The Pietist Schoolman

In the past couple of months, WordPress (the blogging service that hosts The Pietist Schoolman) has introduced some new metrics that help us bloggers better understand how we’re being received. My favorite is a breakdown of the countries where my readers are located. The top four, unsurprisingly, are English-speaking nations:

1. United States (76% of all views)  /  2. United Kingdom (5.5%)  /  3. Canada (2.4%)  /  4. Australia (1.3%)

Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t break things down further so that you can see which posts are most popular in each country. But I suspect that my various posts on World War I have drawn much of the interest from Britain and its former dominions. (I can’t recall writing much more about Australian history than when I posted about Gallipoli being my favorite WWI film and when I reflected on seeing some graves of Australian soldiers who fell on the Western Front.)

But then the remainder of the top ten list gets more interesting:

5. Germany  /  6. Spain  /  7. India  /  8. France  /  9. Brazil  /  10. The Philippines

Germany and France: well, I’ve posted quite a bit about those countries’ histories, particularly — but not solely — with regard to the two world wars. Brazil: its national anthem was a finalist in last fall’s exercise in ranking the best national anthems (and my students received some gentle push-back from Brazilians thinking their anthem had gone underappreciated). India: I never did come back to the Mark Noll/Carolyn Nystrom book, Clouds of Witnesses, as it entered its chapters on India, so…

Spain and the Philippines? Got me – perhaps Emilie Griffin is right and Pietism is less of a Protestant phenomenon than I’d assumed.

Those who know me will be totally unsurprised that I’m not only interested in data like this, but went ahead and recalculated page views on a per capita basis. The USA still comes out ahead, and the UK, Australia, and Canada are still high, but (omitting countries like Iceland, Malta, and the Bahamas whose tiny populations skew the results) the top ten also includes countries like New Zealand (probably there for the same reasons as Australia, plus one token mention of Flight of the Conchords), Uruguay (also in the national anthems discussion), and the Netherlands (a mystery except that Dutch people are just clearly very well read).

Altogether, I’ve had people in over 90 countries take at least a glance at this blog. Which is deeply cool, and humbling.

But, depending on how you count certain territories, that leaves 100-150 others untouched by this blog. That’s hardly a crisis for any of those nations, but it makes me want to invest some blogging time in trying to draw interest from the following places (the five most populous countries without a single page view as of this morning): Iran, the Congo, Myanmar, Algeria, and Iraq.

Myanmar’s going to be a tough nut to crack; befitting a country only beginning to experience some measure of democratization and facing significant economic challenges, the Internet is used by only 0.2% of its population. War-torn Iraq and Congo will also be challenging, with 0.3% and 1.3% Internet penetration, respectively. (Both figures according to this website that measures such things.)

But by this time next year, I hope to be saying hello to regular Pietist Schoolman readers from Algiers to Tehran, Kinshasa to Baghdad, and Yangon to St. Paul.