The first of the graphs below the fold shows traffic to layscience.net for the first 16 days of October, an already high-traffic month thanks to my lovely new band of guest bloggers. It is also a graphical demonstration of the Streisand Effect in action; the phenomenon by which attempts to stifle discussion of a subject only encourage more chatter.

Here's a little quiz for you. Can you guess on which day Trafigura's lawyers tried to suppress reporting of a parliamentary question? And can you guess on which day the British Chiropractic Association issued their latest ill-advised press release defaming Simon Singh? Now imagine those twin peaks, repeated across the interwebs.

In fact, you don't have to imagine it. Below is a visualization provided by the nice folks at Trendistic showing how #Trafigura rose to become the #1 topic on Twitter, mentioned in over 1.2% of tweets.

Carter-Ruck are of course attempting to defend the reputation of Trafigura, while the BCA's statement said that:

This claim has been brought to restore the good reputation of the BCA and that of its members.

I wonder how that's working out for them? I'm not a lawyer or a PR expert, but if they want my advice, sometimes it's far better to just keep quiet.