Over at http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/.
After 6.5 years and over 1300 posts, a new chapter begins.
My sincerest thanks to everyone who's read, commented and supported this blog over the years for your time and attention. And I'll be seeing you over at the new digs!
Warning! Navel gazing ahead!
At the beginning of January, I did a longish post about the hit stats for the blog over 2008. It had been a good year as well as about 18 months since I'd last posted stats, so I thought it was a good time. I also favour transparency in such things; I appreciate it when others post their stats as I think it demystifies the whole "popularity" business.
Little did I know what the beginning of 2009 would bring.
Not that the rush has been that impressive -- I've gotten 19,113 pageviews so far this year compared to 73,212 for all of last year (26% of last year's total in 21% of the year so far, so a slight increase). It's how it's come.
So far this year, I've had my most popular post ever as well as my 6th most popular. That's since June 2006 when I started using Google Analytics. Before then, however, my traffic was only about 5-10% of what it is now so the data from then probably won't affect "all time" totals much.
So, what are those two posts?
As it happens, October 14th is a pretty busy day in the world:
The Toronto Nature Network mafia are organizing another event this coming Sunday evening:
Science 2.0: the future of online tools for scientists
A pub night and panel with Timo Hannay, Cameron Neylon, and Michael Nielsen, hosted by Nature Network Toronto
What does the future hold for the way we do science? Are online repositories such as GenBank and the physics preprint ArXiv, or social tools such as Nature Network, about to change science profoundly? To find out, join Nature Network Toronto for an interactive panel discussion over drinks at the pub.
Date: Sunday September 7 at 7:30pm
Place: Fionn MacCool's (181 University Avenue, near corner with Adelaide)
Map: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=181+university+ave+toronto&sll=46.55886,-95.712891&sspn=34.760328,92.8125&ie=UTF8&z=16&iwloc=addr
About the panelists:
Timo Hannay is Publishing Director of Nature.com at the Nature Publishing Group, publishers of Nature and over seventy other scientific journals, plus numerous online resources for scientists. He is responsible for new online initiatives in social software, databases and audio-visual content. Timo trained as a neurophysiologist at the University of Oxford and worked as a journalist and a management consultant before becoming a publisher.
Cameron Neylon is a biophysicist working in molecular biology, biophysics, and high throughput methods. He has a joint appointment as a Lecturer in Combinatorial Chemistry at the University of Southampton and as a Senior Scientist in Biomolecular Sciences at the ISIS Pulsed Neutron and Muon Facility. He is developing an electronic notebook for biochemistry labs which has lead to his involvement in the Open Research movement and to his group moving to an Open Notebook.
Michael Nielsen is a writer living just outside Toronto, Canada. He is currently working on a book about The Future of Science. One of the pioneers of quantum computation, he coauthored the standard text on quantum computation that is the most highly cited physics publication of the last 25 years. He is the author of more than fifty scientific papers, including invited contributions to Nature and Scientific American.
For more information visit Nature Network Toronto (http://network.nature.com/group/toronto), or contact Eva Amsen (eva.amsen@gmail.com) or Jen Dodd (jen@jendodd.com)
Yesterday I got back to work after four weeks of vacation. We spent three fairly soggy weeks at a cottage just north of Ste-Agathe, Quebec, about 1.5 hours north of Montreal. Although the lake we're on is perfectly beautiful, we didn't take as much advantage as we normally do because of the weather. BBQing was also highly curtailed. We've rented this particular cottage a number of times over the years.
We also spent a few soggy days in Montreal visiting with family and friends; we were back in Toronto last Wednesday to get the boys ready for two weeks of summer camp. They left on Friday. The last few Toronto days of vacation were also fairly soggy (and explosive, too)
Movie-wise, we saw the The Dark Knight in Montreal and Hellboy 2 in Kingston. My wife and I finally got around to seeing Get Smart this past kid-free Saturday.
Rain means more reading, course, and I certainly did a fair bit of it. Here's the tally of books that I've read in the last four weeks. I've noted the ones that are in progress. Three out of the four of us read Heart-Shaped Box and we all enjoyed it. The Ruins and Triptych were both read by two of us (with me still in progress on Triptych).
