Since starting soundingsjohnbarker last September, WordPress tells me I’ve had readers from 120 of the world’s 196 countries, which seems respectable enough given it is an English-language blog written in Thompson Manitoba, the province’s fourth-largest city of 13,123, according to the most recent revised Statistics Canada census count, and located more or less smack dab in the centre of Manitoba, Canada and North America, for those interested enough to pull out a map.
In that eclectic mix of posts, I’ve made certain observations that have held true from the start. Local stories tend to garner the biggest numbers by a considerable margin and the really big ones take on something like a life of their own, appearing with daily readers months and months after they are first posted, albeit perhaps only a handful some days. Other more esoteric or obscure topics tend to draw a much smaller overall audience, but from a wide range of countries. So while a local story headlined “Lonely Planet, the world-famous travel guide, calls Thompson a town lacking ‘charm’ but ‘a necessary evil for northern itineraries’” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/07/14/lonely-planet-the-world-famous-travel-guide-calls-thompson-a-town-lacking-charm-but-a-necessary-evil-for-northern-itineraries/) had about 650 “views” almost out of the gate, so to speak, when it went online around 9 p.m. CDT July 14, my guess is that none of those first wave of readers (and they do often seem to come in waves) were from the European Union, where I’ve garnered 56 views on https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/ (in a tie at the moment with Ireland).
Today, I had my first reader from Vatican City (as opposed to elsewhere in Italy). Pope Francis perhaps? Probably not, but if it was, I expect he might ring me on the telephone to share his thoughts soon enough.
Some countries are special cases. Take Tanzania in east Africa for instance. I’ve had 89 readers from there, which is quite remarkable when you realize Tanzania is a country where electricity, much less Internet connections, can be spotty and unreliable at times. But it so happens that Bishop Prosper Balthazar Lyimo, the new auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Arusha in Tanzania, was posted here in Thompson as a diocesan priest a few years ago, leading me to write a couple of times about him since last November.
While it is easy enough to figure out why more than 31,000 readers have come from Canada, there are some countries, such as Moldova, Curaçao, the Falkland Islands, Georgia, Réunion Island, a French department in the Indian Ocean, and Qatar, that supply a small number of readers, that I have a harder time figuring out, but am glad to have them.
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