You may remember that earlier this year, I launched Autism Hub in an effort to centralise the blogging efforts of people who blogged along themes associated with autism – what they all have in common is no interest in curing autism. Some bloggers are parents, some are autistic people, some are scientists – some are all three!
However, I was totally unprepared for how successful the Hub would become in such a short space of time. There are now over 30 members whereas the Hub began with less than 20. I have at least 4 applications sitting in my inbox right now waiting for me to deal with them. The Hub sends each of its members a simply mind-boggling amount of traffic. I don’t know if any of the other Hub members are as obsessive about stat tracking as I am (and seeing as not a few are with Blogger, that would prove to be tricky) but every _week_ sees an increase – and from an increasingly diverse audience. Personally, I’ve had referrals from a .uk.gov source, a .nhs.uk source, the CDC in the US, the FDA in the US – what _seems_ to be the Canadian autism association – the Times, Guardian, Daily Mail (snigger) and erm, The Sun newspaper in the UK and a variety of US newspapers I don’t know very well aside from the New York Times and (I think) the Boston Globe.
And of course, there’s the ever-watching, ever-silent mercury militia. Hi guys :o)
In terms of numbers, I (_this_ site) get(s) around 1000 unique visits a day via the Hub. Its difficult to tell how many visitors the Hub itself gets because its not the sort of site that _gets_visitors, more the sort of site to _distribute_ visitors, but just about every Hub members places a small (less than 5kb) graphic on their sites. So far this month (7 days) this graphic has processed 86mb of data – this means that single graphic has been seen by 17,613 people. that works out to about 75,000 unique visitors a month, or 2,500 per day. And that’s not counting the over 400 people who access the feeds direct from the 2 feeds the Hub has.
This has all happened in less than 3 months. Incredible.
And yet, the Hub itself has become a victim of this success – its not a very flexible design and is begging for a decent bit of information architecture applied to it. I’ve recently expanded both the front page and the RSS feeds – this is just the beginning of what needs to be a fairly substantial overhaul.
I am delighted that so many people are interested in a more ‘no need to cure’ point of view than some people (ahem) might feel comfortable with – it gives me a sense of hope that our children and our adult friends and colleagues may have a slightly less judgemental future than was previously feared.
The Hub bloggers are doing a great thing – they are disseminating truth, respect, positivity, objectivity and tolerance. I thank each and every one of them and I promise to continue developing a site worthy of their efforts.
Left Brain Right Brain 
Thanks for all your wonderful support.
Autism Diva blog doesn’t have a fancy blog traffic tracker. She is probably getting more traffic than she thinks she is getting… which is about 300 visits per day. It looks like half are first time visitors who come by way of google searchs for things like, “most toxic substance” and other more pertinent topics like “autism HBOT” and “autism Lupron.”
Autism Diva gets a few visits from university URLs which are always fun to see and there are a few from overseas military which always seems odd, but they are probably military moms and dads of autistic kids.
Autism Diva blog is like syndicated or something on livejournal in at least a couple of places. It’s funny to see the blog duplicated there inside a livejournal blog. People are reading the Diva Blog there, too, but one doesn’t know how many.
http://yonjuunana.livejournal.com/friends?skip=30
Out of the last 50 visitors according to “tracksy” 7 were from autism-hub.co.uk.
Kevin,
As a fellow blogger and also a reader, I can’t thank you enough for creating the Hub. It’s a fantastic resource and a makes it so easy to keep up with all of the great autism blog entries.
I still don’t understand why you denied Fore Sam’s request to join. :O
I
It’s all about “you” isn’t it, Anne?
😀
I think she ment I as in iee iee skipper or all those in favour say I.
Thank you so much for “the hub.” It was the impetus to ‘come out’ on my main blog and start the more-or-less anonymous Aspie Dad blog so I could be more frank than I am comfortable with elsewhere.
Maybe that’s a Roman numeral one? That’s pretty obtuse, though. 🙂
Yeah and saying 1 wouldn’t make senses in tis context
Why are you celabrating this ABOMINATION! Now more parents will by in to your delusions about ‘different wiring’, ‘nero-diversity’ and ‘tollerence’ when they should be helping the child become noramal.
Right It has been said now so there no need for Sue M or any other member of the merc-miltia to but in here and go off on a tangent.
(I Cesear perhaps?)
I clicked into this thread from the Hub. It’s a great resource.
Some Alexa ranking stats:
Autism-hub.co.uk: 152,603
Neurodiversity.com: 187,711
Safeminds.org: 2,190,175
Generationrescue.org: 680,037
Enjoy!
