InsectaPod Blog

This blog isn’t super buggy, but its accompanying podcast sure is. As a result I’m always interested in finding other people who are discussing entomology online, especially through blogs. I’be been reading Bug Girl’s blog regularly for over a year now, and I was disappointed yesterday when she posted that she’ll taking a sabbatical in response to someone “outing” her (she’s been blogging anonymously). So I went searching for some more stuff to fill the void. What I found is listed below.

1. The Ant Room. Kari Wilkie writes about ants. Lots of stuff about ants.
2. NC State University Insect Museum. I think departmental blogs are a great idea, I’d like to see the folks in Anna’s laboratory maintain one.
3. Bugs for Thugs. I’m not sure what’s thuggish about this one, but the photos are great.
4. The Myrmecos Blog. More ants, and I learned a new latin word today.

And, finally, just a weird thing that came up in this search. I read a post on Kari Wilkie’s blog in which she quoted a physicist saying that other branches of science are “just stamp collecting.” After that, I was searching google for entomology blogs and came up with this one from Jean-Michel Maes, an entomologist in Nicaragua. The linked post gave me a laugh, because I don’t need to speak Spanish to know that “Sociedad Filatelica de Nicaragua” means stamp collecting.

We’ve been thinking a lot lately about ways to measure site usage. Last month we wrote an article about InsectaPod Cast for an entomology publication and found ourselves wanting to make very specific claims about who has been listening to the podcast. this same info will be valuable as we near the end of the fiscal year and argue for funds to continue the podcast, and good user stats play a role in accessibility and usability.

Thus far, we’ve been relying on the visitor statistics offered by our web host. For the most part, this has been acceptable. I’ve also read some posts that suggest using multiple trackers is valuable, and that page views, which I tend to focus on, are less valuable than user sessions, which my current host doesn’t give me much insight into. As we really dug into the process of using this metric to see if InsectaPod Cast was meeting its goals, though, I realized that the log provided by my web host just wasn’t cutting it.

I’d used statcounter in the past, which offers some tracking for free and then charges for data storage beyond the most recent 100 visitors. Anna suggested we use google analytics this time, though, after hearing it discussed in a presentation at National Extension Technology Conference. Google Analytics has also been used in some projects at the Writing in Digital Environments Center at MSU, where I am a researcher. So I activated that today, and we’ll see what happens.
Up to this point, we’ve seen visitors, unique visitors, and page views increase nearly every month since we posted episode one in July 2007 (the only month there was a decrease was December 2007, a month in which we didn’t post an update). Popular keywords include bedbugs, pinned insect collections, insect gentalia, and ludifisk. The most commonly viewed pages are the most recent episode, the rss feed, and this blog. It’ll be interesting to see what new information we can glean from google analytics, and compare it with what we’re getting from the web host.