Seven years, and 300 blog posts later....

I've been at it longer than most, but I have no idea what it all means.

I just happen to notice I had a nice, even number of blog posts -- 300. I then decided to check just how long I've been at this blogging thing.  It turns out I started in the Fall of 2005; so, my blogging tenure comes to about seven-and-a-half years, which is pretty good considering that the typical blogger has been doing so for only 2-4 years.[1].  That puts my active blogging longevity in the top 10th percentile of bloggers.  Is that a good thing?  I don't know.

About 40 posts a year seems to be my pace, but lately I've been horribly amiss as keeping even that modest rate up. I suppose my first drop in blog posting came when I wrote a short series of articles for Science and Religion Today.[2]  Being forced to have one good idea a month (i.e. an idea worth publishing) allowed me the personal discovery that I only really have one good idea every 32 days; that is, always one day later than the publishing deadline. Unfortunately, as a consequence of that venture, it turned-out that I wouldn't end-up blogging anything, since I felt attending my personal blog would be wasting time -- unless I was pre-building for something worth publishing.  Of course, this paradoxically resulted in me writing less than ever.  Thus, when do I write freely? Only when I have no reason to write about the subject which engages me. Is that a bug or a feature?  I don't know.

And there was another thing that got me posting today, too:  recently the hits on my blog have been going up, though I've been less active than ever.  I wonder if it's all the new iPads and Android devices crawling around the web lately.  Or maybe it's the 33% of the Chinese population with all their mobile use access which is driving up my hits. Or again, maybe it's due to my pithy but hard-won, sardonic self-observations about computer programming, which I've been sharing as Twitter tweets, peeps, bird poops or whatever trendy name they surely require.  (In case you're wondering, I've been doing research in data mining. No, that doesn't help blogging either.) So, can I expect this general trend of increasing blog visits if I continue to post virtually nothing?  I don't know.

In the future, I doubt I'll suddenly start banging-out post after post of deep, scientifically informed commentary on truth, meaning, and religion; though a blogger can usually fire-off a lucky shot every now and then.   Nor do I foresee a sudden loss of I.Q. for a descent into commentary about TV shows, cats, or celebrity actors and sports figures.  So what's coming up?  I don't know.



O.

P.S.,  And by the way, the reason I use that little " O. " symbol thing is because I had a Scandinavian guy email me once that my name means Hydrogen in Danish.  Since then, somehow, using that little atom-like, symbol stand-in as a sign-off for my signature seemed chic.


REFERENCES

[image] weblogcartoons.com

[1] There's an excellent (though two year old) demographic summary of who blogs here.

[2] Most of them can still be found here at the Science and Religion Today website.  Readers of this blog will note little, if any style change from my normal shtick here on my own site.