Well, it's that time again. I'll see you all back here around the second or third week in August.
One thing that will be a bit different about the blogging break this year is that I've scheduled some Friday Fun posts for while I'm away. It's just recently that Blogger has allowed us to write posts and schedule them for later publication, something most other platforms have had for a while.
Blogging breaks are for reading books, of course. So, here's some of the books I'm planning to read over the next little while. It's a nice mix of novels (mostly horror this year, for some reason) and popular science. The popular science, at least, I'll end up reviewing here. Those reviews will probably be the first few posts when I return.
Faithful readers may recall that I was named the Blogger Blog of Note on June 9th. Well, there was quite a spike in hits for the two weeks that I was featured in the various places that Blogger showcases the Blog of Note.
However, Internet fame is fleeting and things are now more-or-less back to normal. Here's an excerpt from my Xtreme Tracking page from today:
Sincere apologies for so many inwardly focused posts lately, but this is one more.
Last Monday's appearance as the Blogger Blog of Note fortuitously lead to a rather nice little item about the blog and me in today's Y-File, York's internal email newsletter. Thanks to Sandra McLean for such a nice profile!
(FWIW, the blog got got over 12,000 hits in the week following the Blog of Noting -- compared to the 600-700 hits per week I've been getting lately that's quite a jump. Even today, a week later, I'll end up over 1000 hits.)
Update 2008.07.07: the Y-File story was reposted in ylife, the student email newsletter. As well, my sister Michele pointed out to me that the Y-File story was also highlighed on Academica a few weeks ago.
Check out this event posting on the Nature Network Toronto Group:
There will be a pub night for people in the Toronto Nature Group, and for those thinking of joining, on Wednesday June 18th at the Duke of York (39 Prince Arthur Avenue).
Please pass on the message to your friends and colleagues – they don’t have to be a member to come along! It will be a great opportunity to meet other people in the GTA who are interested in different areas of science.
By a handy coincidence, there will be a Cafe Scientifique on the “Future of Medecine” taking place at the Duke of York from 6 to 8pm, so we’ve moved the time for our pub night back a little to 8pm so that people can go to both.
To kick off the Nature Network Toronto Group, we're having a pub night at the Duke of York (39 Prince Arthur Avenue, Toronto) at 8pm on Wednesday June 18.
The Toronto Group is an online community of scientists and people with an interest in science from the Greater Toronto Area. We'll be having online discussions aimed at keeping you informed of local science events, and events to meet and network with each other - such as the upcoming Pub Night.
Check us out on http://network.nature.com/group/toronto!
You're welcome to join us at the pub night whether you're a member or just thinking about signing up - hope to see you there!
Checking my referrer logs this morning I see that I've been named today's Blogger of Note by the Blogger team. It's quite an honour and I'd like to thank them for giving this humble blog that very kind recognition.
Please stick around and check out some of the other stuff you can find here. Probably my most famous and well know series of posts are:
I'm delighted to say that I've been invited to give a workshop in Montreal this coming February 15th based on my OLA presentation from 2007, "Blogging for Professional Development."
Here's the whole announcement:
McGill's School of Information Studies (SIS), CLA Montreal Chapter, CLA Emerging Technologies Interest Group (ETIG) and the McGill SLA Student Group present:Web 2.you: A Workshop for Information Professionals
Friday, February 15, 2008
Starting at 9am in Room MS42 at McGill's SIS, 3459 McTavish Street
Map / Schedule / Register
In the spirit of the Web 2.0 movement we aim to bring together a cross-section of participants in a day-long skill share. Those just being introduced to these new technologies would benefit from the experience of presenters and co-participants. Others with more advanced skills will have the opportunity to lead discussions as part of our "unconference" lunch. For all participants this will be an excellent opportunity to reconnect and learn what is being done with emerging web technologies locally, internationally, and in virtual environments.
