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I always wondered how people see the academic world from outside. How do we gauge the interest of the general public on what academics have to say (on average)? One easy way to look at this question is to see the how often people will read an article that has the word ‘academic’ on it.
A proxy on what people read nowadays is digg.com. And the tool to see how often people digg academic posts is now available in Dan Zarella’s blog. Given a keyword, the tool will return data on the average number of links accumulated by stories popular on Digg that mentioned that keyword. This is done with 2007 data.
Well, behold what happens when you enter “academic”:
And compare it to what you get when you type “productivity”:
Why is this important? Well, on average, a single digg increases traffic by 0.10%. So a story that gets 3,000 diggs results in an increase in total traffic to the referring site by 300%.
So, from now on we are a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H productivity blog 
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you !
[how to cite this post]
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AMA citation:
Quesada J. We are now a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H productivity blog. Academic Productivity. 2008. Available at: https://academicproductivity.com/2008/we-are-now-ahhhhhhhh-productivity-blog/. Accessed September 20, 2011.
APA citation:
Quesada, Jose. (2008). We are now a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H productivity blog. Retrieved September 20, 2011, from Academic Productivity Web site: https://academicproductivity.com/2008/we-are-now-ahhhhhhhh-productivity-blog/
Chicago citation:
Quesada, Jose. 2008. We are now a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H productivity blog. Academic Productivity. https://academicproductivity.com/2008/we-are-now-ahhhhhhhh-productivity-blog/ (accessed September 20, 2011).
Harvard citation:
Quesada, J 2008, We are now a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H productivity blog, Academic Productivity. Retrieved September 20, 2011, from
MLA citation:
Quesada, Jose. "We are now a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H productivity blog." 21 Feb. 2008. Academic Productivity. Accessed 20 Sep. 2011.
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Blog, Computing tips, Socializing, Software, Statistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 21st, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Really want to juice the links? Make it Google productivity blog.
Or maybe “Coolest Google productivity blog you’ve seen all day” or “Top 10 Ways to Google Productivity Blog”. Maybe that’s over-fitting to the model a little bit, though…
February 21st, 2008 at 10:23 pm
Cool. I just love reading about a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H and how to increase my productivity in a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H work.
So far, this is the only blog I’ve found that speaks about this niche topic. Well done!
February 22nd, 2008 at 5:11 am
What if … people interested in a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H things don’t use Digg or don’t know yet how to use Digg?
February 22nd, 2008 at 11:14 am
The idea is interesting but I doubt whether it really answers the question:
> How do we gauge the interest of the general public on what academics have to say (on average)?
The vast majority of blog posts or articles from the academic community probably does not contain the word “academic” at all. “Academic” as a keyword is more likely to occur in posts about academic jobs, academic career, and, well, academic productivity
(which may not be of interest to the general, non-academic public) than in posts or articles on “what academics have to say” (e.g. scientific vulgarisation or the role of science in society, economy etc.).
February 22nd, 2008 at 11:15 am
oh and DotMG has a good point too.
February 22nd, 2008 at 3:24 pm
:
“Digg is an interesting news site. You can post a link and a short description to just about anything technology related. You can also vote on the links that are there. Just register and click the “Digg†button to the left of any story/link you “digâ€.
The Digg site then looks at the number of votes over a particular period of time and puts the most popular items on the front page. Digg gets an incredible amount of technology related traffic. Getting on the front page brings down many servers every day. There is that much traffic involved.” (from James D. Brausch’s blog)
IF DotMG is right, then maybe we should have a digg button next to each post. Another similar site is Stumbleupon.
February 22nd, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Note: I think the tool is broken, it says that ‘academic’ has a very bad effect in the body of the text, but it also says it gets 25% more links than average.
Testing the tool with ‘google’ as mr. gunn did get the same effect +25%, but calls it ‘very good’. Looks like a bug to me…
February 22nd, 2008 at 9:26 pm
thanks for catching that bug, it should be fixed now
February 25th, 2008 at 10:13 am
[...] or decrease the popularity on Digg. Jose Quesada first pointed it out, suggesting that “academic” wasn’t a particularly useful word to have in a title. I’ve tried with a few [...]
March 17th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Very useful information.
April 4th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
[...] up on Jose’s musings on good and bad keywords for a productivity blog, I came across an interesting tool to visualize the evolution over time of aggregated social [...]
April 5th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Thank good, we never used “academic” in our blog – wait, I better check
Thanks for linking the tool…
June 10th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Eww, disgusting banner.
Sausage brains.
whats E^E^E^E^E^E^E^E^?
anyways, thanks for the tool =)
cya!
~Nathaniel HackMaple
June 17th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
[...] Academic Productivity) Academic, productivity Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where [...]
August 25th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Thanks! That would really help my seo.
October 19th, 2008 at 9:31 am
The Digg site then looks at the number of votes over a particular period of time and puts the most popular items on the front page. Digg gets an incredible amount of technology related traffic. Getting on the front page brings down many servers every day. There is that much traffic involved.†(from James D. Brausch’s blog)
October 23rd, 2008 at 12:12 am
What about tag pages? I’m finding that alot of my traffic is coming from tag pages. I didn’t see any settings for true/false with regard to tag pages. Thx.
May 26th, 2010 at 2:16 pm
or decrease the popularity on Digg. Jose Quesada first pointed it out, suggesting that “academic†wasn’t a particularly useful word to have in a title. I’ve tried with a few