I've just been checking my google analytics and I can find two hits on date based archives recently. A few more on category archives, but most of the hits that aren't on the homepage are on individual post pages, deeper, direct links.

No one is really looking at my date based archives. Though that might be to do with the site design, which has drop downs for the nav.

Hi, I think that this kind of blog archive navigation is useful because in a blog normally people reflects news and ideas related to a specific moment. It's true that everything is related to an specific issue, but in order to find something you can use categories or time archive.

Regards,

I think chronological archives are a waste. It is the rare individual that remembers past events with a clear sense of the specific day or week in which it happened. The calendar archive for my own blog is useless to me.

"... blogs are about surfing the shock wave of contemporaneous information..."

Are they really? That's interesting. Not sure I subscribe to that view, but hey - it all depends on what you want out of your blog.

I see blogs as things that help us join our thoughts together and build bridges for own conceptual journeys across the chaos of the here and now. So not surfing, but tools to help capture the stuff we like and relate it to other stuff we like in the context of ourselves across time. Kind of like a museum curator: is this artefact interesting now and will it be interesting in the future? How does this artefact relate to the stuff going on around me?

Thus category is the only relevant thing. It will be time-stamped and ordered anyway.

But then I'm not a professional blogger, nor am I doing it for any reason other than leaving myself trails across time.

If the blog is designed for other people - take the statistical hint and drop the archive thing - it's just another feature to be lost in the evolution towards providing a relevant and simple service.