We are delighted to announce that presenters include Jessamyn West who will present "Web2.0, Library 2.0, and Librarian 2.0" and John Dupuis who will present "Blogging for Professional Development"- view their bios . Rajiv Johal & Beth Dunning will also present “Is Boolean Dead? Researching and the New Web” and Amy Buckland & Janis Dawson will present “A Second Life for your Library”.
My review of Walt Crawford's Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change has been reprinted in the November 2007 issue SLA Scitech Division's SciTech News.
Christina contacted me a few months ago about getting permission to reprint the article and I was very pleased to grant it; SciTech News is always full of interesting information so it's nice to be included. For those of you not already members, the newsletter is certainly incentive to join one of the several divisions that publish it: Chemistry, Engineering and SciTech, Aerospace section of Engineering and Materials Research and Manufacturing section of Chemistry.
(In your best "One Million Dollars" Dr. Evil voice.)
A bit of a milestone here at CoaSL. This is the 1,000th post since my first one way back on October 3rd, 2002. A thousand posts in a little over 5 years is not much in comparison to a lot of blogs out there but it's something I'm pretty happy about and even proud of. This humble blog has certainly brought me a few small perks over the years as well as connecting me to a community of librarians and scientists I truly appreciate. It's given me an opportunity to join in a conversation about the present and future of our disciplines and professions in a way that I couldn't have imagined in a pre-blog world.
So, thanks for listening everyone!
I've been getting very few spam comments recently and a lot more real comments. So I've decided to try a little while without moderation and see how it goes. Also, the comment notification emails are working again after quite a while where they didn't so I actually know when people comment without relying on the moderation notices.
Let's all enjoy our new freedom and comment away!
Meredith Farkas has published the results of her survey of her readership's favourite blogs. Check out the list; there are certainly some surprises, most notably that the Annoyed Librarian came in as #1.
CoaSL finished in the 3-6 Votes aggregate, a result with pleases me quite a bit. When the survey was announced, I figured I would get between 0 - 5 votes so I'm quite happy to poll in the upper part of that range. I would like to thank those of you out there that voted for me; I appreciate your support and will continue to blog about things that interest me and, I hope, you as well.
What does the survey mean? First of all, the number of people who voted is quite small, only 218. For the top 10 or so, it probably fairly represents people's true preferences. Beyond that the numbers of votes per blog is quite small so the results are vulnerable to the vagaries of readerships, linking and the way the survey was publicized and are therefore probably much less indicative of anything in particular.
Messages?
I noticed yesterday on Walt's blog that The Online Education Database has compiled a list of the top 25 librarian blogs. By some miracle, CoaSL comes in at #13. Due to the appallingly poor methodology (browse around Technorati for reactions), OEDb has left a good chunk of the most prominent blogs out: Library Stuff, Information Wants to Be Free and Tame the Web to name just the ones that come immediately to mind. The main problem is that they used the DMOZ list of library bloggers, which is incredibly limited and out of date. Of course their other sources of data, such as Google page ranks and Technorati rankings, are suspect as well.
In reality:
A hearty welcome to everyone who's found their way here via the latest What's New @ IEEE in Libraries! Stick around, visit, leave a comment, send me a message on Meebo.
My most famous posts so far have been the My Job in 10 Years series, some book reviews as well as my series of interviews with people in the scitech world.
John Dupuis, a member of the IEEE Library Advisory council and the science librarian at the Steacie Science & Engineering Library of York University in Toronto, Canada, is the author of a weblog providing news and other information for academic and science librarians. Called Confessions of a Science Librarian, the blog features an assortment of posts covering anything from book reviews, recent news, software tips, general opinions, and fun facts. Updated often and written with a refreshing combination of humor and intelligence, the blog is sure to contain something for everyone.
It's that time again. I'll see you all back here sometime around the first week of August. Have a fun, safe and restful summer.
I expect that I will be checking my email and the blog comment moderation queue about once per week.
