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A couple of weeks ago I participated (remotely) in the Royal Society Wiki-a-thon to improve the visibility of women scientists on wikipedia. One of the articles I started because of this event was about Isis Pogson , a British astronomer who worked for many years as an assistant to her astronomer father at the Madras Observatory in India. Of all the articles I created this is the one which has changed the most since - I guess one sign of success on Wikipedia. And this article was nominated as a "Did you know" entry by Gonobobo  a couple of weeks ago, and ended up on the Wikipedia main page yesterday with the text: Did you know: that British astronomer  Isis Pogson  was probably named after  a river , and  an asteroid  was probably named after her? And check out the hits as a result, of the 2277 people who've visited the article since I created it, 1765 (78%) went yesterday. I think that has to count as a success for the Royal Society Wiki-a-thon. :)...

One of the themes of #solo12impact was that the first step in understanding the impact that your online or social media engagement has, is to track your number of followers and other simple metrics of engagement (retweets etc). I would argue the sooner you start tracking the better, as you can observe trends, and you never know what will happen to change your online presence. I found this session really interesting to introduce me to a bunch of Twitter tracking tools. I've experimented with a few before. I'm just going to mention all the ones I know about in this post. One I've used for a while now is " Twitter Counter ". The free version of this tracks the number of tweets you make and the number of followers you have. You have to upgrade (pay) to export this, or see mentions/retweets, or to track back longer than 6 months. One thing I like is the ability to plot trends over long periods, and plot both number of tweets and number of followers on the same graph. I...

I spent yesterday at SpotOn (Formerly Science Online) London . My justification for going was to learn more about tracking the impact of online public engagement. I had a really interesting day, and came away with a bunch of ideas. The sessions I attended were: Raising the Profile of Women in Science Online and Offline (actually on Sunday) #solo12wis Then on Monday: Using Twitter for Science Communication (which turned into a workshop on the idea of using Twitter characters to improve engagement). Storify of this session . #solo12twitter Using Social Media at Conferences and Other Events. Storify of this session .  #solo12 Tracking the Impact of your Online Presence. Blog post taster . #solo12impact. I'm going to blog some thoughts from this session next. And How to Evaluate your Online Engagement. #solo12eval

The interview I recorded with Tom Fielden from the BBC R4 Today show aired at  11:46 UK time, Saturday, 10 November 2012  . Tom also did a nice write up of it for the website: article " Gas Guzzler " You can listen to the show in which this appears for another 4 days at this link: Today Show 10th November 2012 . I recorded the segment and posted in on Audioboo as well. listen to ‘Talking about the Black Hole at the Centre of Our Galaxy on Radio 4 Today Show’ on Audioboo