Numbers.... Black is White and Mine is Bigger than Yours

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This seems the sort of silly yes-it-is-no-it-isn't argument which belongs on my metal detecting nonsense ghetto blog.

I like to keep an eye on who is reading what on my main blog and have noted that over the past few months it seems to have generated an expanding readership, which I find interesting and encouraging to compare with the blogs that give out the damaging propaganda for no-questions-asked collecting of dug up antiquities.

Peter Tompa started his blog before me, and not long ago was boasting he'd had 50 000 hits, which prompted me to look at my own counter and was interested to note that a few days after that, the number of hits to my own rants, comments and observations passed 150 000. Not long ago it passed 200 000 while Tompa's has still not reached 70 000. So the word is getting around, despite my own blog being a rather niche interest thing.

Dorothy King (Blogs and Cultural Property Propaganda ) disputes these figures:

What's that quote ...? "Lies, damned lies, and statistics" Just out of curiosity I looked at Paul Barford's blog figures, since he made such a point of gloating over his blog being more read than those of "coiney" types, and promoted Gill's table as proof to support his theory. Gill gives him 75 to 80 readers, Google Reader 1.

Aha, one reader? So on the days recently when there have been as many as 700 people looking at the blog, Ms King would have us believe that it is the same person, and the ninety or so "returning visitors" a day shown by the tracking software is the same bloke running for some reason from one computer to the next on at least two separate continents? Day after day.

King gloats that a blog she calls "Barford's nemesis, the butt of so many of his posts, Peter Tompa's Cultural Property Observer" has 58 subscribers.

Tompa has 58 times the subscribers of Barford, which does not tally with Gill's table ...

that is assuming that the PACHI blog does indeed have one subscriber. She notes Candice Jarman's recent efforts to contribute to the discussion:

I think starting a blog devoted to Paul Barford was wrong, but ... it has four times the subscribers of Barford's main blog [...]. And I admit that I do find that rather amusing.

So do I, since the actual identity of the author's followers on the home page is shown as six. Ms King claims about herself: "I can be a bit OCD - my footnotes are always accurate, and I like to be thorough with my research. So, I thought I'd check. And the results were surprising". Indeed, a bit of checking would be in order before she calls somebody a liar, because of course this lays one open to having claims like this checked too.

I do not know what figures Dorothy King is using for the readership of my PACHI blog, she says they are from Google Reader. When I looked just now, instead of "1" it says on my screen quite clearly "Liczba subskrybentów: 78". (Number of Subscribers 78). [But in fact what I was talking about was not subscribers but the number of people that have found or revisited my blog and looked at some of what I'd written.] I suspect that, in her efforts to come to the rescue of the honour of writers like Peter Tompa, the poor lady has in her haste mistaken the PACHI blog with this one (which last time I looked did indeed have - for reasons which are unfathomable since it deals exclusively with nonsense like this - one subscriber). *

But this cannot be the whole explanation. Something else is clearly going on here. She says:

Gill's (sic) Blogging Pompeii has well over a hundred subscribers. According to Google Reader it has 22.

On my screen, "Blogging Pompeii" has Liczba subskrybentów: 117 so more or less what Gill stated and not the reduced number PhDiva gives.

Looting matters, Ms King suggests has 68 while on my screen it says: Liczba subskrybentów: 290 so again the number Gill gives rather than the 'revised' figures Ms King would prefer her readers to believe.

So from where does Ms King get the 'revised' figures on the basis of which she makes her claims that the Swansea academic's comments (and my own) on online readership on cultural property matters are false? All very odd.

*UPDATE: For reasons which are even more unfathomable, it seems now to have four. I'll have to be more careful of what I say here now.
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Get on with it...

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"Here’s a pic of Mr Barford enjoying a well-earned beer" saith Candice, but no, wait ("This is Mr Barford - Part 1")...

"a correspondent tells me that the man in the picture to the left with his back to us is Mr Barford. Well, it looks possible and, of course, we know Mr Barford is the master of misinformation".

And Candice is obviously master of nowt. It beats me how he can see that the person shown in a photo with his back to the camera behind another person is "enjoying a well-earned beer" like the good-looking guy relaxing in the centre of the shot. Or that anyone can recognise the back of somebody's head (or is it the butt which was recognised?). What does he mean by "it looks possible"?

Perhaps the person being portrayed by the photographer is the other one facing the camera, but on the right of the guy in the centre of the photo? Stocky come-and-fight me stance and archie sweater, is that not the blogger in question? He looks like the sort of person who'd be rude about collectors doesn't he? Though why would Candice say that this person is "enjoying a well-earned beer" when he is not?Pathetic. Maybe we could cut the crap and instead of simply suggesting "of course, we know Mr Barford is the master of misinformation", Candice could get on with discussing the alleged distortions in what I say about portable antiquity collecting. Can he do that? I think we are all beginning to have our doubts about that.
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Do arms traders maim and kill?

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Do antiquities maim and kill? asks "Candice". Probably reads the Daily Mail. In any case as any gun-carrying American will tell him, "guns don't kill people, people do". Somehow I think he misses the point about US attitudes to international crime and the antiquities trade. In what I presume the "secretary" intends as a question Candice writes:

Do antiquities maim or kill! Most reasonable people would regarding smuggling a few artifacts as a relatively minor offence compared to arms smuggling. But not the radical archaeologists it seems - it appears they regard the preservation of a few antiquities of greater importance than the preservation of people! I detect a rather anti-American tone in Mr Barford's posting - perhaps his does n't agree with the freedoms enjoyed by those in the Land of the Free.

Why would a UK resident who consistently writes "artifacts" be worried about an allegedly "anti-American tone" I wonder? Presumably Candice has sufficient sympathies with the hawks across the sea that he does not see the irony in the comment about the "freedoms" desired by those in the Land of the Free to arrest and deport non-US citizens in countries outside the USA's sphere of direct influence on allegations of crimes not committed in the USA. Perhaps he'll be equally happy to see this individual carted him off to some CIA establishment in Poland or somewhere for "questioning" involving lots of nakedness, water and electric drills. I think US collectors' and dealers' attitudes to antiquities smuggling appalling, I find US attitudes to a whole lot of other things appalling. What is wrong with that?