Happy Spew-nniversary!!!

Eight years and counting!  Sure, I have written fewer posts over the past year, but the Semi keeps in Spewing!  Approaching 1.5 million page views, with the trend steadily increasing upwards.


Everything I said last year at this time still applies.  Except now I need to get the blog either bronze stuff or appliances...

Anyhow, I am very thankful that I started doing this eight years ago.  It is not as much as a time suck as people thought, or as I thought before I started.  Twitter is the great enemy of productivity even as it has been mighty helpful over the years.  Blogging here has led to writing elsewhere--op-eds, posts at other websites (OpenCanada, Duck of Minerva, Political Violence at a Glance, E-IR, etc).  It has helped me get out some of my research ideas far earlier than otherwise would be the case as the academic publishing process is sloooooow.  Media folks have read my stuff here, which has led to not just more media appearances but better ones as they can ask me to explain my ideas rather than just asking what I thought.  The posts have led to interesting conversations on facebook and twitter, not to mention in person when I meet with people who have read my stuff.  I still blush and stammer when I met a Spew-fan, but am glad that what used to be just random thoughts that I wanted to express have become something more than that.

I wish I could dump all the posts into a word cloud thingy to figure out what I write the most about.  It is far easier to see which posts get the most hits: the ones that refer to Harry Potter due to searches finding my posts accidentally, the ones about social media and academia, the ones about sexism in the profession, the stuff on comparative xenophobia (thanks to Max Fisher when he was at the Washington Post) and some of the NATO stuff.

I am very thankful to the people I engage within on twitter and facebook that ultimately generates posts here as well as the people I interact with at conferences, in classrooms and in hallways that help to inspire many spews. As always, I welcome ideas and suggestions as I look forward to year nine of blogging here and there.

So tempted to shout excelsior in honor of Stan Lee, but I will go with one of my favorite superheroes instead: