2014 Blog in Review

The year 2014 marks the first full calendar year in existance for the Slow Searching blog. In the past twelve months I have written 54 posts, including this one. Almost half of these posts (24) were about Cale and my 100 mile walk to Great Wolf. The other large chunk (23) focused primarily on research, including  a sizeable group (9) about selfsourcing. The remaining seven posts touched on a variety of topics, including three related to gender issues in the computer science.

Some of the most popular Slow Searching posts of 2014 were about:

• Academic Writing (Introduction, Related Work, Authors): The three most popular posts of the year were all about how to write a strong academic paper, with the series going viral on Weibo. I plan to finish the series in 2015 with new posts about how to write the Methodology, Findings, and Conclusion sections of a paper.
• Children at Conferences: I only wrote one post on the topic this year (about leaving your kids at home), but all of the posts in the series were quite popular in 2014. My post from 2013 about Attending a Conference with a Baby was linked to from several relevant blog posts (The Professor Is In, Tenure, She Wrote), and another about organizing Child-Friendly Conferences grew into an article for the ACM-W Connections newsletter.
• Walking 100 Miles with an 8-Year Old: My son Cale and I walked from Bellevue, WA to Great Wolf for no reason other than to see what lay between the two endpoints. The 1.5 hour drive took us a week on foot. It was an amazing experience, covered by the Bellevue Reporter, photographer Shanna Paxton, my tweets, and a number of posts on this blog.

Several posts from 2013 also continued to remain popular, especially those about:

• Writing a Book as an 8-Year Old: In 2013 my son Griffin published a 64-page fantasy novel titled The Marakon Ways. The book sold hundreds of copies and was made into an audio book by a publishing company in London.
• Appearing in a Standardized Test: Students across Texas had to answer reading comprehension questions about me as part of their 2013 annual standardized testing. The two posts I wrote last year on the topic (Questions about Me and Standardized Fame) are the two most likely to be found via a search engine. Pretty sure from the queries that all of the search traffic comes from students looking for the answers. Perhaps I should post a cheat sheet for the Jaime-related test questions.

In reviewing the most popular posts, I notice that compilations seem to be popular - so I just created a new "compilation" tag. Popular compilations include: a list of behavioral logs available for research, research papers on gender in the STEM workplace, and trip reports. A post I wrote last week compiling the research I published in 2014 is already among top visited posts, despite being brand new.

Last year I started a series of posts about Related Work as a New Year's Resolution. More recently, I have also started to post Paper Summaries that each provide an overview of a paper I have published. None of these posts have proven to be particularly popular, but I personally find them to be very useful. So a goal for 2015 will be to post on both topics at least once a month.

The blog received 16 comments in 2014, excluding deleted spam comments. I love it when people leave comments; it helps me know I'm not writing into a void. The page view counter goes up (from 20k at the beginning of the year to 51,583 right now), but it's hard to believe that those numbers represent anything real. So please take the time to say hi! And thanks for reading.