It is always amazing how quickly time passes. I started blogging just a touch over a year ago, at the time I wasn’t totally sure at the time how long I was going to keep it up for or what role blogging would take in my work and play.
A year on, and almost 170 posts later, around 10,000 to 15,000 individuals a month visit this site, each making an average of three visits a month. The role that offline readers play in the traffic is surprisingly significant, with the majority of traffic being through RSS, RSS 2.0 and ATOM.
In the grand scheme of things the traffic is less significant than some of the other roles the blog has ended up playing.
First and foremost it has been a really useful way of keeping notes on issues, announcements and other references that I find interesting. Having built up a body of content I find myself searching my own site on a regular basis.
Secondly it has been a really useful way of crystallizing my own thoughts on a whole range of issues. When you work for any large corporation clarity of communication is important, thinking through complex issues is something that can frequently take rooms full of people debating it in one way or another. The blog forces me to think through issues as I write them into a post, and on that front it has been really useful.
I’ve also found myself involved in conversations with other bloggers in the region, and in some cases elsewhere in the world. In this decade the blogosphere and the conversations taking place here are probably as important as the mainstream press in many cases. When I look back to couple of years ago I was definitely missing many of those conversations, and I certainly wasn’t in any position to participate in them.
Finally, on a similar note, the blog has been a right to reply. Hopefully when I’ve exercised that right it has been constructive and helpful. I know that a slice of my readership don’t agree with my views or ideas, but it has been enlightening to engage in conversations around some of the more vigorously debated issues.
I don’t get enough time to write some of the posts that I’d like to write, but I will try to get to them over the coming months. I want to understand issues like the regions migration to IPv6, know more about what it will take to archive the growing body of digital assets that every country in the region is collecting, and get involved with some of the debates around electronic identity management that are taking place on shores local to here.
All those topics take research, and again that research will be driven by the need to write about the issues involved.
Let’s see what the next year holds…