Blogstats in a year of intense LLM "training"

Last year I noted the Top Six locations for C@W hits, as follows (in descending order):

Hong Kong / China / USA / Singapore / UK / Norway

2025 has been a bizarre year for blogstats.  Much as I'd like to think the upsurge represents long overdue global recognition for this blog, many other blogs have found the same and the widely accepted explanation is that the latest generation of LLMs, ever hungry for new "training" material, have been voraciously "reading" new bodies of text.  Obviously, the nearly two decades of flawless prose and compelling reasoning to be found on C@W make us a highly suitable educational experience for these eager students.

Anyhow, the "readership" has increased six-fold over 2024, with a mighty spike in June.  Someone in the LLM industry could doubtless explain this in detail.  Interestingly, while the spike has long since receded into the rear view mirror, it has left a pronounced tail in its wake**.  Presumably, the said LLMs keep coming back periodically to check on our latest gems: and I wonder if also their initial burst of reading resulted in a wider dissemination of C@W as a cited source, which ordinary ("human") www-browsers now access more than previously.

Anyhow, here is the Top 10 for 2025. 

1. Brazil - first by a good distance
2. Singapore
3. USA
4. Vietnam
5. China
6. India
7. UK
8. Japan
9. Bangladesh
10. Norway

Questions:

• Does this mean that electricity is cheaper in Brazil?  Or is it the cost of bandwidth?  I haven't heard of a rash of data centres being built there.

• To what body of hitherto untapped sources in the digitised world will the LLMs go for their next training binge?  What's left that is broadly literate, extensive, ignored thus far - and free?  The complete speeches of Stalin, Mao and Castro?  Might it be something of unspeakably awful content, such that LLMs will soon be effing and blinding like a docker and sharing pictures of nudified politicians ..? 

• May we hope that the wholesome diet of C@W wit, wisdom and literary excellence will raise the whole tone of AI output?  (*ahem*)

ND

PS: start thinking about your 2026 predictions ...

________________

** A company of my acquaintance that publishes a notable blog (as a promotional exercise) has suffered the opposite effect.  Its content having been extensively devoured in the same way, it now gets fewer hits, because AI searches give answers based on the LLM's reading and summarising of that blog.  These days, such searches do at least give links to the original source; but most lazy bastards go no further than the AI summary.  Which, to be fair, characterises much of my own use of AI - given the excellence of the summaries!  (Which is not necessarily a crass, circular assessment: when full reasoning & explanation are incorporated, you can pretty much judge that nothing salient has been omitted or "misunderstood".  And it's self-regulating, too: if the search is for an important purpose, obviously you dig deeper.)      

Some established business models are of course being actively trashed by the phenomenon - not to mention the upcoming fate of many professional, semi-professional and clerical-type jobs ... 

Guess the (blog) readership: RESULT

Further to the little Xmas blog-quizlet, I can report that the 2024 C@W top five countries-of-readership, as given by google-stats, are as follows, in descending order:

1. Hong Kong
2. China
3. USA
4. Singapore
5. UK

For reasons of fairness we'll amalgamate 1 & 2 because I can't imagine anyone reckoned on g-stats distinguishing HK and China: so 2-5 all move up one place and then it becomes relevant to note that #6 (becoming #5) is Norway.   HK+China is #1 by a country mile, BTW - rather gratifying.  And the total viewer-hits for the year was approx 800k, so it's not a particularly small sample (if not remotely premier-league blogging).  As noted before, maybe this is naïve but I don't really feel this is badly bot-distorted because the hits fairly clearly match subject-matter.  If clickbait was the only game in town you can guess what key-words we'd be majoring on.

I gave you a clue which was that the BTL ecosystem isn't at all representative (unless most of you live in HK, I suppose - and I know for sure that's not the case for several of our friends).

We had some pretty left-field suggestions: Belarus, North Korea & Yemen, to be precise.  But there's a clear winner, and it's Caesar H, with China / USA /  UK /  Russia /  Belarus.  Hon mensh to Matt who also got three countries correctly from the top five, but not so accurately ordered.  Russia, BTW, = #6 (revised ranking), reinforcing both the above awards as it featured in both their lists.

ND

Xmas Quiz: guess the audience!

With the year-end readership figures all but fiinalised and the rankings being very clear-cut, we are in a position to pose a little teaser:  over the course of 2024 ...

... which are the top 5 countries-of-origin of the C@W readership? 

(per blogger-stats provided by google).  Answers in descending order, please.  

