Monday, March 24, 2014

Space News for the second and third year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News


The second most viewed entry of the third year of this blog is Space news for Apophis Day from April 13, 2013, with 1270 page views according to the secondary counter but no comments.  Like my entry about a Ringworld movie, it didn't register on the all-time list for the primary counter Blogspot uses.  However, it did show up on the top ten most viewed list for a couple of months.  Some of what drove traffic to that entry involved web search, as I recall "Apophis" being one of the top ten search terms those months.  However, there were fewer than 81 searches using any individual form of "Apophis" or "Apophis Day," as no term including "Apophis" made the top ten for the history of the blog.  I also don't recall promoting this entry beyond my usual posting the link to Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter.  I certainly didn't promote it to Kunstler's blog, as at that time I was just posting links to the blog as a whole, not to individual entries.  So, as I wrote in reference to how U.S.-China EcoPartnerships: The CoDominion plans for sustainability became a popular entry, it's a  mystery to me.*

As for the entry itself, it was just one of my standard compendiums of space and astronomy news that I've been posting weekly for a couple of years.  The only thing special about it was the dedication to the day.
Happy Apophis Day, which I declared as a holiday on this blog last year.
There is an event in the more distant future that fits one of the themes of this blog, disasters with a science fiction flavor, perfectly--the first of two close approaches of the asteroid Apophis, which is predicted to happen on Friday, April 13, 2029. The second pass of the asteroid will also happen on April 13th of 2036. So, today's date, April 13th, will be day of the year when both approaches of Apophis happen. I christen it Apophis Day!
Here is the first of two entries to mark Apophis Day, a compendium of space news originally posted in Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (BRAIN Initiative) on Daily Kos.
The next Apophis Day will be in three weeks.  I'll be sure to celebrate it as one of this blog's special holidays.

None of the rest of the past year's weekly space news compendiums made the 20 most viewed entries list for the third year of the blog.  However, three entries from the second year's top 20 list didn't get recognized in the series that I left uncompleted at Second Year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News: Scary musical clowns from Detroit.  I know I promised in Nablopomo for March: Self to wrap up that suspended series before I would start reviewing the top posts from the third year of the blog, but that didn't happen.  It turns out that it's just as well.  There are connections among my most popular entries of the past two years that weren't apparent to me during the second year alone, but reveal themselves when I see both years' lists.  The popularity of space news is one of them.

Follow over the jump for two entries from the second year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News that are finally getting the recognition they deserve.

The fifteenth most read entry of the second year of the blog was Space and astronomy news: A bake sale for NASA, posted on June 12, 2012, with 229 page views as of Midnight March 21, 2013 (the entry now has 244 page views).  That one includes the rationale for why I began posting my weekly space news digests.
While last week's installment of space and astronomy news had good news about crew vehicles, which indicates that the U.S. still has a future in near-Earth manned spaceflight, the cutting back of exploratory missions is a sign that our society is still facing what I consider to be the quintessential tragic science fiction sign of societal decline, loss of spaceflight. Sigh.
I may not be including this rationale in my current summaries of space news, but it still informs my reporting on space.  I'm watching for signs of hope amid the austerity.

The seventeenth most read entry of the second year of the blog was Space and astronomy news: Voyager, China, ice on the Moon, Mars landing, and more posted only two weeks later, on June 24, 2012.  This entry had 217 page views as of Midnight March 21, 2013, but currently has surpassed the entry featuring the bake sale for NASA with 391 page views now.  I can see why this one got a lot of page views then and still is attracting readers; it reported on a lot of momentous space events from that year--Voyager leaving the Solar System, the discovery of ice on Earth's moon, the Chinese in space, a complete catalog of Martian craters, and a preview of Curiosity landing on Mars--truly a great week in space exploration.  I'm not going to examine why this entry has so many views; it deserves them.

*That entry fell out of the all time top ten according to the primary counter on the last day of the third year of the blog, right before I compiled the annual statistics.  I'll tell the story of how that happened in a couple of days.

Previous entries in this series.
Entries in the previous series:


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