Website analytics are getting harder to trust: AI search summaries are cutting overall traffic, while AI apps and tools are increasingly showing up in the vague "direct" bucket instead of being properly attributed. Using real data from three sites over 2024–2026, this post shows search traffic share collapsing and direct traffic share surging, and I conclude by asking what this all means for…
For World Refugee Day, I helped launch CARE — a new resource archive on the Careif charity website linking to over 2,000 external resources on refugee mental health. Building it within the existing Squarespace site surfaced some real limitations, particularly around page hierarchy and folder structure, and prompted a new accent colour to distinguish the section. With the launch done, there's still…
Away from work, I am a Mac and iPad user. If I want to check my calendar, I open a calendar app. If I want to check my email, I open an email app. At work though, I’m locked into the standard PC-based, Microsoft environment. So if I only want to see my calendar, I have to open Microsoft Outlook and that runs the risk of me seeing (and subsequently getting distracted by) my email inbox. In this…
This is a blog post I originally wrote in September 2011 when I lived in Davis, California. It was written shortly after I heard the news that my grandad had died and was written in his memory.
After many years, I’ve bitten the bullet and made some changes to this website. Some of these are cosmetic and may not be noticed, but there are many underlying changes to the infrastructure including a lot of small, but notable, accessibility improvements.
A blog post about the many different blogs that I’ve had over the years and about my desire to hopefully blog more going forwards.
A short tale of how I unexpectedly ended up creating a website for an artist friend.
An increasing challenge for those of us working in the world of website analytics is the impact on traffic from Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini. The traffic – or as I will come on to discuss, the lack of traffic – from such platforms is a relatively new phenomenon. However, it adds to other relatively recent challenges such as a rise in what is known as ‘direct’…
How I ended up walking 70 miles a month…all while working at my desk. This post looks at the twin joys of walking pads and excessive data logging.
It’s time to reveal my yearly theme for 2024 that’s inspired by the Cortex podcast. I’ll also reflect a little bit on my failures with last year’s theme.
Microsoft’s Copilot is an AI chatbot that utilises OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology. I attempted to convince Copilot that rather than being a cutting-edge AI bot, the answers that it was providing were instead typed by a human named Bob.
I recently came across this blog post by Tony Stubblebine which seemed like something I should shamelessly copy. Paraphrasing from that blog post: If I can’t find at least 52 highlights from the year then something is wrong with my life. So over the last few days I’ve been thinking about what has gone well for me in 2023 (both at work and at home). It was a bit of a struggle to get to 52 items but…
At the turn of the millennium I was finishing my PhD in Nottingham. During that time I was in a band (the Sunflowers) and we had a lot of fun writing songs, playing local gigs and recording a couple of albums. I played rhythm guitar in the band and very occasionally sang (badly, it has to be said). I also wrote quite a lot of songs. One of my songs which I was really pleased with was called…
ICR logo in Lego by Keith Bradnam After four and a half years as the Digital Strategy Manager at the The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) , I am moving on to pastures new. My new role — at The Royal College of Psychiatrists — will probably feature in some future blog posts, but for now I wanted to reflect on my time at the ICR. In particular I want to look back at three broad areas which have…
I was recently interviewed by 46 questions For Scientists who have a remit to "Make science inclusive by highlighting those that do it" . Although I am no longer a scientist, they seemed keen to include people who represent 'science-adjacent' areas (such as science communication). The questions were fun to answer. If you were wondering, they went with 46 questions as that is the number of human…
Photo by Webaroo.com.au on Unsplash This blog post is repurposed from a very long Twitter thread (which became a bit unthreaded)… Over the last week, I have seen several discussions on Twitter about the implications of sending emails outside of standard working hours, particularly on weekends. The simplest form of this debate boils down to ‘Don’t do this’. However, there are many counterarguments,…
Image from Pixabay It's a completely arbitrary milestone but The Institute of Cancer Research — where I work as the Digital Strategy Manager — has now reached a social media audience of over 50K followers/subscribers! This milestone — which happened at some point in the last few days — is calculated by combining followers/subscribers across different platforms so while it clearly doesn't represent…
Sometimes I forget that I have this blog and I can use it to link to other blog posts that I’ve written! In the last month I’ve helped with a couple of Science Talk blog posts at the ICR. At the start of December I co-wrote a blog post, with Sam Dick, to mark the end of the 100,000 Genomes Project: The 100,000 Genomes Project has finished: what were the challenges and what comes next? And then…
Yesterday was LGBT+ STEM Day — the first ever day to celebrate and highlight the role of LGBT+ people working in the field of science, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM). In my role as Digital Strategy Manager at The Institute of Cancer Research , it was great to be able to focus all of our social media output on this topic. I'm proud that the ICR is really committed to equality in the…
As I am now a professional science communicator and as I spend a lot of my time looking at trends and developments in website metrics and social media, I thought that maybe I should have a separate blog for any ideas I have. There are only two posts so far, and I can't guarantee that I will post here very frequently: How not to use Twitter #1: The Labour Party How to identify Apple News traffic in…