Blog spring clean

I've decided to give my blog a little spring clean by changing some of the fonts and headings and adding a new header because I was getting tired of it. At the same time, I've been checking out my Google analytics stats for the blog - an extract is shown below for a recent period in early March 2012...

Not everything I post on here is directly related to my academic research (and some isn't really at all) but the value of blogging for academics is very clear to me, for three main reasons. 

1. As someone who produces a lot of visuals (usually maps) in my work, the printed page is not always a good medium for publishing because of the costs associated with colour printing and the limited pages you are assigned within a journal paper. Basically, it's much easier and more efficient to publish spatial visualisations here; 

2. Since I began blogging I've been contacted by countless researchers and students from all parts of the world either seeking to share their knowlegdge, borrow some of mine or just simply to say they are working on similar things too. Given that what I work on can be quite 'niche', this has been a really useful development; 

3. By putting some of my work on here I'm able to make connections with the outside world in a way that is not possible with journal publications - since they're usually locked behind a paywall and they are normally published 18 months or more from when they were written. The immediacy of blogging is hard to beat (even if it does allow a lot of unstructured, unmoderated content to appear!) and it's also quite therapeutic.

It does take a time and effort to keep it going but most of what I put on here is directly related to my ongoing research and represents a kind of 'snippet view' of what I'm working on at any given time or just an insight into what I find of interest.

Does Anyone Look at This Blog?

When I started this blog I wasn't really sure if anyone would ever look at it but as it turns out people somehow find it and some lost souls even return more than once! Even more surprisingly (for me) is that people often get in touch with me because of it, which is really good because I like to make contact with like-minded researchers and share ideas in this way. Google Analytics allows you to keep track of the number of visitors and the country of origin so I thought I'd highlight the usefulness of that and also post some charts of the visits to my blog...

Here's a chart showing visits per day since I started blogging (as usual, click images to enlarge)


This is a Google Analytics map showing visits per country (still work to do in Africa!)


Most blog visits in the USA come from California


The point of this post is threefold. 1 - to highlight the magical properties of Google Analytics. It really is brilliant. 2 - to demonstrate that blogging does help connect like-minded people and make collaboration possible. 3 - to write about something other than deprivation!

P.S. There will be more on deprivation in the near future...

ScreenToaster - a new tool

I've recently discovered ScreenToaster (via demogirl). What on earth is it? It's a tool for making toast online. Okay, not really. It's a really smart tool that allows you to record your screen activity, then upload it to their website where other people can view it. So, if your Mum wants you to show her how to do something it's great for that, but it could also be of use to people who teach various software skills - in Universities for example. It's not a replacement for traditional screencasting software but I rate it very highly as a new tool on the scene. Quick example below...

Free online screen recorder

As you can see, the quality is very good and you just copy and paste the html text into your web page, blog or whatever and then share it with whoever you like. You can increase the size of the video to fill the whole screen and it remains quite high quality. I recommend it. That's all for now but more e-learning things will appear in the future...