No one’s watching? Well, not really. At least I watched them daily and that’s how I got these data to plot the graph. 
And you guys still remember this cartoon, right?
The following graph shows the fluctuation of their RSS Readers from November 1st to November 30th. Notice that during the weekend, due to no RSS feeds from Google, you could see a big drop in the number in the first two Fridays before someone alerted Google and they corrected the error.
Back in October 29th, I posted in my Indonesian language blog with a title of Watching the Competition of 2 Giants, predicting that the result could be swaying both ways, since by that time, John Chow had 12,877 readers and Shoemoney had 12,740, with a mere difference of 137 readers.* But then Shoemoney used his final secret weapon, and gained more than 7,000 readers in two days. This created a big jump in the beginning of November. However, as John Chow mentioned in his latest posting concerning this, it seems that Jeremy was using the hole in Feedburner to get those values that only Jeremy and John know about it. That’s why, we may ignore the first four pair of data until the first Monday in November. Than you will see that they have gained almost pretty steady number of readers.
When I eliminated the data variation due to the weekend drops on Friday Nov. 9 as well as the first 4 days’ data due to the drop from Shoemoney 21,000 data, then the average readers for each of them during the 25 days in November are as follows:
John Chow: 13,786 ± 874
Jeremy Schoemaker: 13,295 ± 778
Please don’t forget that when they started in October 1, John Chow’s score was only 8,585 while Shoemoney’s score was 10,883 as shown in this cartoon page, where you can also see that 77 visitors had voted there to predict who would be the winner. 
Looking at my graph shown above, does anyone still wonder, who was the real winner here? To tell you the truth, I really don’t care now, (because the answer is so obvious). I just feel fortunate that by following their postings daily, I’ve then picked up few more new tricks on how to increase your traffic from these two giants.
*Note: You don’t need to read bahasa Indonesia to understand that my posting in 28oktober.net was about John Chow vs Jeremy Schoemaker. Too bad the graph was not completed since while I was preparing the graph, I accidentally deleted the spreadsheet that I have just created using the data from the pdf file of screen shots that I took from the two sites. That’s why it only showed two graphs out of few graphs that I had in mind.
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
For the outside world, it might look like a competition between two giants. But, it really is not. It is a perfectly coordinated effort from these two smart bloggers to boost their subscribers. Well done! You need to be innovative to create such a buzz.
Thanks.