Two years of network blogging

Today is the second anniversary of starting this blog, and this is post number 222. Thanks to all of our visitors over the past two years — we hope that the next year will be as productive as this past one has been.

I have summarized here some of the accumulated data, in order to document at least some of the productivity.

As of this morning, there have been 104,211 pageviews, with a median of 129 per day. The blog has continued to grow in popularity, with a median of 70 pageviews per day in the first year and 189 per day in the second year. The range of pageviews was 69-812 per day during this past year, and 3-667 the previous year. The daily pattern for the two years is shown in the first graph.

Line graph of the number of pageviews through time, up to today.
The largest values are off the graph. The green line is the half-way mark.
The inset shows the mean (blue) and standard deviation of the daily number of pageviews.

The erratic nature of the daily variation is apparently all too typical of blogs, and there appears to be no good explanation for it.  So, we might take this as a good example of the stochastic nature of the web.

There are a few general patterns in the data, the most obvious one being the day of the week, as shown in the inset of the above graph. The posts have usually been on Mondays and Wednesdays, and these two days have had the greatest mean number of pageviews.

Some of the more obvious dips include times such as Christmas - New Year; and the biggest peaks are associated with mentions of particular blog posts on popular sites. There also continue to be a few instances of "rogue" visits. These tend to be visits from sites such as Referer and Vampirestat.

The posts themselves have varied greatly in popularity, as shown in the next graph. It is actually a bit tricky to assign pageviews to particular posts, because visits to the blog's homepage are not attributed by the counter to any specific post. Since the current two posts are the ones that appear on the homepage, these posts are under-counted until they move off the homepage, (after which they can be accessed only by a direct visit to their own pages, and thus always get counted). On average, 30% of the blog's pageviews are to the homepage, rather than to a specific post page, and so there is considerable under-counting.

Scatterplot of post pageviews through time, up to last week; the line is the median.
Note the log scale, and that the values are under-counted (see the text).

It is good to note that the most popular posts were scattered throughout the two years. Keeping in mind the initial under-counting, the top collection of posts (with counted pageviews) have been:

129 42 73 172 10 98 58 49 29 19 67 188 8

The Music Genome Project is no such thing Charles Darwin's unpublished tree sketches Carnival of Evolution, Number 52 The acoustics of the Sydney Opera House Why do we still use trees for the dog genealogy? Faux phylogenies Who published the first phylogenetic tree? Evolutionary trees: old wine in new bottles? Network analysis of scotch whiskies Tattoo Monday IV Metaphors for evolutionary relationships Phylogenetics with SpongeBob Tattoo Monday

4,552 3,100 1,964 1,891 1,641 1,451 1,359 1,352 1,298 1,247 1,178 1,088 1,051

This is quite a different list to the same time last year. Posts 129, 42 and 172 continue to receive visitors almost every day.

The audience for the blog continues to be firmly in the USA. Based on the number of pageviews, the visitor data are:

United States United Kingdom Germany France Russia Canada Australia China Brazil Poland

41.1% 5.6% 4.9% 3.8% 3.3% 2.7% 2.1% 1.4% 1.0% 0.8%

You will note that this list is dominated by English-speaking countries. The blog does have a link to Google Translate to help other people, but it is clear that the audience is made up almost entirely of those people who are comfortable with English (or Australian, at any rate).

Finally, if anyone wants to contribute, then we welcome guest bloggers. This is a good forum to try out all of your half-baked ideas, in order to get some feedback, as well as to raise issues that have not yet received any discussion in the literature. If nothing else, it is a good place to be dogmatic without interference from a referee!