Lab Soft News Turns Three Today; "State of the Blog"

Happy Birthday, Lab Soft News. You turn three years old today. The very first blog note was posted on December 21, 2006 (see: Reinventing Pathology: The Autopsy). Interestingly enough, this same theme of "reinventing pathology" has been a persistent one during the course of the last three years.

This will be a brief "state of the blog" note just to bring readers up-to-date. A blog rises and falls and the basis of the interest and enthusiasm of its readers and, on that score, one could conclude that  that the patient is healthy:

• A total of 1,036 notes have been posted on Lab Soft News during the three years and these have stimulated a total of 349 comments. I have come to the conclusion that a blog such as this one is usually not very controversial and thus does not generate much comment traffic.
• Inbound readers currently number, on average, 107 per day. Added to this number are 210 daily email subscribers using Feedblitz, 131 daily RSS subscribers using Feedburner, and 75 daily RSS subscribers using Google Reader. This yields about 523 readers per day. About 80% of them are unique because this is the percentage of subscribers to the blog.
• The reader breakdown by country for the past month is as follows: 73.1%, U.S.; 5.0 %, unknown; 3.2%, Canada; 2.2%, India; 2.2%, Brazil; and 1.7%, U.K. Google Analytics documents that recent readers have come from a total of 48 countries and territories.
• In terms of referring web sites to the blog, 10.2% are from Google and 7.6% are from Yahoo. Confirming these data are those from Google Analytics that shows the following in terms of Traffic Sources: 54.4% direct, 26.0 % referring sites, and 19.4% search engines.
• The average time per reader on the site is 1.25 minutes and readers view, on average, 1.4 pages per visit. This data are reasonable in that most blog readers tend to dwell only on the current material. This is confirmed by the bounce rate of 82.0%, which is the percentage of readers who arrive at a web site entry page and then leave without going any deeper into the site.

Well, that about wraps it up. Stay tuned for another year of interesting news and comments about the lab medicine and pathology world.

Comments

[Jim Sundeen]

Coherent thinking about the big picture with the appropriate level of concern for the future.

[Judson]

I just recently found this blog. Looks really good and interesting, keep up the good work! (I'm subscribed to the typepad autodetected feed)