Happy Birthday Sandwalk!

 
Today is the first anniversary of this blog. My first posting on November 4, 2006 was Welcome to My Sandwalk. Since then there have been 1282 other postings for an average of 3.5 per day (whew!). My original goal was to average one science-related article per day and I think I've come close to that average. The others are just for fun.

I was told when I began that you have to attract hundreds of views per day in order to generate interesting comments and discussions. That seems to be about right. When I started I saw this blog as an experiment and I intended to re-evaluate after six months. When the six months was up I had not met many of my goals so it was a time of soul searching [My Six Months Are Up!]. What happened was I avoided making a decision so I just kept going by default. I'm glad I did. There are now lots of interesting discussions going on in the comments sections.

All of us science bloggers have discovered one important feature of science blogging. You hardly ever get comments about science. If you check those articles where I talked about science, there are almost no comments or discussion. On the other hand, as soon as you mention politics, religion, or racism, there are dozens of readers who want to speak up.

It's a puzzling phenomenon. That's not to say it isn't fun to talk about those non-science issues—it clearly is a lot of fun or we wouldn't be doing it. The puzzling thing is why there aren't more comments about the science.

From time-to-time I asked for photographs of readers who have walked the real sandwalk. I'd like to acknowledge those who sent in pictures.

Cody
The God Delusion
T. Ryan Gregory
PZ Myers
John Wilkins

I hope I haven't forgotten anyone. Send photographs if you're not on the list already.

For those of you who are interested in the numbers, here are the statistics for Sandwalk. What they mean is that Sandwalk is on the verge of making the transition from a low popularity blog to a medium popularity blog. For comparison, Pharyngula gets one million views a month or 20X more than Sandwalk. In terms of the Top100Science Sites Bad Astronomy is 468th, Pharyngula ranks 794th, and Sandwalk is 1006th

Sandwalk has a long, long way to go. I think I'll try for quality instead of quantity!

Here are the top five postings in terms of number of comments: [Arguing Against God] [The Evolution Poll of Sandwalk Readers] [Propaganda Techniques: Shift the Burden of Proof] [Genomics Is Dead! Long Live Systems Biology!] [Dennett on Adaptationism].

Sandwalk readers are a diverse group in terms of geography. Yes, it's true that a majority of readers come from USA addresses, but there's still a large number of you from Europe, Asia, and Australia. There are even a handful of readers from South America and Africa. Oops ... I almost forget—there are Canadian readers as well.

On other issues the Sandwalk readers are less diverse. About 70% of you are atheists and almost all of you accept evolution—even though it may be the wrong version of evolution.

Next month's poll is going to ask about education. I suspect that most readers have been to university. This month the poll will be about your political views, e.g. where you position yourself on the left-right spectrum. I'll be surprised if most readers don't lean to the left.

Anyway, thanks for reading so far. And please, keep those comments coming—that's the most fun part of blogging.

P.S. If you have any suggestions for improving the looks or content of Sandwalk this is your chance to mention them.

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