If anyone gets this right, I shall suspect it's CU or BQ, both of whom still have admin access, much as we miss them.  I couldn't have guessed myself.  Clue:  forget whatever you imagine to be C-O-O of the BTL commenter population, we ain't representative.

PS: someone might tell me I'm being naïve, but I can't imagine the answer is "actually they are all bots".  If I'm wrong about that, it means (a) that's one helluva lot of bots out there - what are they all doing?  (b) they must keep coming back a remarkable number of times - why would they do that?  (c) they are quite discerning bots because they come in numbers relating to the subject-matter of individual posts, as far as I can judge. 

Answers on New Year's Day.

ND

Raedwald RIP

Radders was a great friend to this blog, and I trust we were to him.  I never met him in person (he was due to attend one of our Xmas drinks but for some reason he didn't make it) - but we'd definitely have enjoyed a night over the beers.  His not having posted for three weeks caused disquiet - such a stalwart blogger - and it seems the worst has befallen.  If more details of his personal life now emerge, there's many of us who'll be interested to learn them.

From never having met the man, there is still much to be said from his consistent, colourful and extensive blogging.  He described himself as an irredeemable optimist but was also clearly a fine conservative, and the two traits don't always coincide.  A massive supporter of localism and the wisdom of Burke's Little Platoons, he was also a good European - warmly espousing catholic internationalism but despising globalism in general, and Berlaymont in particular.   As firm as he was in his views, he was also ready to acknowledge mistakes, and man enough to leave them up online for all to see (none of the nasty, furtive re-writing of a Redwood or a Cummings). 

Raedwald had principles, alright: and he was clearly also practical to the nth degree.  You just know he was a man you'd want on your side in a fight: the supremely handy sort who'd rebuild the world after an invasion of Triffids.  At the same time he was clearly of a philosophical bent, his abstractions coming from a solid and wide-ranging empiricism in the best English tradition - an empiricism based in turn on his quite remarkable range of richly-enjoyed experiences.  His tales of Human Reality came from rural East Anglia and the boatyard; from the tough world of quantity surveying and project management at the sharp end of the building trade; and from hardcore bohemian Soho!  Firmly grounded, widely experienced real-world thinkers like Radders give one all the more contempt for the malcontent bedsit lefties with brains the size of planets, who clearly couldn't change a three-pin plug, yet who cultivate gigantic Hegelian fantasy-systems on nothing more than instant coffee, envy and bile.  

We needed Radders for some important fights yet to come.  Much of the UK Left is currently in a slough of despond, having childlishly invested everything in Corbyn.  They seem to despair of pretty much everything just now: but another, less fragile part of the dark side is limbering up for a massive assault on free speech, hoping to subborn the universities, the television, and ultimately social media - one all can too easily imagine platforms trading off the freedoms of expression they currently facilitate for their own freedom to make money.  (They are businesses, after all.)  And then there are the supranationalists ...   

Radders, despite attracting some very odd BTL traffic, maintained a stout line in critical commentary that was extremely valuable to us all.  We'd already lost Anna Raccoon: and now there's one fewer voice to speak truly and plainly in the culture-wars ahead.

How I wish he'd joined us for those beers.

ND 

Blogger Warning

Today, Blogger implemented the long-trailed "new version" and like a trusting eejit, I didn't insist on reverting to the old version (which one can for a short while).  This evening, by way of reward, it butchered the post I put up this morning!

I have reconstructed it as best I can.  But just to get my retaliation in first:  if posts go haywire in the next few days, nothing to do with me, mate ...

And if anyone in Blogger is monitoring these things:  fix the bloody bugs, pal

ND

Peak Oil, EROEI and the Muffled Drum

An interesting thing happened last month.  The Oil Drum, a well-regarded website + blog, announced it was ceasing operations and archiving itself for posterity.  Well, everything has its day - we can all list blogs that were thriving a few years back but are no longer with us.

Some have suggested it was the extraordinary shale-based renaissance of US gas and oil production that did for the Drum.  Probably not.  But, fairly or unfairly, the Drum was associated with 'peak oil', which at its simplest is a view (or theory or doctrine or whatever) that global oil production - as a function of oil-in-the-ground - is doomed to peak, after which we start 'running out of oil'.  

At its simplest, it is Malthusian hogwash.  Of course, there are more nuanced versions than that, and the Drum shouldn't be tarred with the brush one would use for countering hogwash.  Much more important is the concept of EROEI - energy return on energy invested, which has been another Drum favourite.  And this concept really does bear careful consideration.  Declining EROEI could be the end of civilisation as we know it for, in the immortal words of James Lovelock - "civilisation is energy-intensive".  Better believe it. 

