This blog deconstructed: some surprises

Who reads this blog?

A bunch of cool people including in science, educators, reporters, and patient advocates around the world.

Some of them contact me, almost always to say nice things. Sometimes not so nice. To my knowledge this blog remains the only one in the world on stem cells written by a faculty level researcher, but I expect that to change soon. Really. Don’t remind me that I said that last year too.

If I’m wrong and you are a faculty stem cell blogger out there, please let me know. I want company! Also, my offer of free blog consulting (for whatever that is worth) is still open to faculty as well.

Besides direct emails, as a result of all the nifty web tools available, I know a lot about the readers of this blog. This is no Google or Amazon or Facebook so I don’t have your bloodtypes or genomic sequences (yet), but as a group I know some cool stuff about you.

First off, I’m happy to report that the monthly traffic on our blog has increased almost three-fold in just the last 6 months and 100-fold since the first months of the blog. Back in July 2011 when my piece on this blog was published in Nature, we got about 150 visitors a day. Now that number is 350-400 per day, sometimes more than 1,000.

Visitors come from every major U.S. grant funding organization including NIH (now in the top 20 visitors), NSF, CIRM, DoD, etc.

On any given day, we get visitors from dozens of countries. For example, yesterday on March 7, 2012 we had visitors from 44 countries.  The overall top 10 visiting countries in descending order are the following: U.S., U.K. Canada, Japan, Australia, Germany, Spain, India, Brazil, and China.  However, just in 2012 so far, the top 10 is a bit different in interesting ways. The top 5 are the same, but 6-10 are in 2012: India, Brazil, Germany, Iran, and Spain in that order. The number of visits from Iraq is going up fast.

In addition, visitors come to this blog from almost every state in the U.S. each day.

Most top universities have visitors reading here often as well with our top 10 visiting universities not including UC Davis being the following in descending order of visits:

1) Oxford

2) Stanford

3) MIT

4) UCSF

5) UCLA

6) Wayne State University

7) Univ. of Wisconsin Madison

8) Univ. of Sheffield

9) UNC Chapel Hill

10) UBC

We also get a lot of traffic from biotechs and big pharma, but I won’t mention specifics as I know they are sensitive. However, if you can think of a company with any interest in stem cells they are here reading.

The most popular posts on this blog? They are perhaps not surprisingly often the most controversial, where I tell it like it is, putting my own neck on the line. So as a group, you are encouraging me to take more risks in the content.

Thank you for reading this blog. I will try to keep it real and interesting.

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