By John Hunter, founder of CuriousCat.com.
Here is a list of the 11 most popular posts on this blog last year (as measured by views counted by our analytics applications). We published our first blog post on October 1st 2012.
- W. Edwards Deming Called for the Elimination of The Annual Performance Appraisal (2012)
- We Need to Understand Variation to Manage Effectively (2013)
- Dr. Deming’s 14 Points for Management (2013)
- Deming and Lean Management Systems: The Disparities and Similarities (2013)
- Deming Chain Reaction (2012)
- Appreciation for a System (2012)
- Inspection is too late. The quality, good or bad, is already in the product. (2012)
- 2013 Deming Prize Winners (2013)
- W. Edwards Deming on Leadership (2012)
- Knowledge of Variation (2012)
- Lessons From the Red Bead Experiment with Dr. Deming (2014)
My guess is the 2012 posts are very popular largely because I intentionally wrote posts initially that I thought would be useful references for readers and also for me to link to in future posts.
So I wrote posts on Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge and the 4 components that make up the system. I also posted about items of continued interest such as Deming on leadership, valuing people, performance appraisal, and inspection. And I wrote posts on concepts such as the Deming chain reaction. Those “reference” posts are linked to in many posts allowing readers to find out more on specific topics; such posts make up a large part of the top 11.
I included the 11th most popular post since it was the highest ranking post from 2014. Posts from 2014 (especially later in the year) suffer from not having the whole year to attract visitors but they also benefit from a large spike in traffic in the first couple of weeks. For the next 10 most popular post, 2 were written in 2012, 5 in 2013 and 3 in 2014.
Another thing to note is that the way the data is collected only views of a specific web page count. Many readers use blog feed readers to read each post as they are published; those readers are not captured in the data used here. Also if they just read posts on the home page of the blog those don’t count. We have many more view of the home page than any specific post. Both of these factors likely mean posts written in 2014 were read much more the the “popular list” indicates; but our data collection method doesn’t credit those readers to each posts popularity.