Worm Breeder's Gazette 13(5): 3a (February 1, 1995)

These abstracts should not be cited in bibliographies. Material contained herein should be treated as personal communication and should be cited as such only with the consent of the author.

C elegans Internet information servers: status and statistics.

Leon Avery (leon@eatworms.swmed.edu)

Department of Biochemistry, University of Texas Southwestern Medical
Center, 5323 Harry Hines Blvd, Dallas, TX 75235-9038.

As many of you know, there is a gopher server at the CGC
(elegans.cbs.umn.edu) and a World-Wide-Web (WWW) server in my lab in
Dallas (http://eatworms.swmed.edu/) devoted to information about C
elegans.  These servers are heavily used:

     Server statistics from Nov 7, 1994 to Dec 31, 1994 (55 days)

     Protocol         connections     computers       regular
                                       visiting       visitors*   
      gopher             10571          1633            164
      WWW                23613          1408            100
      both               34184          2873            257

*A regular visitor is defined as a computer that visited on at least 
three different days during the 55-day period.

There are several other C elegans information servers, but they are not
included here because I don't have their usage information.

The table shows that, although many connections come from net-surfers who
visit once and never again (perhaps having expired from boredom), there is
a large group of repeat offenders who use the servers over and over. 
Many, perhaps most, come from C elegans labs.  (For instance,
wormworld.ucsf.edu and horvitzlab3.mit.edu are pretty obvious.)

My point is, if you need to reach the C elegans community, this is a good
way to do it.  There is an Announcements page on both gopher and WWW.  In
the 55-day period analyzed it was read 203 times.  If you have a job
opening or a conference or anything else you'd like worm people to know
about, you probably should be advertising there. Announcements can be
submitted by e-mail to leon@eatworms.swmed.edu, and usually appear within
a few hours.