Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Belated Blog Anniversary
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2010 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Missed celebrating it on the day, but 10 December 2010 marked ten years of blogging (or, as I probably called it then, writing a web diary). I look back at those early posts and think I should take a page from danah boyd's book:
...My early posts were all written to [my Zen teacher] in an unedited, fluid style. The only other readers were my classmate and my boyfriend. What i posted then was very personal and most of those early posts persist on my blog today, even though the audience is much larger now. I made a conscious decision not to be embarrassed by those posts.
Instead of real litcrit analyzing a third of my life, or telling you what I think now of "...if I could completely know you by just reading your weblog...", or mourning the bloggers I miss (One Good Thing, Anonymous Lawyer, Everything's Ruined, Real Live Preacher, Bitch Ph.D. ...), I'll just go with raw data. Statistics courtesy my NewsBruiser installation:
Number of entries: 3954
Average entries per day: 1.082
Total size of all entries ever posted: 3811022 bytes (about 3.6 megabytes of text)
Average entry size: 963.840 bytes
First entry: Final and paper and presentation (10 Dec 2000, 06:34PM)
Longest entry: The Intersection of Doom...and Death (17803 bytes, July 2001. Part of my Russia travelogue.)
Shortest entry: First post! (12 bytes, October 2001. This was my first entry when I started blogging in NewsBruiser in my Open Computing Facility web space instead of on Kuro5hin.)
Longest title: "basically it's like one of those hip hop DJ battles where they scratch with their butt or their elbow"
Most emphatic entry: Yahoo! Labs Research Presentations, February 2010 (23 exclamation marks)
Most insecure entry: Questions To Ask Potential Flatmates (86 question marks)
Most linky entry: Thoughtcrime Experiments, One Year Later (61 links)
Most common words (truncated to ten from the fifty NewsBruiser gives me):
- about: 2172
- people: 1040
- which: 939
- would: 879
- don't: 870
- other: 856
- Leonard: 781
- think: 724
- because: 709
- their: 673
Whether you've been reading for ten years or started today, thanks (said pledge-drive announcer Sumana). I've appreciated your eyes, your links, your comments, your emails and letters and response posts, your anonymous gifts (!) and syndications (I still don't know who set up my LiveJournal feed), and your existence. And a special thanks to Leonard, who wrote NewsBruiser, and has fixed bugs in it for me, and who has read all of this.
If you've ever really liked a specific post of mine, please feel free to mention it in the comments.
Comments
Thomas Thurman
http://thomasthurman.org
13 Dec 2010, 0:52 a.m.
Julia
13 Dec 2010, 14:13 p.m.
I think I set up the LJ feed so I could read on my flist as it's my default RSS reader. Thanks for writing interesting, amusing, and insightful stuff for ten years!
Brendan
http://ommatidia.org/
15 Dec 2010, 13:02 p.m.
Yes, thank you. I don't have access to the data anymore, but for years, "about" was my most-frequently-used word in NewsBruiser too! If it's Leonard's I will begin to suspect a conspiracy.
7. Leonard: 781
Zipf's Law is the sound of love.