Oh, and
Evidenceofharm.com: 5,051,545
Sorry.
I love the Autism Hub. It’s a big time-saver.
That’s what I thought I posted.
Kev, I appreciate the hub too, it is huge efficiency tool for me – and it’s puzzle ribbon-free!
To all the contributors, a quick thanks for the thoughtful content.
🙂
Kev, Autism Diva’s latest blog entry isn’t making it to the hub. bub.
Alexa:
Traffic Rank for autismdiva.blogspot.com: 242,940
Autism Hub is just above “autismspeaks.org” and that’s got all the power of NBC behind it.
Traffic Rank for autismspeaks.org: 175,099
Maybe Bob Wright should be buying ad space on autism-hub.co.uk
David Kirby’s page is below 5 million?
autismmedia.org 5,116,166
Erik Nanstiel’s baby is below David Kirby’s ugly site? (smirk)
I guess he doesn’t worry to much about bandwidth.
Traffic Rank for nationalautismassociation.org: 2,431,514
Traffic Rank for autism-society.org: 136,907 (ASA)
Traffic Rank for autismwebsite.com: 247,021 (DAN!)
Anne said: Sorry.
I love the Autism Hub. It’s a big time-saver.
That’s what I thought I posted.
Not in so many words but it was clearly implied. :-p
I think Anne just got all verklempt.
Alexa’s rank for neurodiversity.com is 187,711, not too shabby.
Another interesting place to look is Technorati, which monitors weblogs specifically. Here are some Technorati blog rankings (as with Alexa, lower is better:
neurodiversity.com weblog: 78,342
La Diva: 25,765
Kev: 19,321
hatingautism: no rating at all (hah!)
My own blog (few months old):
autismnaturalvariation.blogspot.com: 315,754
(Unfortunately, the reviews are aggregated for all of blogspot.com.)
hatingautism.blogspot.com: 328,136
Everyone: I’d recommend not visiting the above.
Did you also see the Alexa trends on the mercury sites? Generationrescue.org, reach down 19% in the last 3 months. Evidenceofharm.com, down 80%. Safeminds.org, down 86%. It’s all pretty sad.
The lesson from this: acceptance is inevitable.
I posted a link to autism hub on a mailing list last week. (I think it was last week, anyway.) It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. 🙂
(If I come back and someone is wondering why, I can probably post a link to the appropriate area of the archives.)
Evidence of Harm (paperback) #20,402 (hardcover) #32,056 in books at Amazon.com.
Send in the Idiots (Stories from the Other Side of Autism)(Hardcover)
#146 in books
Let Me Hear Your Voice : A Family’s Triumph over Autism (Paperback) #8,249 in books
Looks like it’s dying on it’s own.
Attention mercury parents…
All your web presence are belong to us
It is the most positive thing on the web I’ve seen.
I will add another thanks for the hub 🙂 It is a great resource and a nice way to find sites without having to keep track of where they all are.
I promoted the hub in a presentation I gave in my education class this evening. I gave a presentation on Mottron’s work and gave out 5 web addresses as the best sources on the web for autism info.
autism-hub.co.uk
neurodiversity.com
autismdiva.org
gettingthetruthout.org
and
autistics.org
I explained what each site was about, briefly.
I’m hoping I educated about 40 future teachers on what autism is and how to respect their autistic students. I demonstrated flapping for them. I told them that just about everything they read in the media about autism is wrong and to be careful about believing it… of course, I told them that there hasn’t been an epidemic.
My professor is a special ed teacher at a junior high in Sacramento. He seemed to agree with the points I was making.
I had powerpoint slides and everything!
Autism rules I looked at your link but didn’t understand, please elaborate
Nathzn, I think Auties Rule was implying that somebody set them up the bomb, to use the proper Zero-Winglish. “Them” being autism=mercury websites.
Happy to be part of the Hub. Thank you for putting this together.
re they really so foolish as to not see that was Bill Gates
Bill Gates is an Aspie (which explains some of the functionality of Windows and Word, IMHO).
I’ve formalized the traffic findings in my latest post.
I am shocked that there are people who don’t want to cure autism. May be these people should adopt severly autistic orphans.
Anonymous – why are you shocked? Were you too shocked to realise that we are already parents to autistic children?
I am shocked that there are people who don’t want to cure autism.
I am shocked that there are people who think that there’s some simple “cure” for what it undoubtedly a highly complex issue with clear indication of genetic predisposition.