I started this blog one year ago. Its been a lot of fun and gone really fast. I’ve done approx 1 post per week on average, which is about as many as I anticipated.

I intended I would blog mostly on research:- phylogenetics, bioinformatics etc but I’ve not done as much of that as I thought. I’ve had less and less time available for research at work. I have to think about how to change that, but I’m still optimistic I’ll get to blog more research in the coming months.
I never got any time to finish creating, and blog about, enormous trees. I really need to get some clear time to make progress with this. I’ve also posted a bit on Darwin-related stuff, and even managed to get a creationist comment (a badge of honour think). I guess there will be more Darwin stuff during 2009.

I’ve used the excellent StatCounter to check out blog traffic. The vast majority of all traffic coming in after searches are googling for some variant of “electronic lab book”. I wasn’t expecting that, especially as I have only one post on the topic. Other searches are as varied as you would imagine. At least that was true until this week when Google searches for “Mike Majerus” and “What Darwin Didn’t Know” have, in just 3 days, swamped everything else from the last 12 months. That tells me that if I want this to be a well read blog I should post more on popular topics, especially BBC TV programs. But, to be honest, I really don’t care about that at all and I doubt I will change the mix very much.

This year my posting plans include-

• Handling next-gen 454 sequence data from environmental surveys
• Large 18s trees again from SILVA
• Some visualisation stuff (I hope)
• Genome-wide orthology detection
• My electronic lab book experiences

Thanks for reading.