I've fallen behind a bit on my book reviewing, with two finished books to write up while I'm off: The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin and the just finished Trials Of The Monkey: An Accidental Memoir by Matthew Chapman. I haven't bothered with a poll to help choose my summer reading this year, but I thought I would share the titles I've chosen to get me started:
I've been using Google Analytics to track my blog traffic for a little over a year now and so I've finally come to a point where I have 12 months of pretty good data – July 2006 to June 2007. This seems like a good moment to take a look back and see what's happened over the last year, especially since it more or less covers my sabbatical leave that started last August.
Before June 2006 I only used the extreme tracking service to monitor traffic. It seems to count things a bit differently from Google so I hesitate to do direct comparisons. However, during the year July 2005 to June 2006 I got a total of 8,727 hits, for a monthly average of 729. This past year, Google gives me a total of 26,928 page views for a monthly average of 2,244. As I'm writing this, I've already surpassed last year's total for July.
That's quite a dramatic increase; most of that is due to both an increased posting frequency (from one or two per week to 4 or 5 per week) as well as a concerted effort to post better. I really made an effort to do more than just quicky, newsy posts and concentrate of offering real commentary and analysis of important scitech library issues. As well, the My Job in 10 Years series proved to be quite popular as has the occasional interview series, raising the profile of the blog quite a bit. Needless to say, I'm very pleased with the increase. (And I would like thank all my visitors over the years for their time and attention.)
Blogging better has meant that I was mentioned more often in other blogs, which in turn meant more traffic. Interestingly, a majority of links from other blogs seems to have come from science blogs rather than liblogs. My niche, partaking of both the liblog world and the science blog world, is a small one but one that I'm quite happy with. Some of the major supporters of the blog out there include Walt Crawford, Coturnix, PersonaNonData, Jane, CuriousCat, TWiL and, of course, all the scitech library bloggers (whom I'm not going to attempt to enumerate, but you know who you are).
Another thing that made me want to do this post is Walt Crawford's post from a few weeks ago Getting your fifteen minutes where he talks about his own traffic (about 85K for May) and Steven M. Cohen's for the same period: about 1 million. Mine was about 3,500 for the same period. Reflecting on the differences I note that I'm not bothered by them; I certainly don't begrudge either of them their success. I do what I do, hoping to please myself and generate some traffic as a side effect. On the other hand, it did get me thinking about taking a closer look at my stats. An interesting note is that while my hits are quite a bit lower than Walt's, our current Technorati rankings are in the same ballpark: he's around 44K and I'm around 50K. The highest ranking liblogs (such as Librarian.net or Information Wants to be Free), Technorati-wise, are under 1K. Whatever that means, and I'm not sure Technorati tells us much that is useful. For what it's worth, Scintilla has me listed as the 123rd most popular science blog.
Below is a chart of the last twelve months of pageviews and unique visits. As you can see, there was quite a dramatic increase starting with January this year, right after the post on A&I Databases. It's more or less platformed the last couple of months. June would normally have been a slower than average month, what with all the conferences, but two 10 Years Series posts boosted the numbers.
So, here are top 10 lists from July 1, 2006 to June 30, 2007, with a bit of commentary on some of the interesting ones.
Top 10 Posts
As those of you actually visiting this blog in the virtual flesh will notice, I've added a Meebo widget to my sidebar. I promise to try and spend a least of couple of hours a day logged in to Meebo, so if you do see me online when you visit, say Hi and maybe we can discuss a recent post. I've never been much of an IMer, so we'll see how it goes, but I'm certainly willing to give it a try. I'm also considering adding Meebo to some work-related projects I'm thinking about, so I'm anxious to see how it goes.
As well, I've also activated a long-dormant FaceBook account (I joined a year or so ago but never did anything). My public profile is here and the internal one is here. No friends yet so if you're on FaceBook, share a little friendship love and give me a poke or nudge or whatever. (It's going to take a little while for an old fogey like me to get a handle on the lingo and rather arcane and convoluted architecture of the site). I'm also thinking in terms of work-related applications here, so I'm hoping to become pretty comfortable by the time I'm back to the real work world in August. Also, if I'm violating some incredible FaceBook ettiquette thingy on my profile, please let me know.
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