2012 will be our fourth year of collaboratively blogging about governance across borders. Fortunately, more and more researchers in related fields start running blogs, as well. Recently, for example, the research group on “Cultural Sources of Newness” at the Social Science Research Center (WZB) in Berlin has started their blog, which I highly recommend. Specifically Ariane Berthoin Antal provides most interesting reflections on newness in general and newness in academia in particular – at an impressive pace.

Looking back at our own third year of blogging, I am happy to provide this year’s statistics (see stats for 2010 and 2009 respectively):

Top 5 blog posts 2011 (in terms of visitors):

  1. Boarding Berlin: The Pirate Party Triumph in the German Capital (FAQ)
  2. Transnational Studies and Governance # 3: Studies on ‘global’ markets in history*
  3. The Dark Side of Copyright’s Force: LucasArts v. YouTube v. Greenpeace v. VW [Update]
  4. Anonymous Attacks German Collecting Society GEMA
  5. The “Why?” of Andhra Pradesh – An Interview with Malcolm Harper

* also #1 in the Top 5 of 2010

Top 5 search terms guiding visitors to our blog in 2011:

  1. Andhra Pradesh microfinance crisis
  2. post-socialism (also #2 in 2010)
  3. anonymous gema
  4. Milford Bateman microfinance (also #4 in 2010)
  5. transnational institutions

Top 5 tags attached to blog posts in 2011:

  1. Microfinance / Microcredit (16 out of 38 in 2011)
  2. Google (7/15)
  3. Creative Commons (7/22)
  4. YouTube (6/9)
  5. copyright (6/16)

Top series in 2011:

  1. Bordercrossing Books (4 out of 6 posts in 2011)
  2. The Series Series (3/7)
  3. Wise Cartoons (2/4)

In total we published 56 new posts in 2011 – three more than last year but still short of the 64 posts we had in our first year of blogging in 2009. We thus did not manage to reach our self-imposed goal for 2011, which was to “beat the 2009 level of posts but keep the comment-per-article ratio at 2” (see statistics for 2010). However, we still have on average one post per week and we received 208 new comments last year. This means that we managed to double the comment-per-article ratio the second year in a row, from 2 to 4.

We also very much appreciate a growing number of guest bloggers (see guestxborders). For 2011, we are indebted to Domen Bajde, Elke Schüßler and Matthias Thiemann, who will return in 2012 to continue his series “Securitization Revisited“.

(leonhard)