Ten years of Divulciencia-Populscience

Next Monday marks ten years since the creation of my blog Populscience (called Divulciencia in its Spanish version). In this time, I have published 438 articles in both languages, plus another fifteen only in Spanish and eleven only in English.

You may remember that in the post I published one year ago to celebrate the nine years of existence of the blog, I included a figure that seemed to indicate that, after reaching a maximum of about 6,000 visits per month in October 2018, this number slowly decreased until reaching about 3000 visits (one half) in January 2023.

One year later, the figure is this:

It can be observed that starting in August 2023, the number of visits to the blog rose sharply until reaching values not far from the historical highs it had achieved in 2018. What is the reason for this sudden change? Did the number of visitors suddenly double?

No. What happened was this: in August 2023, Google Analytics removed the version I had been using to measure the number of visits, and replaced it with a new one (Google Analytics 4). One of the changes made is this: from now on, the tool counts, not only visits to web pages from a computer (as the previous version seems to have done), but also visits from mobile phones. Apparently, the previous version didn’t do this.

Visits to my blog may have remained more or less constant from 2018 until now. What seems to happen is this: more and more visitors use their phones to read my posts, instead of reading them on their computers. The progressive decrease in visits seems to have been an artifact due to the method used to count them.

In fact, I had another way of measuring visits to my blog, provided by the blog itself. But this measure is less reliable, because it includes visits from automated bots, which should not be counted. I tried to estimate and discount them, but I did not consider reliable the result, which can be seen in the attached figure. However, I may not have done so badly, as can be seen in this figure, which shows a linear growth followed by flattening. In other words, what I have deduced from the other measurement.

I want to thank my readers for their loyalty. The fact that the number of visits has grown from 2014 to 2018 and may have remained almost constant for another six years is surprising and satisfying for the author of the posts.

To finish, I am going to update the list of the people (scientists or not) most cited in the blog posts, which I last displayed four years ago.

 

Name	Times quoted in PopulScience
Albert Einstein	75
Isaac Newton	54
Stephen Hawking	31
Isaac Asimov	28
Charles Darwin	27
C.S. Lewis	26
Aristóteles	25
Richard Dawkins	20
Arthur C. Clarke	20
Alan Turing	18
Georges Lemaître	18
Ptolomeo	17
Ray Kurzweil	17
Platón	17
Jules Verne	13
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin	12
Kurt Gödel	12
Roger Penrose	12
Aldous Huxley	10

 

So I have cited at least ten times 19 different persons in the 455 articles in the blog. Among them there are 14 scientists, two of whom were above all great philosophers; and five writers, of which three were great popularizers of science. Three of them are still living; the others are dead.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread on Anniversaries and Organization: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca