With this post, AHP will have published 100 items on the history of psychology.  Unfortunately, we don’t have complete usage statistics for this period, but we do track enough information to determine what aspects of our experiment in “citizen journalism” need tweaking.  (Details below.)

On the subscription side of things, where content is being pushed to readers using our RSS feed, we have recently reached a milestone: 50 subscribers.  Popular items include…

1. Conferences 2007-2008
2. Report of Operations: History of Psychology
3. Conceptions of Giftedness
4. U.S. National Medals of Science in Psychology
5. Bibliography: The Use of Deception in Research

More recently, on the non-subscriber side, the site has averaged 53 visitors per day over the past 30 days.  Within this relatively shorter period, the site’s top pages were…

1. Conceptions of Giftedness
2. Bibliography: Schizophrenia (2000-present)
3. Capgras in Court
4. Bibliography: Cannabis Canadensis
5. “Punitive psychiatry” still practiced in Russia?

The difference between these two groups can be attributed primarily to the effects of Google (520 visits/month), Wikipedia (240), and the community of bloggers (100).  And although our resources have apparently been useful, it seems that providing a few comments to introduce an annotated bibliography is rarely sufficient to produce a “top page.”  Rather, top pages typically combine scholarly resources with news hooks and “feature writing.”  (Lesson learned.)

In any case, the experiment — now just less than five months old — seems to be progressing nicely.  If you have suggestions, please feel free to offer them below as comments.

-JTB.