Celebrating One Year of Narcissism

Perhaps the best way to celebrate a year of thinking about myself and my thoughts would be to examine what I have blogged about.

To be clear, I do not have a clear, consistent tagging strategy, so take the following with a grain of salt. 



I have posted 1114 times on these and other topics

Pop culture	148
Afghanistan	143
Academia	98
Ethnic Conflict	54
Civil-Military Relations	52
Television	48
Sports	48
Obama	48
Travel	36
Lost	35
Media	34
CA	29
Terrorism	27
Iraq	27
Internet	26
NATO	24
Canadian Forces	22
Technology	21
US foreign policy	18
US defence policy	18
Pop social science	15
Quebec	14
Zombies	11

So, what does this tell us?  First, my subtitle is more or less on target--IR, Ethnic Conflict, Civ-Mil, Politics in General, and Selected Silliness.  Perhaps the selected silliness ought to go first, given its ranking here.  But given that Afghanistan is my current research focus (what others are doing there), then I think I have actually focused more or less on what I promised a year ago.  There is much double coding.  If I dropped all of the Lost stuff (no!! don't!!), much of the TV and Pop Culture would also drop off.  Not all of it, but a chunk.  So after the middle of May, we should see probably fewer pop culture posts as Lost fades.  On the other hand, summer is movie season for the Spew Clan, so we may just see some substitution. 

Quebec is actually only in 14 of my posts, but if we again remove Lost from the pool, all of my highest commented posts except for one are Quebec-related.  I guess my passion/frustration provokes more folks, and perhaps more folks who read this have opinions about Quebec.  The post of race and a swimming pool near my old home outside Philadephia got the most comments for a non-Lost post.  Again, race, like Quebec nationalism/language politics is quite emotional.  I suppose if I lived in the US and posted about racial politics and religious conflict (especially if I still lived in the south with a southern readership), then I would get more comments on such stuff.

The Ask the Reader posts tend not to get much in the way of responses.  Oh well.

My readership has increased over the course of the year from the mid 30's per day to the mid 50's to 60's.  Not a widely read blog by any stretch of the imagination, but I was mostly into this to express myself, whether anyone was reading it or not.  Of course, my ego cannot help but seek more attention (always the Leo, always the youngest child).  More on trends in viewers tomorrow.

So, to the loyal readers, I ask: any thoughts on changes, continuity, new topics, fewer posts on x or y, more on q or p?  Not that I will necessarily listen.  Listening is one of my weakest skills, as I try to be aware of my limitations.  So, speak up.  Speaking of which, limitations was a theme I was going to pursue but didn't.  Perhaps in the next year of blogging. 

Thanks for an interesting year of comments on and off the net.