Traffic
I think I neglected to mention here that traffic at SH has gone way up since the Hugo announcement. (All of the following numbers refer only to page requests for the Contents page, which is the only thing we track on Nedstat.) According to the Nedstat stats pages, an hour or two after the announcement we were getting slightly higher than usual traffic, most of it from the UK (where it was morning). When I got up the next morning, about 45% of our traffic was being referred from various places the Hugo ballot had been posted, mostly at Locus Online. By noonish, it was something like 66%, quite a bit of which was coming from Sci Fi Wire (the daily-news segment of scifi.com). By midafternoon Friday, about 85% of our traffic was coming from Hugo listings; then the next morning the news hit Slashdot, and all day Saturday we were getting indirect traffic from that. (Slashdot readers going to the official Hugo announcement and following the link from it to us.) Things are calming down a bit; still significantly higher than usual, but not nearly yesterday's levels. (But over half of our traffic is still coming from Hugo listings at the moment.)
But the cool thing is that there are also a bunch of smaller sites that are posting Hugo listings—often sites I've never heard of before. Some of the sites that we've gotten traffic from include:
- scifidimensions (interviews, reviews, original fiction (no pay))
- The Alien Online (news, reviews, interviews; British)
- Radio Free Tomorrow (a blog that anyone can contribute to—I'm sure there's a name for that, but I'm blanking on it)
- Fantastica Daily (news and reviews)
- Sci-Fi Storm ("Your Source for Sci-Fi News," a Slashdot-style blog)
But the really coolest thing is that we've been getting traffic from non-English sites that I didn't know existed. There's a whole vast world of non-English sf out there, and I know almost nothing about it. (For example, the Chinese sf magazine Science Fiction World is the largest-circulation SF magazine in the world (at 370,000 copies per issue, five to ten times the largest American sf magazines' circulations); see SF Weekly's mini-review for a bit more info.) So I've been delighted to get traffic from sites in other languages:
- StarDust (a Spanish-language site)
- Fantasymundo.com ("Tu portal de fantasía")
- BEM Ciencia Ficción (in Spain, I think)
- Corriere Della Fantascienza (an Italian site)
- QuintaDimension.com ("Revista virtual de ciencia-ficcion, terror y fantasia")
- SF-Fan.de ("Alles fuer den SF-Fan!")
- Literatura w Esensji (Polish; unlike with the Spanish and German sites, where I can generally pick out words here and there, I can't read anything on this site)
- And an Asian site or two that I seem to have misplaced the info for.
Now if only I could read those sites. Hey, anyone out there interested in doing a review or article about a non-English sf magazine, author, or book?