One can never predict which blog posts are going to be popular among the readers. I posted a video referring to a health didact on Sciencebase recently that was picked up by Lifehacker and gave the site a week-long traffic spike bringing us several thousand of new readers (most of whom seem to have disappeared as the traffic has now levelled off, that’s not a surprise). Similarly, a post showing the patterns formed when a viscous syrup is drizzled on to a moving conveyor belt also went “viral”, similarly bringing in even more new readers.

I post all Sciencebase and Sciencetext blog posts to the Facebook fan page too and assumed that the viscous drizzle would get lots of interest there too. But, now that I’m checking over the Facebook insights, I can see that actually it got very little interest. A few comments, a few likes and only a limited “reach”, whereas unrelated post and far less exciting posts about email permissions and tech things reached far more people but never went viral in any way on the site.

One can never tell just how hard to please some readers might be…oh, so now you want to see the viscous drizzle?

More about the science here