I just happened to notice that this blog has been alive for a year now. That’s pretty good for me. For awhile, last year, I slipped all around from hosted solution to TypePad and Blogger. There’s lots of statistics that flow about how many blogs, how often people post, what the time element is for those that continue. I wonder what the statistic is for people that move from one platform to another. I had this blog here for awhile called “Tail of the Comet” and it was a MT blog. MT seems to be a very complex piece of software with lots of knobs and buttons and dials. Before that, I had the usual “news, views, subterfuge” moniker for the blog. Somehow, I’ve managed to keep my mysql database backed up and exported here and there. Now its wordpress and I really think that wordpress for me is the best. It has just the right number of knobs and dials and I can host it myself on my puny webserver.
There are many more interesting facts and statistics than what the big guys tell us about the posting popularity, the number of blogs that are created every year, and the number that remain active after X months or years. More interesting is the why of things. Why do people do it? Can numbers ever really tell us the why of things? I doubt it. You need a view inside the numbers for the why of things. People years ago told me a blog was a collection of links on a daily basis and if I wrote an “online journal” it was not a weblog. Well, I’ll call this thing any damned thing I want to and its what i want it to be. But it changes every time I post to it. Statistics, pie charts, pretty PowerPoint slides capture lots of nteresting geographical, statistical, and use trends. But not the why questions.
And we cannot expect them to. Because we all write these thngs for different reasons and I think whether you are up front on the comet or in the middle, on the tail, or just don’t care; you all write just to write. Suck that into your excel spreadsheet as an old friend was wont to say.
