; I barely have time to blog), but all the messages I’ve gotten have been friendly, helpful, encouraging, etc. A number of people wrote with helpful suggestions concerning my post about phonetic transcription — as you can see from the updates I’ve made to that post — and an exchange with two people helped me to solve an XML parsing error that phonoloblog’s RSS link was generating. (Note: it somehow had to do with the fact that I had some IPA in a post’s title; the work-around is to avoid that.)

So welcome to phonoloblog. I hope you enjoy it even just half as much as I am.

[Update: I forgot to mention that at the time I wrote this post, the average length of a visit to phonoloblog was about the same as the average length of a visit to Language Log — a little over 4 minutes. Right now (8/3/2004, 11:45-or-so pm PDT), Language Log is still at an average of 4:11 and we’ve dropped down to 3:39 … so maybe I’ll just stay on a little longer to bring that up a bit. ;-)]