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Number 1000

Entry 1000, on 2009-04-30 at 22:46:50 (Rating 1, Activities)

According to my numbering system this is blog entry number 1000 - at least on my own blogging system (at blog.ojb.co.nz) but it will be lower than that on other blogs I post to. My first blog entry was just over 6 years ago on 2003-04-04 and I have spent a lot of time writing stuff since then. I have also just reached comment number 2000 on my own blog and I am close to posting tweet number 1000 on Twitter. My podcasting activity has almost stopped but I do have a plan to get that going again soon.

So what's my point? Well I often wonder whether the time I spend on these activities is really worth it. Its not that I would be doing something non-geeky if I didn't blog - I would be doing other similar stuff instead, like adding new pages to my web site - so its more a choice of which geeky activity I spend most time on.

I do find blogging quite valuable because I have to think about and research the topic I am discussing. I admit I don't spend a huge amount of time either researching or thinking, but that's just the nature of most blogs. I do hope that my blog is more realistic and better researched than most, but some of my political and religious opponents might not agree on that!

I use this blog to present opinions and I don't say anything here if I can't back it up with reasonable evidence, but I certainly don't aim for the same level of support as I have in the skepticism section of my web site, for example, where I have extensive footnotes and sources for its contents.

The text file which contains all of my blog entries is over 18,000 lines long which means its a similar size to a typical book, so maybe you could say I have written a book over the last few years. According to my hit counter (again, on my main blog site) the blog has been accessed about 1 million times since then, so you could also say that its a fairly well read book too! I should point out that a lot of those hits are from automated web services, but a good proportion are from real people!

The most disappointing aspect of my blogs is that they don't get enough comments. There is one person (who uses the name SBFL - and I thank him for his input over the last few years) who makes a lot of comments on my main blog and a few others who regularly comment on the others, but overall only a small proportion of visitors actually comment.

Considering the controversial nature of a lot of my topics I'm surprised more people don't feel as if they have to disagree and point out where I'm "wrong" in a comment. On the other hand the blog is like a record I write for myself, so the comments aren't really necessary. Sometimes I go back and read through some of the older entries and its interesting to remember the issues at different points in the past.

Comment 1 (2006) by OJB on 2009-05-01 at 11:39:18:

Correction. I haven't created 18,000 lines, I have created 44,000! (Over 700 A4 pages) I have actually created 18,000 paragraphs, which is quite different.

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