Wings Over Scotland

We try not to bang on about our readership stats so often these days, but as some mainstream media types have been casting doubt on our figures this week and we’ve just passed a couple of nice round numbers, we thought you might like to know.

We’d like to say a big “Welcome!” to the 15,000 brand-new readers who’ve joined us in the last 30 days, a big “Thanks!” to those of you who were here already, and an extra-special one to those of you who told others. Keep spreading the word, folks.

In the whole of 2012, Wings Over Scotland was visited by 141,012 unique users, who made just under 2.6 million pageviews. In 2013 so far, we’ve reached 285,581 unique users who between them racked up over 6.6m pageviews.

Just wait until we really get started.

An alert reader today pointed us towards internet traffic analysis site Alexa.com, and in particular its statistics for the Yes and No campaigns’ official websites. There was an interesting quirk (or at least one that might pass for interesting in the silly season).

Can you spot it?

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s “Follow Friday” on Twitter (as it is every Friday). So for those of you still scared to take the plunge into this most modern of communication tools, we thought we’d put together a handy one-stop list of 50 of Scottish politics’ most significant tweeters, and see if we can get you started.

(Click the images to visit the pages.)

Read the rest of this entry →

Littered with bank and school holidays, and often with the first glimpse of summer luring people out of doors away from their TVs, newspapers and monitor screens, May is usually a pretty slow month in politics. (Except in election years, of course.) We’re human too, and the last 30 days saw fewer posts on Wings Over Scotland than any this year – 83 compared to the Jan-Apr average of 101.

So we’re extra-chuffed about this:

That’s a whopping 15% increase on last month’s all-time record, and over 8,300 more unique readers. (Number of visits was also up slightly, with total pageviews marginally down as you’d expect from the decreased post count.)

As ever, thanks to everyone who makes the site worthwhile by coming here to read it. We’re taking a research day today, but no more slacking after that. There’s work to do.

Damn. That concerted Unionist smear campaign directed at us last month really hurt.

That’s 1,233,872 pageviews in April – almost quarter of a million up on the previous high, thanks to over 10,000 new first-time readers. We’ll try to struggle on.

Our survey of Scottish political website readership closed last night, and the results are in. And we must admit, we really didn’t see this one coming.

Remarkably, the winner of the poll – excellent news resource BBC Scotlandshire – was on 0 votes the day before voting closed, largely because we’d forgotten to include it. But to our surprise, in the small hours of the morning a whopping 1,011 votes arrived out of nowhere – or more specifically, according to our IP tracking, from a single building close to the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood.

When we checked, we found that it was the headquarters of a smaller and more amateurish news-reporting organisation, so we assume that lots of employees working the late shift had all decided to vote to express their admiration for a respected rival at once. (Curiously all from the same computer, and now we come to think about it, several hours after the poll had in fact closed.)

It’s quite the mystery.

Read the rest of this entry →

Amazingly, it’s now been a whole year (plus two days) since we unexpectedly found ourselves top of a poll of most-read Scottish political blogs conducted by Scot Goes Pop. As we’ve now got a pretty sizeable readership, we thought it might be interesting to pick up the baton and conduct a similar survey for ourselves this year.

Below is a list of all the active Scottish political blogs we could think of. (We’ve been fairly liberal with the definition of “active”, hence the inclusion of LabourHame.) The criteria were pretty simple – the content of each site had to be chiefly about Scottish politics, and it had to be a proper website/blog (so we’ve excluded writers who are exclusively newspaper columnists with no site of their own, which knocked out the likes of Ian Bell, Alan Cochrane and Kevin McKenna). Facebook doesn’t cut it.

(We’ve included as many Unionist blogs/sites as we could find, but they’re remarkably thin on the ground, as we noted around the turn of the year. Even the once-tireless Councillor Alex “Braveheart” Gallagher has given up since last October.)

If you’re unfamiliar with any of the sites listed, you’ll find most of them in our links column over to the right. In the first poll (about which blogs you actually read on a regular basis in 2013) you can tick as many boxes as you like, and in the second we’d like you to choose your single favourite. Both polls close at midnight on Sunday.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’ve received another letter from Ian Taylor’s lawyers. You can read it below.

Read the rest of this entry →

We suppose we should thank Mrs Thatcher for giving us the last nudge over this rather special landmark, thanks to our second all-time-high pageview record in two days:

It seems fitting somehow.

So we weren’t sure what to do about our 1000th post. We toyed with the idea of making it a throwaway two-liner just for fun. We thought about a grand mission statement, but, y’know, it’s pretty obvious what our mission is so there didn’t seem much point. We considered a sort of “Greatest Hits” thing, but we basically did that last month. We were fairly sure we wanted a cartoon, though.

In the end, we decided there’d been enough navel-gazing already in the last month, and that it might be best just to make a quick point and then get back to work.

Read the rest of this entry →

When you involve yourself in politics, the surest sign that you’ve got your opponents rattled isn’t that they start to copy you. It’s when they start to smear you.

Last night, an unholy alliance of prominent Labour and Tory activists (and some plain old-fashioned internet nutters) embarked on an extraordinary, co-ordinated and prolonged attack on Wings Over Scotland. We were accused of being liars, “needle-dicked fascists”, Nazis, misogynists, “sub-tabloid trutherists” (whatever the hell those are), “second-wave feminists” (ditto), “online vigilantes”, sectarian bigots (not sure on which side), “hate preachers” and probably of leaving the toilet seat up – it was hard to keep up with the sheer volume of abuse.

There were petty slurs on our professional standing and on where we live. We were, with no small measure of irony, accused of deploying “vicious personal invective”. It was the full kitchen sink of ad-hominem, as a frightened, panicky opponent threw everything they could think of in our direction.

We won’t delve any further into the details. The material outcome was the biggest influx of new Twitter followers in several weeks and a number of belated donations to our fundraising campaign, so that was nice. But what on Earth could have provoked such a poisonous and sustained onslaught?

Read the rest of this entry →