More on my first year (and a week)

Last week I noted that it was one year since I began The lost outpost, and commented that I’d post something more later.

I’ve been running a weblog inside IBM since August 2005, and when I hit the one year milestone a few months ago, I wrote a retrospective which listed a few of the interesting facts and figures. Inspired by Aidy’s recent post about his first 10,000 hits, I thought I’d combine some statistics with some thoughts on my engagement in the blogosphere.

First of all, some background. I started this blog mostly through the heckling of Mr Richard Brown, a good friend of mine who also happens to be my frequent nemesis[1] in all things business, economic and technological. Richard thought that I had some interesting things to say on my internal weblog, and encouraged me to move outside the IBM firewall. Little did he know that not only would I start an external weblog, but that I’d also end up contributing to eightbar, GameTomorrow and SOA Tips’n’Tricks (although I’ve not posted much to the latter yet, an oversight which I shall remedy in 2007).

I still maintain an internal IBM weblog. Why? Well, largely because some things I write about are more to do with the boring bits of my day-to-day work and are not of interest to a wider audience. Conversely, my photography posts are probably of less interest to an internal audience. Some content is cross-posted, but the number of posts that appear on both blogs has significantly gone down over the course of the last twelve months.

So what has happened this year? Here’s a summary of some of the major events:

•  The T60 was announced. It took me 6 months to get one.
• I had an article published on developerWorks in February and another in August.
• I moved digital home back in March, a decision I continue to be happy with.
• Second Life appeared on my radar in April, and I’m really pleased that we’ve made so much progress since then. The growth of interest internally has been amazing. I’ve interviewed a SL celebrity and had my work published. I’ve also participated in an excellent media event.
• More and more colleagues started blogging during the year. It’s been great getting to know them all better, as well as making contact with old friends.
• I was interviewed for a feature on ibm.com.
• A photo was chosen for some online news stories, and I had some approaches about selling others. My first “real” assignment was last month. Hopefully 2007 will present me with more opportunities to develop my skills.
• I’ve made some great friends, and I never would have met them without blogging.

Now for the numbers. In general I’m very pleased. There has been gentle growth, particularly over the last 4 months. Looking at my blog stats graph, it has been nearly a month since I received less than 200 hits per day. Weekends are generally much quieter, which I attribute to fewer people searching for more technical topics from their work desktops. If you exclude weekends, I get anywhere between 300 and 450 hits per day right now.

• Blog stats: 419 posts, 708 comments… 11,321 spam comments…
• Most viewed post: TomTom 910, still waiting
  I don’t understand why this one persistently comes out top, since it doesn’t really say much. I’ve written far more on the subject since then, so much so that I recently started a new tag for my satnav-related posts.
  Competing strongly for the most views is Renewing car tax online, which seems to get a lot of hits from search terms related to the UK car tax system. Again, not my core area, but kind of cool to know that it was something interesting.
• Most commented post: TomTom 910, still waiting
  I appear to be unofficial TomTom support sometimes…
  One thing that would be nice is if more of my visitors who come in from searches would comment and communicate with me!
• (current) Technorati ranking: 50,368
  Seems to hover fairly consistently around the 50k mark, sometimes a little higher. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to read my posts, and link to me.

While I’m doing the funky statistics thing, a bit about Flickr. I’ve been active there since November 2005, went pro in April 2006, and I’m currently at 23,971 views. I was very engaged at the beginning – I actively commented, visited other photostreams, participated in groups. I’ve been less active in the past 6 months, and that is reflected in the much lower interest that I’m seeing in my photos. Social networking can take some effort, and I don’t always have the time 🙁

• 504 photos (448 viewable to all), 328 contacts, 27 sets
• 5 photos currently in Explore
• Most interesting photo:
  
• Most favourited, commented and viewed photo:
  
• My own (current) favourite photo:
  

 Finally, it seems that I’ve not done well enough in my first year to hit the Google Zeitgeist. Never mind.

[1] the man is frankly, far too intelligent and should allow the rest of us to try to keep up with him at least once in a while.