Milestones, Plus a Gratuitous Zombie Reference

Interesting times down here in the bunker — yesterday the site happened to hit several milestones all at once. First, the @epolitics Twitter feed (which doubles as my personal account) finally reached its 1000th subscriber, who depending on the exact timing may have been Heather Holdridge, a good friend (she wins valuable prizes, i.e., I’ll buy the next round).

Considering that I don’t use Twitter particularly strenuously except when I’m live-covering online advocacy events or the occasional Eagles game, that’s not bad at all. On the same day, the site’s RSS feed pushed up over 1100 followers for the first time, and in a big jump too, since it leapt above 1150 in one swoop (a critical mass of DC-ites must have come back from vacation). More recruits for the e.politics robot/zombie army…

Those RSS followers are loyal readers, too, since the average article will ultimately be opened by roughly 30-40% of subscribers to the feed. By contrast, a typical link posted on Twitter might get clicked on a half-dozen or a dozen times (more if it gets re-tweeted by someone else), while the same link posted on Facebook will usually catch the attention of a slightly larger handful of my 800-odd “friends” (and believe me, some of them are pretty odd).

On the e-book front, “Learning from Obama” has now been downloaded just over 3500 times, thanks to a lot of forwarding and posting and a ton of good incoming links. Its older sibling (the “Online Politics 101”) has had an even more impressive year, being accessed some 30,000 times since the new edition came out in the summer of 2008 — it’s now closing in on 50,000 total downloads since 2006!

– cpd