This Blog in 2009

2009 was my first full year of regular and earnest blogging.

I’m usually surprised by which posts do poorly and which ones are successful. Sometimes I’m not really happy with something but I hit “Publish” anyways and people love it. Sometimes I put hours of extra work trying to popularize something and it vanishes.

Here are my top 20 posts of 2009, according by pageviews (a soon-to-be-outdated metric, maybe) in Google Analytics. Some of them might be surprising:

I went with top 20 rather than top 10 because there are a lot of anomalies in the top half. My biggest hit of the year is also the most uncharacteristic post I’ve ever written.

The Tori Stafford post was an attempt to stretch my boundaries a little by writing something more visceral, less abstract. Almost all of the traffic came from search (1,395 out of 1,606 pageviews via Google alone), mostly through variations on “what happened to Tori Stafford.” My keywords seemed to have hit a conspiracy-theorist nerve. It generated daily traffic for 3 months and over 6 months later it still generates weekly hits. Unfortunately it has nothing at all to do with the rest of my content.

How to Build in the 21st Century turned out to be a great surprise last week. It was written in one of those serendipitous episodes, and given the bad timing for readership (Friday night) I just kind of tossed it into the blogosphere without expecting much attention (the whole week had been a bust and I was at the point of apathy). It still managed to fall way short of my modest expectations… until Umair Haque tweeted it a few days later and people started sharing it in Delicious. But then even after I tried promoting it via Twitter again Monday it still seems to be one of my most unpopular posts among regular readers. Funny way to end the year; gives me a lot to think about.

So I’m at the Laundry Cafe was the result of another serendipitous episode — except it happened in the real world. Unfortunately, like the Stafford post, it’s fairly uncharacteristic, and other than some social media relevance it has almost nothing to do with the rest of my content.

The Silicon Valley Model, like “How to Build in the 21st Century,” was a post that is right in my sweet spot and is very representative of the kind of thinking I’m trying to promote, but was almost completely unnoticed until Jeff Jarvis found it and posted a few excerpts on his blog.

Uncovering London Ontario’s Economy was one of my social engagement successes — of which there are far too few in London. There don’t seem to be enough active linkers to have an effective ecosystem in the city (unless you’re in web design/development). So this is one of the posts I’m proudest of. I was expecting it to be one of those rants that get sucked into the abyss. Instead I woke up to a handful of reactions, which was a completely new experience.

The Social Media Mafia post was another uncharacteristic one, but unlike some of the others I was actually very happy that people liked this. And I love the thought of doing things that people enjoy.

More on Hipsters was a disposable aside that was destined to disappear until Richard Florida responded to it — not that it was worth responding to, except he was part of a group of guest bloggers filling in for Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic and I’m guessing it was not easy filling that quota.

Who Twitters? still comes up in search results — which always surprises me for something as common as Twitter. It goes to show what a game of luck SEO can be (why I never bother much). If I titled it with SEO in mind it probably would never have had any juice.

The Raw Feed of History is my personal favourite. It’s probably the most representative of all of my posts, covering the social and political implications of tech-driven developments within a broad and deep historical context. I would have liked to see it do better. Much of the traffic was international via followers who shared it with their contacts, which made me very happy, but unfortunately I didn’t have the same success trying to share it with my own acquaintances — a typical result that gives me no end of frustration.

Creative Culture and Web 3.0 via Google Wave has been another search engine hit that didn’t seem to resonate with people I actually know at all, despite a lot of work I put into trying to customize it to my audience.

Ontario in the Creative Age: First Thoughts. I’m including this as the 11th post in what would have been a top 10 list because it is one of the posts I’m proudest of; it’s one of my most characteristic posts in terms of subject matter, and it perfectly represents the problems we face here in London Ontario. This is a post about London but it generated more pageviews from Toronto. The local region brought just about 18% of the total traffic. The only external link came from a Kitchener site.

I’ll leave it at that for now.

Interestingly (at least to me), there’s almost no overlap between pageview popularity and feed item popularity, according to Feedburner’s stats, these are the top posts via RSS:

That last one could be my blog’s permanent subtitle…

What’s my focus?

It isn’t for lack of trying that I haven’t narrowed myself into a specific niche. Every year I get a little closer to finding it.

A lot of this stuff I feel like I have to write because nobody else is. I’d be happy to just read and comment about local issues, for example, but there aren’t enough opportunities.

This is why I also spend so much time in “digital media advocacy.” I’m hoping to educate and bring a potential audience online. I know there are people out there who would love reading the stuff I love writing (I can’t be the only one), but they aren’t showing up and casting their votes. My guess is they have the same doubts that I had a couple of years ago before a few twists of fate turned me into a blogger.

Also, by reaching out I get a better sense of what people are looking for so I can adapt a little further towards them — towards you.

I have some thoughts about where all this is going in 2010, but I’ll get into all that later.