ACTIVE SALON BLOGS LIST UPDATED

There are now 159 active (updated in the last month, or officially on vacation but returning) Salon Blogs. Comings & Goings this past month:

• No longer blogging, it seems: The enormously helpful Charlie Z at Driver 8, the enormously successful Julie Powell of the Julie/Julia Project, Ray of Nobody Loves Raymond, whose blog is MIA, great story-teller Hugh Elliott at Standing Room Only, and Cat M. of Chronicles of an Anti-Apathetic. Their presence in this part of the blogosphere will be sorely missed.
• Good news: Penny of My So-Called Lesbian Life is back.
• Daniel X. O’Neil, the veteran Salon blogger at GoogObits who uniquely chronicles the deceased, has moved to his own site.
• The flight from Radio to Typepad seems to have stopped, at least for now.
• Of the roughly 100 new Salon Blog numbers assigned this past month, about 40 actually made at least one post, and the following 17 appear to be posting regularly. I especially recommend MallowDrama, Hermit’s Notebook, Hoi Polloi and I Don’t Know What Happened, which are off to sensational starts. Welcome, new Sloggers all.

Some stats for this past month:

• Total hits this month for Salon Blogs were about 1.1 million, up about 8% for the month, but they were very unevenly distributed (even more than usual), with 850 thousand of these hits going to the top 11 blogs. For the typical Slogger, December traffic was about 10% quieter than November, due probably to the holidays. The median for active Salon Bloggers was only about 700 hits per month, about 30 per day.
• Inbound blogs totaled about 3250, up about 5% month-over-month, with the top 11 blogs accounting for 50% of them. The median for active Salon Bloggers was 7 inbound blogs.
• About 42% of active Sloggers are female, up significantly from just over 30% three months ago. That’s great news, but I don’t know what to make of it.

I’ll continue to keep the Directory current, with your help, and will report at least bi-monthly on comings & goings and stats.

P.S. I’ve also updated my Tables of Contents (see top left of my blog). Since Google has, for some reason, stopped crawling How to Save the World, Google is no longer a reliable way to find things in my archives. I’m going to test some other search engines and change my search bar accordingly.