Because it's not science without graphs:
That's the traffic for this blog for 2007. If you integrate the area under the curve, you get a total of 833,275 page views for the year, which is, frankly, kind of astonishing. That's up from last year's total of 574,676, so I guess the goal for 2008 is to break a million.
The top ten posts for the year, in terms of traffic:
- Many Worlds, Many Treats: 52,667 (of course)
- Bunnies Made of Cheese: 14,068
- Stealth Creationists and Illinois Nazis: 9,048
- It's Turtles All the Way Down: 5,539
- New "Meme": Manly or Self-Sufficient?: 5,213
- Why Do Polarized Sunglasses Work?: 4,713
- Bush Commutes Pluto's Sentence: 3,367
- The Easterbrook Idiocy Supercollider: 3,275
- What Is String Theory?: 3,070 (special guest blogger edition)
- What's the Worst Reason for Being an Atheist?: 3,020
What's the lesson, here? Well, the glass-half-empty version would be "controversy sells." Five of the top ten are about politics or "culture wars" issues, and one of those is just blatant atheist-baiting. Only four of the top ten are really about science, and one of those is about string theory, which is the physics equivalent of the culture wars. If you want to consistently generate lots of blog traffic, you can't go wrong with articles denouncing somebody as an idiot.
The glass-half-full version: "Cute dog + science = pure blogging gold." The two dog dialogues combined for almost double the number of hits as the rest of the top ten. And they got me a book contract, to boot.
I think I'm going to focus on that side of my writing, rather than becoming yet another tedious political ranter...
Physical Science
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=24386
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977215115
hunka hunka burning love!
To an industrial scientist the the glass is neither half-full nor half-empty: half water, half ullage, and the bill of lading charges shipping and handling for both.
For politics, 100% ullage.
Posted by: Uncle Al | January 1, 2008 1:27 PM
Congratulations to Emmy, on a job well done!
Posted by: Rajesh | January 1, 2008 2:03 PM
Because it's not science without graphs
Traditionally, at least a semi-log graphs was required, but standards have been slipping all over.
Posted by: Johan Larson | January 1, 2008 2:28 PM
Traditionally, at least a semi-log graphs was required, but standards have been slipping all over.
Everybody's a frickin' critic. Fine: here's the semi-log version.
Posted by: Chad Orzel | January 1, 2008 2:59 PM
Aaron's piece about string theory was remarkable in, well, being actually about string theory. It had pictures, formulas and explanations, in other words actual content. So, it was a delight to read, precisely because it completely bypassed the tedious "culture wars". Frankly, I am surprised it generated so many page views, maybe there is hope after all.
On that note, happy new year!
Posted by: Moshe | January 1, 2008 5:18 PM
I think you are now suppose to make a frequency distribution plot, fit a power law to the heavy tail and submit!
Posted by: Brad Holden | January 1, 2008 8:54 PM
Man if you could just teach Emmy to type and use power point........
Posted by: Perry | January 2, 2008 12:07 AM
You know, the year is cyclical. A log-polar version wouldn't be too much to ask?
Posted by: Janne | January 2, 2008 2:23 AM