Originally posted November 11, 2010
Okay, so much like parents celebrate their child’s 15 week and 3 days, we’re celebrating 24 weeks…
November 10, 2010
Hey there SciencGeisters! We just wanted to give a big shout out to YOU, our readers, for visiting, reading, commenting, providing inspiration and generally keeping us going!
Some History and Stats:
Matt and I first conceived of ScienceGeist back in December of 2009 when we sat down over coffee to think about ways we could engage in science/policy issues and get experience writing about it. At the time we envisioned posting a small set of articles for and about the scientific community. We mulled over the idea for awhile and in January, 2010, decided to get serious. We started planning some topics (global warming first) and began drafting a layout for the site.
In March we settled on the name ScienceGiest. It embodied the “spirit of the times” (a la zeitgeist) as well as our passion for science. We quickly bought our domain name and chose a hosting site. We chose “.net” because we wanted to create a community, but quickly accepted the kindness of a family member who had the foresight to register us with “.com” as well. (Thanks, Tom!)
We learned some basic html code and it was May 10th, 2010 that we started with a mission statement…
We initially formulated a series of topic-driven articles that were supplemented by fun/current little science news pieces. These were to be called “Science du Jour” and we soon realized that they were the “bread n butter” of our little project (these are what now populate the Home Page of the site).
It is still our goal to publish in-depth articles on the inter-workings of science and policy. We are planning a blog symposium with a number of other science bloggers (stay tuned for details) as well as a series of guest-authored posts for the new year.
Since it’s inception, ScienceGeist has had 4,072 visits with 1,875 unique visitors! 45% of our traffic has come from referring sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Twitter and ChemBark, to name just a few) so thanks for getting us out there!!!
This last month alone we’ve had 1,616 visits to our site and in October, we broke through the 100 visitors per day benchmark!
So, where are you from, ScienceGeister?
According to Google Analytics, we’ve had visitors from 71 countries/territories! (makes me think of Risk)…
United States- 3,374
United Kingdom- 117
Canada- 81
India- 63
Australia- 57
Germany- 38
Italy- 29
Switzerland- 21
New Zealand- 21
South Africa- 20
Philippines-18
Brazil- 15
Japan- 13
Belgium- 12
France- 11
China- 10
Ireland- 9
Russia- 7
etc
etc
Israel- 4
Greece- 3
etc
Egypt- 2
Kenya- 1
etc
Afganistan- 1
etc
etc
I gotta say, looking at the world map has been one of my favorite OCD activities since starting this site!
Okay, enough of this! We’re just very happy and excited to have you reading and participating in our blog! So as it is our 6 month anniversary and we can’t exactly take you all out to a nice, romantic dinner, please suffice it to say… THANK YOU!
Cheers
~gk and MRH