The demographics of a blog readership – updated

About two years ago, I posted on the distribution of readership of this blog. The passage of time has increased this from 144 to 176 countries. There are apparently between 189-196 such, so not quite yet complete coverage!
Of course, it is the nature of the beast that whilst we can track countries, very little else is known about such readerships. Is the readership young or old, student or professor, chemist or not (although I fancy the latter is less likely). Another way of keeping tabs on some of the activity are aggregators such as Chemical Blogspace, which has been rather quiet recently. Perhaps we have become too obsessed by metrics, and with the Internet-of-things apparently the “next-big-thing”, the metrics are only likely to increase. This will only encourage “game playing“, and I urge you to see a prime example of this in the UK REF (research excellence framework), the measure which attempts to rank UK universities in terms of their “excellence”.

Ah well, I had better leave this blog and go off and check on my h-index just in case it has notched up another integer.

Henry Rzepa

Henry Rzepa is Emeritus Professor of Computational Chemistry at Imperial College London.

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  • I first met with Becks in the early 70s. The shop was in South Tottenham opposite South Tottenham station. This was convenient for me then aged about 12 for travel from Barking.

    The shop had a wonderful chemical garden in the window of sodium silicate. Thus I started my first steps in chemistry.

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