Where did the year go? A retrospective look at 2009

As I write this, I’m sitting at the breakfast bar in in our vaction house on Kaua’i, at about 9:30 in the morning on December 29. It struck me that there are but three days left in what so many are (incorrectly) labeling the last year of the first decade of the new millenium.¹

I’m not about to look back over an entire decade (I’ve only been blogging for a bit more than 2 years, and I fear I bore you too much already, to subject you to that!), but I think an examination of the past year is reasonable.

By the numbers: 131 articles — 822 comments — 2 tons of spam

Since January 1, I’ve published 131 articles, not including this one, but including Krizzlybear’s guest post on the 22nd. We’ve discussed the various articles, you and I, in 822 comments. I’d guess somewhere between 300 and 400 of those are mine (and probably closer to the latter number). 

I started out the year focused almost exclusively on World of Warcraft, with the occasional foray into a personal post, whether I was talking about computer upgrades, site upgrades, or events taking place in my personal life, such as the loss of my mother-in-law in early March, to vacations we’ve taken (including our current sojourn to the Garden Isle).

As time went on, my enthusiasm for WoW waned considerably, as did my posting about the game.² For much of the year, I am afraid I rather floundered around, trying to find a niche where I really felt comfortable. Finally, over the past 3 months or so, I’ve started focusing more on writing—not necessarily mine, but on helping others improve theirs. I expect, as I’ve posted several times, that I will continue in that vein, as I have caught the copyediting bug. I’ve received a lot of encouragement from a few friends, and I hope the articles I will be writing will be helpful to many of you, as well.

Back in September 2008, I wrote that WoW blogging is not just a niche. Well, it is, of course, if you take blogging as a whole. However, it’s not a small niche; in fact, if you take a look at the Twisted Nether Big List of Blogs, it’s pretty huge!

Unfortunately, copyediting seems to be a much smaller niche, and as I’ve written more about writing and less about WoW, my daily, weekly, and monthly average pageviews have dropped to somewhere between a third and a half of their prior levels. To those readers I’ve lost, thanks for your readership, and I hope you find at least as much enjoyment elsewhere as you did at the Aerie. To those of you still hanging around, thank you for your loyalty, and I hope it’s well-rewarded in the coming year.

I’ve emphpasized how important it is for bloggers to have a dialogue with readers

One of the things I’ve tried to do over the past year is emphasize how important I believe it is for bloggers to engage in dialogue with our readers. That’s part of why I try to make a point of replying to every meaningful comment on this blog. I know I’m not 100 percent successful in that endeavor, but I want you to know how much I appreciate that, through your comments, you give me the opportunity to converse with you.

To that end, I gave the comment system "Intense Debate" a trial run a couple months ago. While the concept has merit, I found it put up more barriers between us than it tore down, so I abandoned it within 24 hours. On the other hand, I’ve enthusiastically endorsed CommentLuv, I’ve eliminated any and all comment moderation other than my spam preventers, and I’ve maintained the ability for you to edit your comments as well as subscribe to individual comment threads.

One of my challenges over the coming year is to increase the average comment count per post, but of course, that places the burden squarely on my shoulders to create content that is interesting and compelling enough for you to want to comment. In a way, I view your comments as a much more informative "report card" than I do FeedBurner subscribers and Twitter followers (in fact, the latter is pretty meaningless with respect to blog readership, I believe).

A couple other things I did for the first time this year were to create audio content and to include videos in my posts. The one audio I did was simply a reading of the accompanying text: I have no intention of abandoning writing for speaking. However, if I think a particular article lends itself well to being a podcast, I’ll endeavor to record it. As for video: That was more an exercise in "can I do this?" than anything else. I certainly do not intend to embed a bunch of YouTube clips here!

But the one thing I really want, and need, are suggestions from you on topics you’d like to see discussed here. It’s all well and good for my ego for me to pontificate on matters large and small, but if my interests don’t intersect yours somewhere along the line, you’re going to grow bored and leave, and I’m going to get tired of listening to myself. To that end, I’m going to explore options for allowing you to rate my posts (no promises: I said "explore options"!), and I will continue to solicit your feedback.

My goal is to turn the Aerie into a valuable resource for writers of all kinds: bloggers, novelists, short-story writers…you name it. But most importantly, I want your time here to be fun, because after all, if we aren’t having fun, what’s the point?

Happy New Year!

Tagged as: Retrospective