My 1st blogiversary!

Or should that be anniblogary? Whatever the word is, you know what I mean: I started this weblog exactly one year ago.

In the past year, I’ve written posts about various topics, but the focus has, of course, been the brain. Perhaps I should have called this weblog Neurohistory, because I’ve written a number of posts about the history of neuroscience, such as 100 years of Alzheimer’s Disease, Exorcising animal spirits: The discovery of nerve function and The discovery of the neuron, which has just been published in the Science Blogging Anthology compiled by Bora Zivkovic. These posts have been some of the more popular items on this blog, and I’ve very much enjoyed writing them. But an even more appropriate name for the blog would be Neuroethology, because it’s the posts on animal behaviour that I’ve enjoyed writing about the most. Recent ethology items I’ve written include Bats don’t echo brain theory, Fish use logic to infer their social status, Monkey conflict management and Cannibalizing cheating wives’ offspring, but there are many more.

If you’ve been reading this blog for some time, you may remember that it originally looked different. The screenshot below might stir a few memories! I don’t remember exactly when I switched to the current theme. About a month ago, I switched to a third theme, but then reverted to the curent one a few days later.

It’s been an eventful year of blogging. The highlight for me has been the inclusion of my essay in Bora’s book. To be included in this book, with top science bloggers like PZ Meyers, Phil Plait and John Hawks, and professional science writers like Carl Zimmer, is quite a big deal for me. But there have been other high points too: I’ve been featured in Seed’s Daily Zeitgeist twice – once in August of last year, when Jake submitted the same essay that appears in the anthology, and again in November, when PZ submitted something about I wrote about bats; I’ve started contributing to the Institute of Ethics and Emerging Technologies; and I’ve been invited to join the Scientific Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation.

The first big spike in my graph showing the number of visitors came from a link to this post from Slashdot. But I didn’t feel the full ‘Slashdot effect’; an item on Slashdot generated a thread of several hundred comments, one of which contained a link to me. This brought in about 400 new visitors from it, pushing my new daily record up to about 780. Then there was the ‘PZ effect’ – a link from Pharyngula pushed my ‘Best day ever’ up to about 1,200 visitors. Soon after that, a link to this post from a Spanish-language Digg-type site called meneame.net increased my record to around 5,200.

But my best day yet was in December: this post was stumbled upon late one night, and the next morning I’d had over 4,000 hits. By the end of the day, the counter had reaching 5,407. The internet is a funny old thing, and one can never tell what items will be popular. The post that produced my biggest spike yet required very little effort on my part, and I certainly don’t consider it to be one of my best. On the other hand, some items that I’ve spent long hours researching and writing have been barely noticed after being posted!

I’m not hugely concerned with my statistics. It’s all very well when there’s a big spike in the graph, but the vast majority of those people never return. For me, it’s far more satisfying when the number of regular readers increases, even thought these increases are usually small. At the moment, I’m getting an average of 1,000 visitors a day, my Technorati ranking is about 7,500, and more than 600 people are subscribed to my RSS feeds. There are more statistics in the screenshot on the left.

I’ve tremendously enjoyed writing this blog, mainly because I love to write, and because I’ve learnt much in the process of researching and writing my blog posts. Things always change, though, and, by the end of 2007, I think (or hope) that my personal circumstances will be different. As a result, I’ll have less time to “blog”. To say that I’ve become rather attached to my weblog is a bit of an understatement – it feels like my other baby! So I’m pretty sure that I’ll continue to maintain this site despite these imminent changes.

I’d like to thank everyone who’s linked to me over the past year, especially Dan, Vaughan and Chris, who have done so often, and PZ Myers, the big dog of science blogs, who’s linked to me not once, but twice. I’d also like to thank all my readers, particularly those few who comment regularly, and those who have left encouraging comments. I hope that you’ll all continue reading Neurophilosophy.