ScienceBlogs: The First Year

One year ago today, Uncertain Principles went live on ScienceBlogs. In honor of the anniversary, here's the first year at the new site, in one graph:

Well, ok, that's not that informative. In fact, for all you know, that could be an NMR trace from a chem experiment-- the little bump to the right is the reactant, the little bump on the left is the product, and the two big spikes in the middle are solvent. A more informative version is below, along with a few of my favorite posts:

Like a good physicist, I've re-done it as a semi-log plot (which is appropriate, given that the traffic numbers span a couple of orders of magnitude), and I labelled the four visible spikes from the previous graph. In order, those are due to:

• Top Eleven: Time to Vote
• The Blogger SAT Challenge
• Local Realism, Loopholes, and the God Delusion
• All That I Want (in which I got tenure)

The first two are definitely at the top of the list of the achievements I'm proudest of on the blog. They both involved a fair amount of work-- the Top Eleven vote was the culmination of a couple of weeks of researching and writing short descriptions of classic physics experiments, while the SAT Challenge took a fair amount of effort from both me and Dave. The fourth is, of course, the highlight of my year, on the blog or off it.

I'm reasonably happy with the EPR/ God Delusion post (which got picked up by Digg), though it wouldn't make my top five favorite posts. The post in that vein that I'm happiest with was the follow-up on Atheist Church Socials, which didn't get anywhere near the traffic. It's too squishily moderate to really drive a lot of traffic, and doesn't either insult people or invite insult enough to be a big draw. I put a lot of thought into it, though, and I'm happy with how it came out.

The most widely cited physics post of the year is probably Physics Funding Fundamentalism, which was excerpted in Seed, and will appear in the science blogging anthology Bora's putting together. That got me a couple of contacts from reporters, as well, which tells me I probably ought to spend more time writing about science funding...

My other favorite post of the year would have to be How to Tell a True Lab Story. I keep thinking that I ought to polish it up a bit, and see if the Corporate Masters would take it for Seed, but I keep getting distracted by shiny things and forgetting to send the idea to the editors.

Anyway, those are the highlights of the year. I've been pleasantly surprised at how quickly I picked up a much larger readership than I had at the old site (491,000 visits!), and how many people have stuck around. It was especially gratifying to have a hundred-odd people leave congratulatory comments to the tenure post-- thank you all.

It's been fun so far. I think I'll keep it up for a while longer.