Category: blogging

Happy New Year! Best wishes for 2014

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Mid-year 2014, RRW will be 7 years old.  Time does fly!  Thanks to all of our readers new and old for continuing to visit.

We are happy to report that we surpassed our goal of 1000 subscribers/followers by today!  At this moment we are at 1007 and for a small, narrowly focused blog we think that is great.

Since our inception we have had over 1.7 million visitors and this past year those visitors came from 202 countries.

2013 was our top year so far for readers with 377,228 viewers. We are growing every year!  The average number of visitors per day was 1,522 for 2013.

The top posts were our Fact Sheets, followed by ‘They are fighting back in Sweden,’ and ‘Why so many Somalis in Minneapolis.’  Just a reminder that in our right hand sidebar is a list of ‘Top Posts’ every day.  I find it very useful to see what readers are most interested in and you might too.

Please subscribe, follow us on facebook, or on twitter.  Tell your friends!

My apologies for setting up that Yahoo e-mail address to write to us (in the right hand sidebar).  It turns out I can barely drag myself there to look for reader e-mails because the junk mail is so out of control at Yahoo.  But, I promise to go there today to begin cleaning it out.  Sorry if I’ve missed something important.   You can always send a link via a comment to a recent post (even if it’s off-topic) and we will see those as we still monitor our comments before posting.

One more thing.  I think wordpress is placing ads on our posts, but we want you to know that this project—Refugee Resettlement Watch—is a charitable endeavor by its writers.  No one pays us for our opinions!

Thanks for making November our top month ever!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

As always I preface a report from RRW with the caveat that we are a small blog with a very narrow focus, so we continue to be amazed by how many people are interested in this rather arcane subject.

November 2013 is our top month for visitors in our 6 year history (5,155 posts).  We had 45,661 views this month (1,522 daily average) and that puts our total views at 1.6 million.   But there is more than that!  We reached 28,985 facebook users in the last week of November alone!

We also added 77 followers when our goal each month is to add a modest 30 new followers.

The top home country for visitors is obviously the US, but we have readers in 157 countries!  The nine (after the US) in descending order in the month of November were:  UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, Sweden, South Africa, France, Thailand and India.

If you would like to follow us, you can subscribe to the blog, follow us on facebook (here), or follow on twitter (here).

If this is your first visit to RRW, be sure to see our fact sheet on the US Refugee Resettlement Program, here.  It is daily one of our top most visited features.  See our Top Posts list in the right hand side bar to see what people are reading on any given day.

Remember RRW is a charitable enterprise, we are paid by no one for our work and we write (and post comments) when we have a few minutes.

RRW has best month since our debut in 2007!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Gradually, ever so gradually, people are beginning to ‘wake-up’ to refugee resettlement (other legal immigration) and what it means for taxpayers and for the health and social structure of communities and countries.  September 30th isn’t over yet, but this is already the top month since July 2007 for the number of visitors reading our blog!   That also makes September 2013 the month with the highest daily average of viewers.

On September first, we set a goal to add 30 new subscribers in the month.  We have far exceeded that goal by adding 75 (before today is even over!).  We will keep expectations low and aim for 31 more in October.

Of course the largest number of our readers come from the US, but here are the next nine countries in descending order:  Australia, Canada, U.K., Sweden, Germany, Thailand, South Africa, India, and the Netherlands.

New e-mail address is on the right-hand side-bar.  If you happen to have my personal e-mail address, please feel free to continue to use it!

And, for those of you who prefer not to subscribe, know that I post everything at twitter and posts automatically go to our facebook page.

I am AnnC@RefugeeWatcher.

Facebook page is here.  My apologies in advance for being terrible about chatting on facebook.

Also, apologies for any advertisements on our posts.  They are automatically generated by wordpress, our work here is completely a charitable enterprise—call it a labor of love!

Addendum:  Oops, I should have mentioned our fact sheet, a hot read lately too!  It is linked above under the header.

What Somalis are doing for RRW (not to mention the image of Islam and “refugees”)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Our readership at RRW is going through the roof and it’s almost exclusively because the public is finally beginning to search for information, and understand better, how so many Somalis have “found their way” to America.  Of course we know they didn’t find their way here, but were brought here over more than three decades now through the US State Department’s Refugee Resettlement program with the help of nine major federal contractors.  The mall massacre in Kenya with speculation (no official confirmation yet that I know of) that some of the killers are Americans (former refugees) has prompted this latest round of interest.

See the disturbing images from Nairobi in the UK Daily Mail (hat tip: Ed).

Thousands of new readers visited RRW in the last few days.  And, I’m happy to report that we have exceeded our goal of adding 30 new subscribers in the month of September.  We have 43 new subscribers with five days left in the month!

Almost every search term yesterday related to Somalis.  Here (below) is what people are searching (I took out about 5 searches that didn’t involve Somalis).

somalis in minneapolis
why are there so many somalis in minnesota
maine somalis catholic charities
lutheran brotherhood and somali refugees
how many somalis in kansas city
where in minneapolis the somalias lived
somalis in minnesota
louisville somalians
how many somalis in america
number of somalis in minneapolis
which administration brought somalies to minnesota?
clarkston ga ann somalis
somalis minneapolis
somali maine mn clinton
how did all the somalis get to minnesota?
why so many somalis in minneapolis
somalias in wisconsin
bed bugs shelbyville,tn

To answer the question, which administration brought Somalis to Minnesota?—the answer is all of them since the 1980’s.  George W. Bush had some really big years following 9/11!   Check out our numbers here.

Our most-read post yesterday was this one from 2011:  ‘Why so many Somalis in Minneapolis?‘

To learn more about the Refugee Resettlement program be sure to visit our fact sheet, here.

New e-mail address for RRW

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I mentioned here a few days ago that we were changing our e-mail address.  Make a note, the new address is AnnRRW@yahoo.com.   It’s not ‘hot’ because I am told that will discourage junk mail.  Copy and paste it into an e-mail and send story tips to that address!  Thank you to all who send us tips and private comments!