Life has been a bit busy lately and the two year anniversary of the Whisperer sped past without me even noticing. Happy second birthday Whisperer – you are officially a toddler!
To be honest with you, I didn’t think the blog would last this long. I thought I would run out of things to say long before this, but lucky for me every day life seems to provide endless blog fodder and people are kind enough to keep sending in guest posts. I am confident, so long as there is no dreadful change in the social media policy of RMIT University (which has been very open and tolerant so far) we will see at least one more Whisperer birthday.
The Thesis Whisperer started as a blog called ‘Research News blog’ on our University Learning Management System (LMS) ‘Blackboard’. I think the closed format of Blackboard, which required an RMIT login, might account for the disappointing 26 hits it had in the time it was there. I was wondering whether I should bother carrying on with it when a student rang and asked me if I was “The Thesis Whisperer”. I laughed because it seemed such a good job description for my strange occupation as research educator. The next day I realised that it would be a great new name for the blog and embarked in a ‘re-branding’ exercise, starting with a move to WordPress.
Suffice to say – Best Idea Ever.
If you are wondering if all the time that goes into running a blog (and it’s a lot) is worth it, I say a resounding “Yes!”. I’ve met so many wonderful people and had many opportunities to travel over the last two years, all because of my work here. One of the unexpected benefits has been the connections the blog has made for me within my own university. I have had the privilege of mentoring colleagues, in particular The Research Whisperer and The Teaching Tom Tom and I am pleased to see other academics at RMIT starting to establish their own blogs. The support of a growing community of like minded souls who meet regularly at our weekly “Shut up and Write” sessions is essential to me professionally and personally, so thank you everyone.
On the Thesis Whisperer’s first birthday I did a summary post which included some of the stats that I see ‘behind the curtain’. These stats are interesting for what they say about you, the audience, so I thought I would share some more this time.
The first ever post on the blog was on June the 7th called “How is research writing different to driving a car?”. This is the 194th post – a grand total of around 200,000 words – of course not all of these written by me. I have been lucky to have 34 other people write for the whisperer, some occasionally and others more regularly. I’d like to thank all these people publicly as they are vital to the success of the Whisperer and its sustainability. Like many other academics, I am regularly struck down by attacks of ‘busyness’ and would be unable to sustain the load alone. Besides, I think the blog benefits from many other voices and points of view (if you are interested in contributing, you can see our editorial guidelines on the About Page).
It’s hard to say without any comparison statistics, but it seems this blog is popular, both here in Australia and overseas. By the time this post goes to air I estimate the Thesis Whisperer will have had around 580,o00 unique views. I am particularly pleased by the number of comments it gets as they are my favourite part of running the blog. When I finalised this post last week there were 3622 comments; I think this is a testament to the willingness of PhD students, as a community, to share their knowledge and experiences with each other. There’s many a claim that PhD study is isolating. It can be, but in my experience you can also make many new friends. I hope people feel like they have a lot of virtual friends here.
A lot of the literature on blogging is obsessed with ‘traffic’, so how many ‘hits’ does this blog have a day? Well it varies a lot and if I wrote about writing all the time it would probably be a good deal higher. Every post goes out to nearly 4000 subscribers. On a quiet Sunday the blog will get around 700 hits; on a normal weekday it gets between 1500 and 4000 hits. Most of this ‘traffic’ comes from the Thesis Whisperer social media sites Facebook and @Thesiswhisperer on Twitter.
Our busiest day ever was 6,151 hits, when we got “Fresh pressed” for the first time (featured on the WordPress home page). That day it was Ehsan Gharie’s post “What to say when someone says ‘Should I do a PhD?”. The most popular post of all time is “How to write 1000 words a day (and not go bat shit crazy)” which shouldn’t surprise us I suppose! The top ten most popular posts authored in the last year, other than Ehsan’s fresh pressed effort, were:
1) The Valley of Shit
2) How do I start my discussion chapter?
3) Publications in your PhD
4) 5 Rookie Researcher Mistakes
5) 5 ways to look more clever than you are
6) What not to wear: the academic edition
7) What to buy your favourite PhD student for christmas
8) How I use technology in my PhD
9) 5 ways to soothe an anxious PhD student
10) How to get a job in academia when you finish your PhD
WordPress, the cloud based provider I use to make this blog, is a statistics nerd’s idea of heaven. One of the things it enables me to do is to see the search terms which people use to find the Whisperer, which are an interesting window onto common concerns of PhD students. The top ten search terms from this year, other than variations on the term ‘thesis whisperer’, were:
1) Writing
2) Papers
3) Zotero vs endnote
4) Shut up and write
5) Should i do a phd
6) 1000 words a day
7) Getting things done
8) Apps for researchers
9) Discussion Chapter
10) How to get into a PhD program
Last year I thought about what these stats said about why people visit the Thesis Whisperer. I think the analysis I made then still stands and that most people visit it for:
- Getting an understanding of some of the things that ‘no one thinks to tell you’ about doing a PhD
- Emotional support and understanding of the emotions which the PhD can provoke in us
- Advice on ‘soft skills’ (mostly related to communication and technology)
- Advice on writing and productivity (and procrastination)
- To see what other PhD students are doing
But I’m wondering – why do you visit? What sort of posts do you like reading and perhaps more importantly – what topics would you like to hear more of? Love to hear your thoughts in the comments as we head into year three!