Thursday, December 8, 2016

Visitor statistics to the EXEB-blog: the mystery of May 2016



Posted by Erik Svensson

The EXEB-blog has been running since 2009, and I occasionally check the number of visitors. I do not post as much as I did in the past, and nowadays it is mainly our forum for announcing EXEB seminars.  I used to hope that we could use it more actively, for outreach and scientific discussion posts, but as many seem to be unwilling to contribute I have more or less given up on that. 

However, I note that we do still have quite many visitors who are interested in our lab-meetings and seminars, and I guess it is good to have a presence in the bloggosphere. At the present moment, we have had over 300 000 visitors over these 7 years, and the average number of visitors per month hovers between 8000 and 12 000 per month. Naturally, some posts attract more visitors, such as the one when we discussed a PNAS-paper with the title "How does penis size influence male attractiveness in humans?" 

Something strange happened to our visitor number in May 2016, however (check visitor graph above). Suddenly, the visitor number jumped up almost fourfold to about 40 000 visitors, and remained high during the summer. As this is normally quite a slow period for the blog with no regular meetings, I find it interesting but difficult to explain. Was it simply some robots that scanned our blog then, or were there suddenly an extreme interest in the research activities of EXEB? Well, we will probably never get to know the answer, but it is at least fascinating to think of what it could have been that caused this spike of visitors!!!

No comments:

Post a Comment