It’s what you say, not how you say it
Like most bloggers, I keep an eye on my blog statistics (and try not to get too obsessive about it).
I frequently see a spike when Genome Technology Online link to one of my posts. The previous post, on Facebook apps for scientists, resulted in my biggest spike ever – 798 views in a day. Somewhat surprising at first, given that it was a short, uninformative post linking to a far better blog article (Bertalan, I hope that you received some traffic!)
What this tells me is not that my post was great, but that people are very interested in what Facebook (and perhaps social networks in general) can do for scientists. Next question: what should we (the “web 2.0 for science” community) be doing better to capitalise on that interest?
Very true. I get a lot of traffic every time I am up on GTO, but the interesting part is that the posts I consider to be the better ones, are not usually the ones that make it. Perhaps instead of SEO, we all will start trying to optimize for GTO :)
Deepak
November 12, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Thank you, I got some nice traffic from you (the post got more than 2000 visits in 2 days)! But I’ve never been featured by GTO…
Bertalan Meskó
November 12, 2007 at 4:45 pm
It is also the highest traffic spikes I get. Second highest must be Bora I think :).
Pedro Beltrao
November 13, 2007 at 12:51 am
Berci,
You spoke too soon :).
My biggest traffic spikes actually come from Stumbleupon, and on occasion Techmeme, but GTO is the most consistent.
Deepak
November 13, 2007 at 3:36 pm