Happy birthday to i
One year ago, I had only a vague idea of what a ‘blog’ was. I did not read any blogs at all aside from two maintained by old friends, which allowed me to more or less keep up with their lives. Their blogs served as a sort of email supplement, but that’s as far as it went. Ever the Luddite late-adopter, I started this website one year ago today for reasons that remain unclear.
Wait, now I remember. There was something about a baby, a very needy baby, who was taking up so much of our attention that our friends and families began to assume we’d fallen into a bottomless Karstic sinkhole. So this blog[1] seemed a lazy way out, an economy of scale for disseminating information about and pictures of our vomit-flecked and sleepless existence, for those few who could stomach the documention of same.
Any readers who have blogs of their own (and that’s 75% of you, as far as I can tell — more stats below) know quite well that maintaining one of these electronic navels for gazing into is not quite the time-saver you might first think. In retrospect I am baffled as to how I managed to find the time to simply get it up and running, never mind actually write anything. I do recall a few near-all-nighters last February during which I wrestled endlessly with tiny bits of }css{ and resized images and tracked down hex codes for burnt sienna and so on. If nothing else, maintaining this site has made me a much more efficient user of the internet. I’ve learned a great deal about maximizing bookmarks and browser tabs & extensions, search engines & on-line references, as well as various sites which a year ago I’d never heard of: Flickr, Technorati, del.icio.us, Bloglines, WordPress Codex, and on and on. Keeping this site going has also made us more discerning consumers of our own photographs, which has had its own follow-on effects for the better.
But the biggest change in my internet habits in the last year[2] has been the reading of other people’s blogs. When I started this little island of self-absorption I had no idea about the billions and billions of other people out there doing projects that were similar, only interesting. What began as a trickle of browsing progressed to regular reading, and now there are not only a generous handful of friends and family whose blogs I use for keeping in contact, but also numerous strangers out there whose lives I keep up with on a daily basis — people I’ll never meet. Some of them know I’m out here. Others have anywhere between no clue and fawning assurances that their postings bring me joy, whether they are daily-as-sunrise, reliable as the newspaper, or long awaited with great anticipation. It’s a very interesting way to know people without having to actually deal with them.
This project has also yielded some human interaction, too. It was only a few months old when some other foreigner-bloggers in Slovenia tracked me down and dragged my misanthropic ass out for bowling (of all things) and beer (mmm, beer…) Via the magic of email and comments I’ve also cyber-met many people I wouldn’t otherwise have known existed.
As promised above, some more statistics:
- As of this posting, there are approximately 100,000,000 blogs in the ‘blogosphere’
- On average, a new blog is started every single second
- 25% of new blogs are abandoned within the first year
- 66% of blogs go without an update for over a month
- 87% of blog content consists of reasons for not posting more, sorry people, but things have been like, all crazy around here.
- 98% of blogs kind of suck[3]
- Reading the other 2% takes up way too much time
These statistics are only partly made-up, but any actual information contained within them comes from the internet, so it’s a bit like the fox guarding the henhouse here.
Before I began this post I stopped by isoglossia’s in-house statistical analysis division and asked the chief for some ore from the year’s datamines. Here now, the dross:
- The year’s posts number 156, or an average of a post every 56 hours. I’m generally satisfied with this, considering our month’s absence in August, pressing family matters in the fall & winter, and Adam’s unabated neediness
- The word ‘Adam’ appears in 38% of all posts, not including this one
- ‘Buckwheat’ is used in five posts
- ‘Malkovich’ appears in four posts
- The year’s post which generated the most comments was also the most complicated one, Java-wise.
- 78% of our readers are equally divided between Slovenia and the U.S., followed by Spain, Poland and Japan as top isoglossia-reading nations.
- 66% of you use some version of Firefox. Yay!
- isoglossia yields high-ranking search results for strings like:
- tits + “nova gorica”
- funny + pictures + of + monkeys + wearing + birthday + hats
- song + who + makes + the + monkey + dance
- crippling + back + pain
- “Faberge Organics Shampoo”
- bloody + rage + override + code
- danish + vegetable + vocab
- I hope you like the changes to the layout to mark our second year here. The look has gone through ten amateurish variations, which can be seen here, for all you sentimentalists
This is not meant to be self-congratulatory, other than the part about having dodged that ‘25% of all blogs fail’ statistic. Despite the year’s many bouts of infrequent posting, this period has seen a small but loyal fanbase build up, and I thank you all for taking time from your obviously not-all-that-busy schedules to drop by now and then to read about our flecks of vomit and shaking tiny fists of rage.
The next baby, I promise we’ll be documenting in far greater detail.
[1] Yes, I give up. It’s a blog, already.
[2] As always when I make a sweeping statement like this, I have in mind the qualification “not including Adam-related factors”
[3] Not yours, of course.
