Sep 27, 2007

Chemical Blogspace Stats

Posted in Chemspy at 4:00 pm by chemspy -- 2 Comments; add your comment

The Chemical Blogspace Zeitgeist page is an interesting round up of chemical blogs. The ChemSpy blog resides at #9 in the top fifty chemistry blogs (trailed slightly by Sciencebase at #13). That in itself is quite gratifying, but it is the other statistics that make for more entertaining reading. Apparently, ChemSpy has a reading index (Gunning-Fog as it happens, based on the most recent three months posts) equivalent to a scientific journal (index of 14). Reading Sciencebase on the other hand is like picking up a Thomas Pynchon novel. But, at least, the site doesn’t rank alongside
In the Pipeline, The Bioenergy Blog, Cheminfostream, and it’s a puzzle…, which all have a Gunning index of between 17 and 20 and so are apparently equivalent to reading a “Manual for Taiwanese DVD player”. Not my words, Cb’s!

By the way, sites also seemed to be ranked on the basis of their use of InChIs, it’s worth checking out this page to see what molecules are being discussed and to see their structures.

Scrolling down, I learn that Sciencebase is fifth most active blog, while, not unexpectedly, Chemspy is not in the top 20 based on activity (frequency of posting). Once again, Sciencebase features in the top 20 based on wordiness (average posts being around 500 words), while Chemspy’s terse commentary (until today, that is) nestles much further down the tree. The final statistic of interest is the measure of friendliness, which might also be referred to as blog nepotism, or blogotism, to coin a word, just how many times a blog links out to other sites in the chemical blogspace. Again, not unexpectedly, neither Sciencebase nor Chemspy feature in the top 20, basically because my posts tend to be standalone write-ups referencing the primary literature and only occasionally have a need to backlink to other blogs. That said, I’d be interested to know if ChemSpy readers would prefer to see more outbound links to related content elsewhere in the chemical blogspace. Please leave your suggestions in the usual place.

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