Rick Green from the Courant and I met at my parents farm on Barber Road in the May of 2009. Conversation with Rick Green.

Rick mentioned that blog visitation had diminished noticably at the Courant blogs. At that time the Cafe hadn’t seen much of a slow down. If you look at the graphs of annual visits (blue bars) and page turns (green bars) on the next page you can see that our activity didn’t diminish significantly until 2010 and went slightly lower in 2011. Since we are half way through 2012, I extrapolated both numbers to see where we are headed in 2012. It looks as though we are on the rebound. Perhaps this is due to JTO’s informative contributions and Diane’s insightful comments. This revival is refreshing in light of the demise of all eastern CT blogs that I was aware of and the leading CT blog CTLocalPolitics which bit the dirt under the pressure of litigation. CTLP was sued but the judge ruled in favor of the blog with a Summary Judgement. Now for the most part we are joined by newspaper blogging and the blogs of newspaper reporters who get paid to blog. Last week I actually posted a comment at USAToday telling the world that, like Ann Curry, we were leaving the NBC Nightly and Today show. I’m sure this sent shock-waves through NBC. I personally have been disgusted by their morning stories which ain’t news except for perhaps the first five minutes. CBS isn’t much better. Fire the person who lines up the stories; don’t blame Ann Curry.

I attribute the Cafe’s slowdown to the rise of Facebook.The first graph (click to enlarge) plots the rise of Facebook which grew dramatically from 2009 to the present.  We have about the same number of visitors that we had in 2008 and 2009 but repeat visitors visit less frequently.  We now have an alternative home to go to in Facebook. Becki joined Facebook in November of 2008 and Mariah signed me up in November 2010. I find Facebook to be a good place to keep track and  interact with relatives including my kids and to see the grandkids. When Becki travels, I am able to follow her progress on Facebook. Here at the Cafe, we have bigger fish to fry.