This year in blogging

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 8,500 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

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2010 in review

Good old WordPress sent me an email today, with my blog stats for the year, which I share below. I was surprised (and pleased) that I blogged on this blog about once a week, in a busy year of teaching and learning. That’s about as much as I can manage I think.  I was totally surprised at the Gilligan’s Island interest; I’ve got to blog more about 60s television shows I think!

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 5,600 times in 2010. That’s about 13 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 66 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 428 posts. There were 59 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 11mb. That’s about 1 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was August 21st with 122 views. The most popular post that day was Teach for Australia (revisited).

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were digg.com, annasnextadventure.blogspot.com, warrickwynne.wordpress.com, twitter.com, and google.com.au.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for gilligan’s island, teaching and learning with technology, gilligans island, gilligan island, and human ingenuity ib.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Teach for Australia (revisited) August 2010
4 comments

2

UbD meets improving student learning (one teacher at a time) March 2010
1 comment

3

Teaching Generation Z August 2006

4

Human Ingenuity: An Overview of IB Thinking April 2009

5

Creative Ingenuity – Core competencies of the 21st Century April 2009
1 comment

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The end of Ning

One of the worrying things about ‘free’ online tools is that one day you may have to pay the price. Which is what is happening at the moment with NING, an online tool that educators have taken a lot of interest in,which announced last month it would be discontinuing its free service.

It took me a little while to understand the potential power of being able to create your own social networking site but once I ‘got it’, I saw the power. I’ve talked a bit here about some of the Nings I’ve joined and even some I’ve created. Some haven’t worked. For example, the Ning I created for me and my cycling mates was a total disaster with interest level petering along about the level of my puncture stories. I wont even link to it; it’s too embarrassing.

But, some have been great. I created a Ning for a network meeting that I attend twice a term and it’s worked really well. The Expanding Learning Horizon Conference Ning was very handy and the ASCD Conference ‘Edge’ website, modelled on the Ning ideas, was better and more useful than the official website. So, I understand now.

But some day you’ve got to pay the piper, and last month Ning announced it was discontinuing its free service in favour of a paid model. Bad. Bad for me and time I’ve put into my cycling site and the network site, but worse for large, well developed Nings like Classroom 2.0 which currently has over 42000 members. I guess you could say that with that many members the site should be paying (and maybe they are) but bad for those people who’ve invested time and energy and content into something that is now likely to disappear. The screenshots below from Classroom 2.0 show it as a lively and interesting place.

Ning’s latest blog posting ‘Mythbusters‘, sounded just a little defensive to me as they tried to claim that they would still have a model for educational and non-profit organisations. We’ll see next week.

Meanwhile, don’t start any new Nings until you see their new pricing plans and be aware that some of the tools we’ve all become pretty reliant on (Gmail, Wikispaces, Wetpaint etc.) might one day decide they want to update their business model or simply fold up the tent and slip into the night.

I’d be worried about Wetpaint next. Take a look at the most recent look of my Peninsula Creeks Wetpaint site. A giant, inappropriately contextualised ad for ‘Glee’ and Google Ads taking over the navigation space down the left hand side. Hmm. Maybe we’ll all go back to building our own web pages again. Now, where’s that book on HTML got to? And, WordPress and this blog is safe. Isn’t it?

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Beginning of a great adventure

Or so said Lou Reed, in his (best) album, New York.

But, after seven years of blogging this doesn’t feel like much like a new adventure. Moving this blog from edublogs.org to wordpress.com isn’t an exciting thing to do, or particularly adventurous. It took me about an hour and a half to find a new blog name, export my posts from my old edublog and import them here. It didn’t work too well first time, it did the second.

And why? Well, Edublogs had gone ad-happy, and while I won’t labour the point, they were in-text style ads that appeared in your blog content, unless you upgraded. Edublogs has been my preferred platform and my recommendation of choice to other educators for the last three  years or so. But Edublogs had some performance issues earlier this year and I began to worry about being so reliant on one independent service in these increasingly economic times.  And them came the ads.

So, here I am world. I’m not excited. I’ve been blogging too long to think that anything I say here is going to change too many things out there. But I write because I think and feel. And that’s still an adventure.

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