Crossing the Rubicon of 10^6 * 0.25

Synthetic Daisies will has achieved another milestone (250,000 reads) in just a few short days! When I started this blog in December of 2008 (roughly 8 years ago), I did not have any real expectations for readership. I was, however, drawn to analytics and the power of blogging as a platform to reach new audiences. And I kept updating milestones for the blog when the number of visitors hit 20000, 50000, 100000, 120000, 150000, and 200000.

Readership has increased exponentially since blog inception, despite the uneven sampling points in time.

Since the blog's inception, I have increasingly used social media for outreach activities (both at this blog and elsewhere). Part of this has been motivated by a deliberately radically open science strategy [1-4]. For a while, I was cross-posting from a Tumblr blog (Tumbld Thoughts), as well as a blog run by #SciFund (Fireside Science). I also have my entries cross-posted to the OpenWorm Foundation blog.

Visualizing radical open access. COURTESY: Open Reflections blog.

NOTES:
[1] Kriegeskorte, N. (2016). The selfish scientist’s guide to preprint posting. The Winnower, 4. doi:10.15200/winn.145838.88372.

[2] Chawla, D.S. (2017). When a preprint becomes the final paper. Nature Research Highlights, doi:10.1038/nature.2017.21333

[3] Lancaster, A. (2016). Open Science and its' Discontents. Ronin Institute blog, June 28.

[4] Faulkes, Z. (2012). Why I published a paper on my blog instead of a journal. NeuroDojo blog, September 7.