CS Community: Impact Statistics and Related Numbers.

For those of you interested in readership statistics, I have tried to put my hands on as many numbers as possible. Without further due, here they are:

Currently, in order to provide information to this blog and attendant pages:

• there are about 500 pages being crawled every day,
• I have on average between one and two good discussions with one of you or a researcher outside of this community on the subject of compressive sensing per week.
• There has been about 280 entries on Compressive Sensing, most of them featuring extremely recent preprints.
  

On the readership's side:

• ~30 people are reading this blog directly in their e-mail box,
• 102 people are reading this blog through Google Reader, while another 60 maybe reading this RSS feed thanks to Feedburner.
  
• ~180 visitors/day or about ~5000 visitors/months (not unique) are coming to the site with about half of that traffic from the search engines and from wikipedia.
  
• The Compressive Sensing LinkedIn group has 24 members since its inception a week ago.
• The readership and linkage to Nuit Blanche have enabled it to reach a PageRank of 5, while the Big Picture site has a PageRank of 3.
  
• Some people come back often to either the blog or to the Big Picture site and some people stay for long periods of time (see the stats below gathered over a year and a half time period)
  

On the impact side, I have had some widely differing accounts. This mostly stems from the fact that:

• I link directly to papers and Google Analytics or some other counters do not do a good job at counting those hits,
• Sometimes Nuit Blanche is not the only blog/site pointing to the page or paper,
• People read the blog through e-mails, rss readers, google cache or through the site itself,

For all these reasons, I currently estimate that about 60 to 100 people will click through to the paper listed on the blog the day it is posted. I also estimate that over time that number is doubled. One thing is important to remember, once it is featured on the Rice Compressive Sensing repository page or on this blog, Google knows about it and it becomes visible much before it eventually is published on a journals' sites. Sometimes this may lead to a very large audience as evidenced in the statistics of this video: It has now reached 2950 viewers from 250 a month ago, I am not sure how that happened, if one of you know more about this please let me know.

I have renovated the Big Picture on Compressive Sensing site but it needs additional cleaning and attention.

LinkedIn just sent me this this week:

First, thank you for managing your group on LinkedIn. We sincerely appreciate the time and effort you devote to your members, and we know they value it. Together you have made Groups one of the top features on LinkedIn.

This Friday, we will be adding several much-requested features to your group:

• Discussion forums: Simple discussion spaces for you and your members. (You can turn discussions off in your management control panel if you like.)
• Enhanced roster: Searchable list of group members.
• Digest emails: Daily or weekly digests of new discussion topics which your members may choose to receive. (We will be turning digests on for all current group members soon, and prompting them to set to their own preference.)
• Group home page: A private space for your members on LinkedIn.

We're confident that these new features will spur communication, promote collaboration, and make your group more valuable to you and your members. We hope you can come by LinkedIn on Friday morning to check out the new functionality and get a group discussion going by posting a welcome message.

I am wondering how this can be used for the Compressive Sensing LinkedIn group. Initially, it would be a great way for companies and employers to advertize about jobs that require an understanding of Compressive Sensing as listed in CSjobs. Thoughts ?