3000

Yet another threshold – I have had 3,000 visitors to my blog.

The last three months of posts works out to about 43 pages in Word. I typed 15,609 words, or 75,478 characters, excluding spaces. It’s 91,234, if you include spaces. Text density, as well as content, must be on the light side. The secret? Short words. Also, I know there’s at least one “I” in narcissism. Too busy being a god among men to bother counting.

It took over three years to hit 1,000. I didn’t do a retrospective post for 2,000, because that was achieved in about a week, thanks to one post that launched a thousand clicks: "New Facebook Virus: Redhot sexy girl in thong dancing."

It's awesome to know I have readers (read: people seeking treatment for an electronic version of gonorrhea)  from countries like Jordan, Russia, and Malaysia.


Then, it went back to the good ol’ days of nearly zero readers.

Some of you have noticed that, as of late, I’ve taken to using more humor. It helps me get through the days. Apparently it helps you, too; people are stopping by to browse and, hopefully, laugh. I’m glad we can escape together.

Here’s a word cloud from Wordle looking at posts that spanned between 2,000 and 3,000 visits (late April to today).

Note that it has some pretty weird non-words. Those are screen names that represent important US politicians in a series of White House AIM conversations.

Here’s what the word cloud looks without them:

I also included a word cloud for 1,000 to 2,000 for completeness:

Again, the above isn't particularly useful, since it consists of only three posts.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a word cloud covering the first thousand visits. I do have clouds covering them by year in the post that marked a thousand visits.

I copied over the one from 2009, as I feel it is representative of the blog before then.

There aren’t many differences. From my the 1000 visits post:

”I think it's remarkable how stable word frequency remains throughout the last three years. I talked more about "students" in 2007 and "Jesus" appears more prominently in 2010.”

The change I do notice in the panels above is that “time” is a word that has recently fallen from my writings. It must be because, unemployed and depressed, the days blend together. Time is no longer a scarce commodity for me, and perhaps even writing the word conjures up unpleasant thoughts about my life.

On the other hand, "God" has emerged more prominently in recent blog posts. I also continue a trend of exploring and expressing more thoughts on religion and faith, a trend emerging even in early 2010. To what end, one cannot be certain: I am presently an agnostic, who occasionally goes to church to see the wonderful old people I grew up with.

I should also note that this includes a couple posts (e.g. this one on Frankl) that were archived, after a time, because I considered them too personal and containing information that might compromise a job interview. I de-archived them recently, in part because I was tired of trying to appear well when I am not, and in part because I thought it might be potentially helpful for someone who might read it.

Finally, I felt that the last post, Shirley Sherrod, part 2: Telling the Story, was one of the most important posts I'd written in a long time. The writing isn't the best, but I think I had something important to say, something worth reading -- which isn't always the case. It didn't nearly get as many hits as the AIM conversations or the OkCupid profile. But that's the nature of these things, I suppose.

Finally, thanks for reading. You're the only reason I'm still writing.