Today is the six-month anniversary of this blog's public life. It's been hugely
fun so far, and very encouraging as an experiment in sharing book
research, thinking and some writing (or at least phrasing) in public.
Thanks to the extraordinary quality of the comments, emails and other
feedback I've received on my posts, I think the book is going to be far
better thought-through than I could have made it myself. I won't go as
far as to call it open-source, but there is definitely a hint of the architecture of participation at work here.
This month has also seen a few other gratifying blog milestones:
- 100 posts (about 4 a week, on average; I'm no Instapundit)
- 1,000 comments
- 1,000 Bloglines subscribers to the RSS feed. (I have no idea how many I have through other readers)
- 1,000 daily visitors on average to the site over the entire six months (more recently, the daily average has been more than 3,000).
- 10,000 visitors on a peak day
My average post is about 700 words long, which means I've written about 70,000 words for this blog over the past six months. Which, coincidentally, is the target length of the book. So either I will be using a reasonable fraction (20%?) of the words here in the book, or over the short nine months of the project (from the end of Dec, when the deal was done, to my due date in September) I will have written the equivalent of not one book but two. In my spare time. Which seems, well, nuts. Needless to say, I hope the synergies between blog and book extend beyond the quest for intellectual rigor and to actual, you know, writing. Or I'll be hosed come September.
My thanks to all of you, who make this so worth doing. Even today I am still amazed and thrilled at how rewarding it is to give away my time, ideas and research here, because I get back so much more in return. The power of the gift economy is truly remarkable, and we've just begun to see all the places it can work.
You should just delete all of the posts except the 10 most popular ones. I mean, if the rest didn't get as much traffic, they're not worth keeping around, right? :)
Posted by: Mike | June 17, 2005 at 01:36 PM
Hey Chris,
Thought you'd be interested in this article. It features the long tail in reference to Powerlaws written in 2003 http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html
Dan
Posted by: Dan | June 17, 2005 at 09:34 PM
I love your blog; it's already made my "A" list. What more can I say but keep writing!
Posted by: Ron | June 18, 2005 at 04:51 AM
I think you're well over 1000 bloglines subscribers...
You link to this feed in bloglines:
http://www.bloglines.com/userdir?siteid=602068 (rss?)
but, I'm subscribed to this feed there:
http://www.bloglines.com/userdir?siteid=888411 (atom?)
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