A few points for readers and contributors.
- SPAM. I get a few hundred a day. Akismet does a superb job of precision/recall but occasionally a few genuines get false spam. If so, repots and mail me and I’ll see if I can find it
- Puzzles. The answer to last year’s puzzle was ordinary sulfur, S8. Everyone who has every come across it would recognise it. I have had only one reply to my current problem – the most incorrectly submitted molecule in publications – so I may not continue issuing puzzles.
- Spellchecker occasionally goes wonky so forgive the typos
- Please send in comments – without them I haven’t a clue what people think. I know I have readers – but they just lurk. If you are a bid timorous, mail me and I’ll post the comment anonymously.
“Timorous” … Possibly. “Lazy”? Yup, that’s more me. You have no idea of the effort it has cost me to post this comment, Peter 🙂
If you want an idea of the number of readers use Feedburner to power your RSS feed.
I echo your statement about blog viewers sending in comments. I know that the ChemSpider blog is read as I get many off blog comments and emails..even phone calls. However what I have already come to recognize is that blogs are read and rarely replied to. Likely you have the same tools reviewing the access to your blog as we do and I can see the traffic clearly to the posts. But commentary is minimal. This community is very tight in terms of people speaking out and the majority of commentaries come from the usual suspects. And that’s okay…I judge many people prefer to read rather than actively participate. From some I have heard that this is “safer” because of their company politics. Baoilleach is correct about FeedBurner and we will be adding it shortly.
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Feedburner is set up at both the ChemSpider Blog and the ChemSpider News blog. Peter, I really recommend doing it. It is very easy to set up and I for one like to read what you have to say and would welcome it in my inbox over having to go to the website.
Peter, I’ve been enjoying your reporting of WWW2007. I wish I had been there in person.
We’re trying to advocate an Open Data approach in the transport world with our National Transport Data Framework project. It’s even more of a closed world than chemical publishing!