My first year of blogging

It’s been a year since I started blogging. Before that I didn’t know much about blogging. A month before I started writing blogs, I never read a blog. I heard about it, and I thought it was something like an online diary. The first few blogs that I wrote, I would consciously send out my blogsite to my friends and family hoping they would read it.

When the topic of ‘reservations’ came about, I started writing blogs answering some of the questions that I faced when I was growing up. I ended up writing 13 episodes on that topic alone. With that my blog started to receive readers whom I never knew before. Receiving such audience was something that I was not prepared for. It was both good and bad. Good, because you are able to reach a wider audience. I became friends with some nice people because of that. Bad, because the commenters could write anything hiding behind the curtain of anonymity. When I saw few nasty things written about my family, I started to monitor the comments that I receive. If I find comments insulting, I reject them.

Though the blogs reach wider audience- it is extremely small compared to any mainstream media. Imagine an article written in THE HINDU or a program on NDTV. Such articles and programs reach millions and sometimes even billions. I compiled some statistics here on my blog from the last one year.

So far, I have received a total of 28,440 visitors (as of Feb 1^st, 2007). The current average (taken over last 7 days) is 137.83 visitors per day. That’s extremely low compared to what one can achieve using a newspaper or a TV program. And in the last one year, I have written 90 articles on various topics.

The number of visitors for each month (starting from Feb 2006 and ending in Jan 2007) is:

138, 200, 777, 2704, 2962, 1476, 1083, 2751, 3655, 4067, 3989. So, there has been a steady growth since I started out, the peak being December 2006.

The top referrer to by blog has been Google, followed by blogger.com, desipundit.com, thecrimson.com, nanopolitan.blogspot.com in that order.

Most popular articles on my blog site are:

MF Husain and nude paintings

Adolf Hitler and Indians

Reservations V: Apotheosis of IITs and myth of merit

Telangana - A New State

My Stand on Reservations I

The number of visitors from US is 11737 (42.28%) and from India is 11040 (39.77%)

According to Technorati, my page rank is: 119,313 with 104 links from 31 blogs.