Something very funny happened to me last night that made me realise just how ‘big’ the Connected Internet blog has really become and just how many people actually read my miscellaneous ramblings each month.
Even though I get over 250K unique users a month, it took a real-life experience for the magnitude of that number to really sink in and for me to realise what a big number that is e.g that’s nearly as many people in the city where I grew up.
I was having dinner with one of the biggest partners I’d worked with in the past, who I might be working with again in the future. After we’d concluded the business section, he started asking questions about what were the latest services I was using, gadgets etc as he finds me a good source of ideas for new toys.
We started talking about media and home entertainment centres, and how no one had yet delivered a nice easy way for consumers to buy all the kit they need, plug it in and then just use it. Yes, it’s all possible, but consumers shouldn’t have to cope with complex wiring, dozens of remote controls, home networking issues, file formats, codecs, tags, artwork etc
He then mentioned some great articles he had found linked to from a site called ‘Lifehacker’, that had great guides on how to organise iTunes libraries and fixing tags. That really mad me laugh, and I had to tell him that the guide that was actually linked to was written by me! Not many people in my professional space know about ‘Everton Blair‘, so there’s no way he would have known. He then mentioned another guide on another site, and again that was written by me!
I’m still regularly stunned by the power of blogging and the reach of the internet. Never in my wildest dreams 3 years ago would I ever have predicted that in a few years, I could write a few words on my PC one cold night in Oct 2005 in London and post it on the web, which would be read by someone in Montreal, Canada who I didn’t send the post to or even knew that I was the author, which would then be randomly discussed over dinner two years later.
Amazing!
Not just the power of blogging, but the power of search – it means posts like that from ages back are still easy to find and get hold of. Of course, it needs complementary tools, and a good archiving system and permalinks help (as your site does very well). Making a blog powerful means making it fit with the other technologies (such as search engines) and be easy to use.
I’d have to echo Chris’s comment above– it’s amazing how my friends and colleagues can find what I’ve said about a given subject in nanoseconds!!
I think and after fallen your pr to 3 you can see all your visitors.
That’s insane man. I’m not sure the day will come where that will ever happen to me, but a couple weeks ago I made a comment for the first time on a site outside my usual “neighborhood”. I was floored when the author got really excited that “the Bush Mackel” had made a comment on their site!
I had to explain that I’m just another person like everyone else, but it was just odd ’cause I never knew this person had ever seen “my work”. You gotta love the web bringing us all a little bit closer. (#):)
Haa haa, yep, just another person, like Bush and eleventy-seven million other people. Even though I haven’t bene at blogging an dother visible online activities nearly as long as Everton and other “net names” I am often blown away by the power of the ‘net, both to find information and to interact with people, world-wide.
Darren Rowse recently wrote a similar post … while looking at the numbers he had collected on a readership of problogger reader’s blog, he crunched the numbers a bit and pointed out just how many people blogging touches … really was eye opening. Google good or Google bad, the ‘net is really great stuff. Hmmm, now what was the address of that page I used to have on GeoCities …..