Interesting visitor statistics of our blog: where do our readers come from and how many are they?

Although this blog was never intended primarily to have a big outreach, and was mainly aimed to communicate within our own lab, locally in Lund, you might be interested in some visitor statistics that has accumulated over the summer, since a counter was installed earlier this year. Sofar, we have had about 1500 pageloads, which probably is not equal to the number of visitors, since some visitors come back.

However, I think it is a fairly educated guess that we probably have several hundred visitors, many of them active scientists and biologists. That demonstrates quite convincingly, in my opinion, the value of blogs as an efficient tool of scientific communication. Hopefully, this blog also increases the visibility of our research and could even help to attract students and postdocs, once they discover it.

I have included a graph of the number of downloads this year, and as you see, it has peaked during the summer and then gone down, probably because low activity from us all during the field work and our vacations. Now, however, I think we should all strive to put up more blog posts, and try to keep the blog an active and attractive forum. I have kick-started the fall today with three blog posts, and I am looking forward to more contributions from e. g. Maren, Machteld and Fabrice and of course our colleagues in other countries, mainly Tom and Shawn.

I have also included a map of the geographic origin of downloads and visits. As you see, many downloads come from Sweden and Europe (not surprisingly), but we also have some fans in Australia (hello Tom!), the US (hello Shawn and Ryan) and even Brazil (!). Again, this map and the visitor statistics sends and important message: research group blogs, like the one we have, are extremely useful to communicate science, not only locally within the group, but also globally. So please, do not hesitate to put up new blog posts, including advertisements of your own recent lab-publications, as it increases the visibility of our research and (most likely) results in more future citations. Keep on bloggin'!!! Gotta love it!