Monday, October 07, 2013

1000 Posts

Somehow I've now written 999 post in just the last 7 years (minus 10 days). For my 1000th post, I'm going to look back at the blog through the eyes of Google Analytics. According to GA, the top 10 most viewed posts have been:
  1. I'm that Guy in which I confess to being the guy who's made it so difficult to open potato chip bags. This is the only post I've ever had that "went viral", as you will soon see by comparing the number of pageviews (45,658 pageviews)
  2. Swimming and Viscosity in which I take xkcd to task for assuming that adding gelatin to a swimming pool would slow down Michael Phelps (or anyone else for that matter) (12,448 pageviews)
  3. Bouncing Jello at 6200 frames/second which shows a pretty cool slo-mo video of bouncing jello (6,477 pageviews)
  4. Donuts which surprises me all the attention it has received since I only made a quick comment that the production operators running your experimental stuff are more productive with donuts (that you supply with your own money) readily available. (6,445 pageviews)
  5. A Monomer I won't Work With in which I discuss why I won't work with urushiol, the active ingredient of poison ivy, even though it makes incredibly beautiful coatings (4,683 pageviews)
  6. Peak Plastic? Not a Chance in which I emphatically disagree with Professor Chachra that we will ever see peak plastic. (She thought that since plastic is made from oil and since we will one day hit peak oil, then we will also hit peak plastic. A logical argument except that plastic can be and in fact already is made from things other than petroleum. Ooops! We may not be able to grow enough corn to replace all the oil that we use, but we can easily grow enough corn to replace all the plastic we use.) (4,334 pageviews)
  7. The Toughest Lesson from Grad School in which I discuss a mindset that my thesis adviser imparted on me to never stop thinking about pushing for more results from all experiments.(3,196 pageviews)
  8. The Largest Molecule in which I discuss molecules that are macroscopic in size and in some cases so big that you need a crane to lift them (only to then be trumped in the comment sections by astrophysical entities!) (3,004 pageviews)
  9. The Cox-Merz Rule Rules in which I profess my love for the Cox-Merz rule, that empirical relationship that allows us to take data from oscillatory shear measurements (in the lab) and apply them to non-oscillatory settings (real world processes) (2,677 pageviews)
  10. Rubber Gloves - They're Not All the Same in which I talk about how the ubiquitous nitrile glove may not be the best glove in all situations (2,476 pageviews) Sadly, because of the safety issues associated with this, the number of views needs to be much, much higher.
All told, there have been 450,397 pageviews. A goodly number to a non-blogger (Hi Mom!) but more about that in the coming days.

The audience has been worldwide, with the United States showing the most views (199960, which is about 44%), and with France coming in second (27005 pageviews), followed by the UK (23652 pageviews), China, Canada, Germany, the Ukraine, Australia, India and Belgium. Surprisingly, the English speaking countries were not in order of 1, 2, 3...as I write exclusively in English (other than the occasional Latin or German expression).

And what have I gotten from all of this? Well, just like when you referee a journal article, I can take all the money I've made from boggling plus 5 dollars and I can buy me a 5-dollar-footlong sandwich at the local Subway shop. Speaking of refereeing, the blog has given me enough visibility that I now actively refereeing articles for the Royal Society of Chemistry, something that I enjoy doing, but doubt that I would have been approached had I kept my silence within the corporate environment that I work in. I am honored by each and every request.

And speaking of corporate environments, this blog got started because the company that I worked for 7 years ago actually ACTIVELY supported its people participating in social media. I can't say that I ever had a client initiate a business deal with my previous employer because of the blog, but I do know that it helped seal the deal in many cases by providing credibility about my knowledge of polymers. It's totally difference with my current employer to whom social media really doesn't have much value. Except when it is done via their corporate outlets, all vetted by Legal department and ...

As I say in my bio on the homepage, these opinions are strictly my own. Any overlap between them and my employer must be considered an accident. To 1000 more!!!

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