Six million page views: The Number’s Game in Long Distance Blogging

The Long Distance Blogging continues. Six million page views roughly amounts to about a million page views per year but those stats don’t include the 800+ people receiving this blog as a “newsletter” every day and the 1200 subscribers of the Nuit Blanche RSS feed which has about 1200 subscribers.

I was recently asked to provide some advice to doctoral students and realized that the blog had been one of the most important time investment over many different “hobbies”. There have been many times where I doubted the usefulness of the whole enterprise. Trying to answer some difficult questions publicly is an interesting exercise. Over the course of several interactions with readers of the Nuit Blanche, I am finding out that the blog has acted as a proxy to our own collective questioning. From afar it may look like that the great lesson in all this is there is no reason to feel embarrassed about writing one’s own limited understanding (even though it may be cringeworthy looking back). The deeper lesson, I feel, is that you are not the only one asking the stupid questions and that writing a blog does provide a service to a community of people. In the end, asking these questions over and over, will make you an expert. The public trust will come from the frequency of your postings, and yes, this long distance bloging is a marathon.

Because of my recent involvement with LightOn, Nuit Blanche has mainly been pointing out to some papers that caught my attention as opposed to being more focused on making sense of it all. I try to remedy this by writing insights that are compounding over time in the Sunday Morning Insights. Enjoy !