So - no more drum-beat.  But you'll not stop hearing about EROEI.

ND

How Nadine Dorries blog got taken out.

The Barclay Ultimatum

Synopsis: Nadine Dorries is trying to to run operation Shredstone, the deflection of the media from expense claims to other matters, when the Daily Telegraph's FBI {Frauds and Benefits Investigator} calls with some tough questions his shadowy bosses want answered.

Weekend post: What would you like to see here

So you are here reading this blog, hopefully you have been before. We want to know why..

What do you like about it?
What issues should we discuss?
What don't you like?
What should we do more of or less of?

Let us know, it will hopefully help to improve our quality. Soon we will have to make a stylistic upgrade, so any feedback now will be most useful.

Thanks

CU

MP to gag Cityunslicker

CU is off on a well-earned break for 2 whole weeks. Mrs CU is unlikely to stand too much time being spent on the Blackberry (actually, nokia E71), sadly I have 3 key competing concerns:

1- Work emails, lots of them; Ho.

2- Blogs, addiction to reading/writing; Hmm.

3- Shareprices; heavily invested in some real up rollercoasters at the moment, must be monitored to avoid massive losses; Hee.

This will no doubt require more time than is allowable under the t's and c's of our holiday arrangement. I recall the horror of hearing from a friend who had found that his (now ex-) girlfriend had 'accidentally' dropped his blackberry in the pool on first day.

Perhaps inclement weather will strike to save me from spending all day in the pool with the little 'uns - a quick prayer to the rain god is in order. Sadly, Mrs CU has no doubt found somewhere with 14 hours plus sunshine a year and a no rain guarantee; I am therefore looking for a hideout on the beach like the one pictured..

So it is over to Mr Quango for a while (with help from Mr Drew of course). He has promised me several long tracts to account in full and public for this expenses for the last 23 years. Should keep the readership riveted.....

1000th post

Gosh, that is quite a number when I saw it come up today. 1000 posts between Honourable Member MR Quango, Nick Drew and myself. I wonder what the next 1000 will bring given that we started this in the middle of 2006 in the sunny uplands of the falsified Labour boom!

Yet today, the scene is much bleaker. Companies are reporting poor results and the rally we have just experienced in shares seems to be petering out. No doubt all the boards are having endless discussions about further cost cutting to try and break even or even turn a profit.

This is the worst news of all as 224,000 more people lost their jobs in the first quarter of this year. Taking the total to 2.2 million. Given that the government don't count another couple of million at least because they are mums/students/carers then the real number is really horrible. What a sad state we are in.

Redundancies announced at my place of work Monday, so will soon see if I am added to the tally. I will be on hols for 2 weeks at that point, hoping it is not made longer than that...

Once Upon a Time on the Net

A story I was aware of today was the long expected, overdue, demise of Mr Draper, editor of Labourlist.
The main blogs, Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale and the followers were discussing whether its best to let a defeated foe escape the battlefield or to pursue after them with all forces and wipe them from the earth.

The argument reminds me of the film 'Once upon A Time In The West'
"'Morton', the railway magnate, is a cripple and dying of polio, and who's ambition is to reach the Pacific ocean. Morton had previously paid for gunmen to kill 'Frank'. They failed. Frank turns up at Morton's rail car after a shoot-out looking to get revenge.
Should the cold eyed killer, 'Frank', kill Morton or let him be, as he presents no threat?"

Morton, crawling towards the muddy water from a leaking pipe, demonstrates his immense inner strength and appalling physical weakness. The music, overlaid with the sound of the Pacific surf breaking , just reinforces the man's powerful determination, while the spectre of the killer, with the thinnest of razor thin smiles, watches on.



What has this got to do with Derek Draper or Quantitative easing, or the LDV deal?
Nothing really.
Its just a masterpiece of cinema, without a line of dialogue, where the actors perfectly convey the directors intentions. Enjoy it.

I'm pretty sure its Hannah Montana the Movie for me this Sunday.
There is no justice.

Des Boot

The story so far.

Kaptain Draper of U-sles Labourlist has been having difficulties...

Links Update

I have used this evening to try and visit a few more blogs and to update my links a little. Let me know if there is anyone I have missed out who either links to me or is wrongly excluded.

Special mention to Mark Wadsworth and Sackerson as new members of the tiny UK blogging community who focus on business and economics.