Today is my 1-year blog anniversary.   And what a year it's been.  My essentials page indexes a few of my favorite posts over the past year.    We start with a traffic recap --> since the dawn of time, this blog has received about 45K visits and 80K pageviews to it's ~300 total articles.   Overtime, my traffic looked like this: 

Traffic ebbed & flowed pretty dramatically with peaks driven by posts which participated in the "intellectual build up" to the Iraq war.  Google was and continues to be my #1 traffic referrer by far - even counting the period when I had a precious sidebar link from the inimitable SDB.  

Over the course of blogging I've made a handful of new friends -- several of whom I've met face-to-face.   I'll freely admit to a certain mental image for what was expected when meeting another blogger:

But I can happily report that for the most part, the folks I've met have quite social, rounded personalities that belie the stereotypes their geeky internet-personas project.   Most are simply everyday folks who had a penchant for observation and a desire to communicate to a broader circle.   Others have rather esoteric, interesting backgrounds and look for a venue to communicate their work to a much broader audience.   In either case, this is all Good Stuff - when you strip away all the other accroutrements of life, friends & family are the most important thing you've got left and blogging's had a positive impact on this all around.

Topic-wise, I've blogged a lot less about tech than I expected.   A large part of this is the nature of my job - my juiciest, best insights into the tech biz (and particularly the wireless data subsector) are inextricably intertwined with my own and my company's competitive advantage.   In climbing the blogging equity ladder, I've got a permanent handicap that prevents me from writing about the very subject I ponder the most!   University profs, open-source types, and retirees do have a natural, tactical advantage here. 

Blogging has, however, let me indulge my passions in areas outside of my work.   Like I said in my first article, I've always had a deep interest in the intersection between politics, econ, and philosophy and this is NOT something I get to muse about on a daily basis.   Due to blogging, my thoughts are more well formed, crisp, and, groomed for the savage beating of Internet intellectual opinion.   I'm thus well armed for conversation at the bar or office water cooler.

One area of suprising depth & vigor of late has been "desi culture" blogging.    As I said in a few of my entries, "Desi" is a new cultural identity which we've got the privilege of witnessing first hand and which I've got rather unique access to.  It's also something that gives my blog a bit of a schtick.

So, I've learned something new, met some new folks, fleshed out a few interests and participated in a new, emergent social phenomena.   All at a cost of about 20-30 min a day.  As a hobby, I think it's something I can see sticking with for at least another year   ;-)