This blog is today less than four months old. I published the first post on September 9, and a whopping 102 more since then.That’s an average of almost one post per day, despite SVP, SauroBonn, and Christmas holiday. Where did all this come from? And how was it all received?
Views
To my utter surprise, dinosaurpalaeo has almost over 13,000 views by now! Close to 1,000 in September, pretty exactly 3,000 in October and 4,000 in November, and over 4,800 5,000 in December! Much of the initial rapid rise and some of the steady increase I certainly owe to the cool guys at SVPOW. They repeatedly gave me a plug, and a bunch of tip on how to improve my blogging. One of the posts they linked to, It’s time for more Plateosaurus from October 5, is the second-most popular post, with over 450 views.
Posts
Another topic that drew a lot of readers is the series of posts on my SVP talk.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
I’ll have to add something on the brief mention I made about sauropods and racewalking, but that will take a lot of hard thinking. I have to be careful to restrict what I write here to things that are really included in the abstracts of talks I gave, otherwise I place my upcoming paper(s) on the topic at risk: “not novel”.
Together with the homepage (~3,850 views) these two topics make up the Top 5 posts, followed by quite a gap in popularity. Next on the list come the Encyclopedia Britannica dissections. In between them is my short discussion of the physics flop in Carpenter et al. 2011, unsurprisingly, as I advertised it on the Dinosaur Mailing List. Other popular posts include Theropod Thursday 1, 2, 5 and 6. Some other posts that I thought pretty good fall by the wayside, but that’s likely due to their early publication date.
Pictures
OK, time for a nice picture! The coolest one I posted is, I guess, this one:
An anterior view of the MFN’s Giraffatitan mount (panorama image created in hugin).
The Media Library says that I uploaded over 350 MB worth of pictures, 242 in all. I guess it is time to have a reader poll on best and worst image while the total number is still small enough.
Search terms
What’s kinda fun to check out is the search terms that brought people here. “heinrich mallison blog” is first on the list, and “heinrich mallison” is third. To my utter surprise, “dinohyus” is second. Weird search terms include “ugly beast”, “ugly giraffe”, “scaling a horse”, “brown black striped mammal” (what post of mine on earth did this yield???), “glass caps”, “momy lionel”, “far away stuff”, and so on. “blof” seems to be a common way to misspell “blog” (no surprise), and a lot of people apparently search the net for “dinosa”. And someone wanted to learn “how to say kentrosaurus”.
The future?
So what’s in store for dinosaurpalaeo? I’ll keep things they way they are: I’ll post what comes to my mind, I’ll happily stick to the blog subheading about rants and raves (more of the former) about dinosaurs and stuff (again, more of the former) as it gives me so much leeway, and I’ll probably slow down a lot. To be honest, I am slowly running out of good dinosaur photos to show, I guess I have enough for some 50 or so more posts at most. You can expect a few more “how to” posts, and you can expect to get bored stiff whenever my next paper comes out: I’ll be blogging about it from sunrise to sundown for a whole months 😉
That said, I’d appreciate feedback! My posts get very few comments, so speak up!
With that, let me wish all of you a happy new year 🙂
dinosaurpalaeo 
CooL!
Maybe you should consider doing a dinohyus special. That will rake in them eyeballs! 🙂
All the best in 2012!
I’d comment more often, but I’m not a scientist myself and am mindful of Mark Twain’s dictum about it being better to be silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.
dinosaurpalaeo is an excellent blog and you do fascinating work. The bit about the articular cartilage in (non-avian) dinosaurs likely being thicker than in mammals that had been used in modelling dino movement (because it is in birds and crocodiles) may be the coolest single thing I’ve learned in the past year.
BTW, as I recall, I found your blog searching on your name thanks to the Kentrosaurus post Darren Naish did at TetZoo and your lively comments there.
And the Giraffatitan pic is awesome, especially because you posted it at a size that required a lot of scrolling to get to the bottom of. No small scale pic could convey the sense of that awesome neck going on forever.
I look forward to being bored with your next paper. 🙂
Thanks, Mike!