I don’t know if Jim West meant to do this, but in his post yesterday Ok Houston (WordPress), We Might Have a Problem… (I had the same problem) he revealed his daily WordPress visit statistics for the last month. I can compare them directly with the statistics for this blog. It looks as if Jim has been averaging around 1000 visits per day through March, rather more in the last few days.

Gentle Wisdom cannot yet match Jim on a daily basis. But its daily average number of visits, which was 82 in February, leapt up to 493 in March. Since 17th March, when I published David Wilkerson prophecy: earthquakes in Japan and USA, Gentle Wisdom has had more than 500 visits every day, with a peak of 1356 on 21st March. On 19th, when it had 1181 visits, Jim West clearly had well under 1000, so I edged ahead of him at least briefly.

In September 2009 Gentle Wisdom joined the select (maybe) band of official bibliobloggers. Thirteen months ago it actually made it into the infamous Top 50. But it didn’t hold its position because I wasn’t blogging regularly last year.

Meanwhile Jim West, also known as Zwingli come back to life, has held the #1 spot in the list of biblibloggers for most of its life, except for a short break when his blog was deleted and before he started a new one. He is still there in the latest list published yesterday – its title Oh My Goodness!!! Jim West Lost is an April Fool. Over the years the Alexa rank required to qualify for the Top 50 has inflated (because a lower number indicates a higher position): biblioblog #50 had a rank of 1,397,865 in August 2009 but 863,218 in the latest figures.

As I was blogging very little for nearly a year, it is not surprising that Gentle Wisdom slipped well down the Alexa rankings, to below 7,000,000 on the one month figures from a month ago, just before I started to relaunch this blog. But its one month rank has already risen nearly six million to 1,333,112, and will doubtless continue to rise quickly if my daily number of visits remains above 500. So watch out for Gentle Wisdom in next month’s Top 50.

I can’t help wondering if Gentle Wisdom should really be listed as a biblioblog. After all, most of the posts are not about biblical studies. But then the same is true of Jim West’s writing. Also Jim often posts 20 times a day, mostly very short posts. This suggests that on average only about 50 people read each post. By contrast I had over 15,000 visits in March and 35 new posts in the month, which corresponds to nearly 500 readers per post.

It looks to me as if Jim West is maintaining his #1 position only by blogging large numbers of short posts. If he keeps this up he may maintain his position, just ahead of Joel Watts who has a similar posting pattern. But if Gentle Wisdom only needs to double its number of visits this month, to follow up its sixfold increase last month, then that #1 biblioblogger spot is by no means secure. Watch out, Jim West, here comes Gentle Wisdom!