Perhaps it is too early to speak about a tradition, but last year at the same date and exactly at the same time, year 2008 retrospect was published. The logger has been ticking for a full year since (except that it was turned off – due to mistake – for over period of nearly four months during the summer; see figure below), and it is time to look back and see what really happened.
Lets start with salient visitor statistics – the figures in the parentheses refer to last year’s statistics for the sake of comparison. During the past 12 months, the blog pages have been viewed 24 598 (6205) times during 10 812 (2744) visits by at least 5304 (1499) individual visitors. Each visitor peeked on average to 2.28 (2.26) pages and spent roughly 2.2 (2.5) minutes on these pages per visit. These numbers translate to some ca 65 (100) views per day as shown in the graph below.
Not surprisingly, most (4589 [1406]) visitors were from Finland, followed by USA (1776 [422]), Germany (665 [51]), Sweden (534 [no rating last year]), UK (539 [119]), Canada (355 [234]), Italy (253 [nrly]), Hungary (232 [nrly]), India (187 [nrly]) and Spain (108 [nrly]). As shown in the map below, hits were received also from many other countries – 115 (74) in total. However, note that the map below does not reproduce all visitors for reasons beyond my understanding. Nevertheless, from Finland, we were visited most frequently from Helsinki, Vaasa [sic!], Lahti, Turku and Vantaa. Jyväskylä, Tampere and Oulu still stumble in darkness. There was also one visitor from Rovaniemi – I want to believe that it was Santa Claus.
As to the most viewed contents of the pages, the top-ten most viewed blogposts are listed below. This excludes the clicks on directory pages and tags, including the highly popular link to tag ’sex simulation machine’ (276 hits) which topped also last year’s stats (264 views). Note also that these statistics do not account for time-dependence: the earlier entries have of course had more time to be clicked than the more recent ones.
The top ten entries (# of times read):
1. Hardcore fishing in Hungary (Gabor Herczeg) 687
2. Fishy stuff (Juha Merilä) 466
3. Risks of wind energy (Anna Kuparinen) 455
4. Exit GST (Juha Merilä) 280
5. Siberian jays mapped (Juha Merilä) 199
6. Aliens of coral reefs (John Loehr) 184
7. Antipredator strategies for dogs (Juha Merilä) 177
8. Conservation genetics (Juha Merilä) 164
9. The great killer tits of Hungary (Gabor Herczeg) 155
10. Dressed up for success or something else (Juha Merilä) 153
Also twelve other blog entries broke the 100-line. However, once looking these figures, it is good to remember few things. On the one hand, the stats are likely to be downwards biased because the entries read directly from the blogroll will not tick a hit in the counter. The same is of course true if the writings were read through RSS feeds. Likewise, visits during the nearly 4 months the tracker was down are not included.
On the other hand, not all readers necessarily found what they were looking for. Or what do you think about these: ‘what are the risks associated with the production of wind?’, ‘a sex simulator’, ‘sexsimulation’, ‘sex simulator 2008’, ‘sex simulation machines’, ‘sex simulatie’, ‘sex simulatiers’, ‘sex mashine’, ‘machine sex’, ‘sex simulator machine’, ‘sex machine’, ‘simulation sex’, ‘making sex simulator’, ‘sex symulation’, ‘sex machine fuck motor’ or ‘tits of the year‘? One also wonders what the person using a search string “and i can’t put my dick in your phd” was looking for?. On the other hand, those looking information about ‘creative research in science‘, ‘when is best moon phase to catch marlin‘, ‘physiology of frog rectum’ and ‘wigs’ probably found what they were after. Unsettled are ‘what is fisheries induced evolution?‘ and ‘what would the dress code be for an ecologist?‘.
Do you wonder about the peak at the end of December 2008 in the figure above? It was the entry ’Fishy Stuff’ – linked to one sport fisheries page. So much about the scientific glory.
One Comment
Good to see how widely the blog is read. I think that the top entries provide a good example on how important a good title is – there was a post about it on the blog but I forgot the title (it might not have been so good).
BTW, I’m not sure that searching ‘physiology of frog rectum’ clusters with ‘creative research in science‘ or ‘and i can’t put my dick in your phd’ … Perhaps in between.