This is a map of the locations of people who have visited our lab blog over the past two months. I may have shown some of you this before but this past week we broke a bunch of our own records again (graph below) and filled in a bunch more of the gaps! I’m posting it here as it is really quite rewarding to see the reach of our little blog!
Long-term followers of our lab blog (including facebook friends!) will have noticed a change in last couple of months, both in the frequency and in the type of content that we are posting. Basically, we’ve decided to be more active in promoting science communication. In practical terms instead of only reporting interesting lab events we are now also including cartoons, lay-friendly project descriptions and a series of writing guides.
I like graphs…
Most of the website views have been driven by the writing guides but every other page is also getting more traffic. This has come from a little bit of social media promotion by our guys that has led to retweets by some big accounts (eg Write that PhD with 37K twitter followers linked to the guides on Friday, hence the spike this week!). What is quite cool is that the guides already existed as I have been teaching this sort of stuff to PhD and MRes students for the last few years but it was only in January that I thought that they might be appreciated by the wider research community. It really is rewarding to think that people all over the world will hopefully find our content useful!
If you know anyone in Iceland, Greenland, Belarus, Mongolia, Iran, Afganistan, Uzbekistan, Bolivia, Paraguay or any of the countries that are missing in central America or West/central Africa sent them our way, we want to fill in the last few gaps!
LaNts and Laminins 