2025: The year in review – Part 2: Blogging

2025 was a shade less than spectacular on the blogging front; our post frequency fell to around two per month, and the average post was a mere 168.1 words long. As for content, politics, sport, and culture have remained broadly our main themes, though I’d hesitate to claim that we’d covered anything in particular depth.

Anyway, here are our top ten posts by traffic in the last 12 months; as has been the pattern for the last few years most of them are from the archive:

1. That gum you like is going to come back in style
2. Superbowl LIX prediction
3. Pascal’s new wager
4. Leap of imagination
5. Change don’t come easy
6. How ’bout them Cubs?
7. Eve of destruction
8. World Series 2025 prediction
9. Futurama
10. Premature insurrection

My personal favourites of this year’s output:

• David Lynch RIP
• Longitudinal Trumpism
• Brian Wilson RIP
• Pascal’s new wager
• AI eternal
• Thoughts on the Gaza ceasefire

In a rather surprising development, the US has overtaken the UK as the source of most of our traffic, and our general global appeal seems to have expanded a little too, though it’s still well below the 100+ tally of nations we used to reach around a decade ago. Here are the top ten for this year:

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. India
4. Singapore
5. China
6. Germany
7. Portugal
8. Canada
9. Bangladesh
10. France

Interestingly, ChatGPT has come from nowhere to be, by a large margin, our number one source of referrals; the fact that the preeminent AI agent seems to regard this blog as a reliable source of information only intensifies my suspicion that the technology is ludicrously over-hyped.

I usually conclude my last post of the year by lamenting my poor productivity, and promising to do better in the months ahead, but this time around I’m going to cut myself a little slack. With the world the way it is I feel I’m doing well to maintain an old-school, flesh-and-blood human presence in the sea of AI slop.

So I’ll raise a glass to wish a happy New Year to all our readers, and may it bring you good health and good fortune.