Thursday, February 5, 2009

Screw you Hasselhoff

One of the entertaining things about having a blog is seeing where the people who visit are from. As one might expect, the majority of people who visit this small corner of the internet are from North America. Many of the hits from outside of this continent are one-offs, who probably got here by mistake, but the UK, Australia and France always show up on a regular basis. What has been really surprising to me is the European country that is most reader-represented. None other than... Finland! So, David Hasselhoff might be huge in Germany, but I'm huge in Finland!
Why? I have no idea.

8 comments:

  1. I like the city overlay onto the map from Google Analytics. Turns out ~ 10% of all my traffic comes from New Jersey. Woo-hoo, Whippany!! What's up?!

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  2. I get a lot of hits from Finland too. What's up with that?

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  3. The nights are long.

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  4. So they should be doing better things than reading blogs. That said, they must have a thing for good science blogs

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  5. There are a lot of foreigners from other European countries doing PhDs and postdocs in Finland. I guess Finland has funding to attract them.

    Based on this, my theory would be that those foreigner scientists, who are not fully integrated into Finnish society, are bored and in their free time read a lot of science blogs ;-)

    Another fact is that Finnish system is very competitive at the level of tenure-track assistant professor and is very much based on soft funding.

    My second (more serious) theory based on this fact is that people are looking for some mentoring and advice from people at the similar career stage in the similar funding system.

    I am not Finnish, but I know a few Fins, and Polish, Romanian, Spanish people who do/did their PhDs there.

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  6. btw I might be an outlier on your map ;)
    geographically. but not if you consider that my background does not match my geography.

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  7. I'm all for outliers. In any case, you've got the best theory so far. I wasn't assuming that any hits from Finland or coming from people born and raised there, but it does seem odd that I get a lot of hits from there, more so than other European countries.

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