Blog Reflections

I'm happy to report that I enjoyed blogging much more than I thought I would. At first I was a little intimidated because I wasn’t confident that my writing was good enough to put out there publicly, or that I had something interesting to say, especially on technology-related topics. Throughout the process I really felt like I found my voice and had some fun along the way. I stayed away from getting overly technical, since that isn't my strength. I tried to keep an open-mind and approach the blog as an explorer, although my hesitance and skepticism clearly came out at times.

My initial intent was to review new technology and tools to see how I can integrate them into my work and life. While I did stay somewhat true to that mission, I also brought in some relevant news items and a couple of funny, odd little discoveries to comment upon. I realized that it was too time-consuming, and quite challenging to review a new piece of technology or tool for every blog post (especially when I would've had to blog about 45 times in 7 weeks to get A on the project).

My goals for this blog were not overly ambitious. My hope was that the few people that read the blog would find it enjoyable and informative. A month ago I was nowhere to be found in the search results, now I am the second search result if you Google “worth my while” or “worth my while or not”. On Bing, I am the third search result for “worth my while” and the first search result for “worth my while or not”. Sweet!

I wish I could report detailed analytics for the life span of my blog; however, I made a mistake when setting up the analytics and didn't correct it until it couple of weeks ago. In about 12 days, I had a total of 113 visits, 245 page views, 41 unique visitors, 2.17 pages per visit, with an average of 3.09 minutes per visit.

Through looking at the Google Analytics map overlay feature to track the origin of my web traffic, I know that my sister in Washington only reviewed my blog twice (I am going to bust her for that), 15 visits came from California (thanks mom), and 90 from New York. I did have one visitor in Miami and one in Connecticut, which could be strangers since I don't think that I know people in these states, unless my friends are accessing my blog while on vacation.

Most of my blog traffic was from referring sites (all of my classmates linked to my blog from their blogs), which goes to show the power of “link love”, and also the power of Facebook. Posting links to my blog on my Facebook status updates definitely worked to drive traffic to my site.

If I had to do it all over again, I would've chosen a different name for my blog to make it more unique and search engine friendly, but I definitely would stick with the Blogger platform because I found it to be quite user-friendly and I like that it was integrated with my other Google accounts.

I struggled over whether or not I wanted to reveal my full identity on the blog because I didn't know whether I wanted it tied to me professionally. In retrospect, although I am proud of my work, I do feel that it is more personal musings, versus my professional opinion as a communicator, so I feel that I made the right decision to keep it anonymous (although clearly it's not anonymous to my friends and followers).

Overall, using this blog as a platform to further explore digital communications, both through first-hand experiences and following developments in the news and blogosphere, helped me to shape and express my opinions about this changing world of technology. If it weren't for this class, or for this project, I would not have challenged myself to explore this topic on my own, which I think is critical and relevant for communicators in all fields.

Although I have enjoyed blogging, I don't think I will keep this up, at least not in the short-term, because I have so many competing demands for my time (and I need some rest and relaxation, hello summer!). Now that I am more interested in keeping up with the world of digital communications, I am sure that as I stumble across new tools or articles I will immediately think “this would be a great blog post!” Maybe at that time, after a bit of a rest, I will feel compelled to pick it up again.

Hopefully my blog was worth someone’s while, but if not, at least I personally got a lot out of doing it. Enjoy the rest of the summer; I know that I will!