Michael Graham Richard

Welcome to all the new readers. I’m impressed by all the interest in that post. It actually got more traffic in less than 24 hours than this whole blog in the past 30 days combined, and I thought I was doing pretty good. The post boosted my ranking on WordPress.com to featured blog on the frontpage, to #1 in the Top Posts list and #6 #5 in the Top Blogs list.

My interests are eclectic, but I’ll definitely keep writing posts in the style of the Space Telescopes and Asteroids ones. As a reader, I really like it when someone takes the time bring together - in a newbie-friendly way - a lot of scattered information about an interesting topic. I’ve become interested in many things after reading good introductory articles, so that’s what I try to create. At the same time, I learn a lot researching and writing, so it’s clearly win-win.

Since I haven’t been involved with a new blog in a long time - not since when blogs were just starting to become more mainstream - I’ve been wondering what the launch of a new one would look like.

Here are the stats for the first 2 weeks of this blog. I’ve written 7 posts including the short introduction one, and have gotten about 1,900 visits so far. That’s an average of 317 visits per post if I don’t count the short introduction, but as you can see from the graph below, it wasn’t evenly distributed.

The first peak is mostly due to my Near Earth Objects and Asteroids post which generated some inbound links, a mention on a podcast and some Google traffic; the post about Carol Dweck’s theory got a lot less attention though Guy Kawasaki sent an email saying he liked it; Paul Graham’s Economic Theory sent over some Reddit and Google traffic, but not tons; the two posts about Craigslist (one, two) didn’t generate the public discussion I was hoping for even if it was interesting to get a direct response from Craig Newark and Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist’s CEO; finally, the other big peak came from my First Potentially Habitable Planet Outside the Solar System post, which I published a day before the story broke on CNN and other big media channels — that can probably explain the extra attention.

So far it would seem that astronomy posts are the most popular, and that’s cool because I intend to keep writing about that topic, but I also have ideas for more posts about psychology and sociology, security and cryptography, and various other things. Stay tuned, stay curious.

I’ve been blogging under a pseudonym at Blogspot.com since 2003, but that blog has turned into mostly a public bookmark for interesting articles and videos I come across. I have decided that I needed a new home for my non-TreeHugger writings.

I have acquired a few domain names that will point here:

• MichaelGR.com
• MichaelGrahamRichard.com
• Michael-Graham-Richard.com

I hope that I will be able to generate enough posts to make this place interesting, but TreeHugger is my first love and it is taking a lot of my time and energy, so posting will most likely be sporadic.