Sum it up

According to WordPress, enough people visited this blog this year to fill up Madison Square Garden three times… but most of them did not come to read about filling Yankee Stadium… rather, they were interested in the very large number of people pairings that exist in the world.

Here are this blog’s Top 10 visited pages in 2011, starting with the most popular…

..and here are the Top 10 visited pages of all time…

I’m glad that the “Metaphors are like, everywhere“ post has been scoring well over the longer term…. it’s one of my favorites for a bunch of reasons… but then, if the people want stamps, statistics and steaks, well then, let them eat steak…

(I expect the Forever Stamp investment value analysis to continue to trail off in popularity, especially as the USPS continues to shrink the scope of its First Class service… hmmm… if what I’m looking for is site traffic, perhaps I should find a new alternative investment vehicle to analyze…  perhaps a depreciation table for Apple products? How much will your iPod/iPad/iPhone be worth in 12 months?  Compared to the standard GAAP straight-line depreciation schedule for computer equipment? Tempting… tempting…)

Moving in the realm of things I can control/influence more directly….

Clean it up

There are 40+ comments awaiting moderation, most of them spam filter refugees consisting of statements such as this:

I honey your stories very much because they are written in an understandable perspicuous. So I can read them although I come from Austria and get some problems to interpret English stories.

I’ve got to do a better job staying on top of the comments and giving thoughtful replies to those who bother to do the same… and purging the spam/cruft as it accumulates.

Okay, done. Only 3 of those were real comments awaiting approval/reply.

There are 90+ draft posts, some of which will never, ever, see the light of day…posts such as…

Energy Drinks are the Young Man’s Bottled Water

Well, maybe I will get around to it, as there are some topics (Green Style, Uncommon Comestibles) that I haven’t touched as often as I would like. A friend commented on how this blog has become more focused on topics related to my profession (learning, business performance and personal effectiveness). Those who know me know that I consider that trend both a good thing and a not-so-good thing.

There are also some nearly-complete drafts… in some cases, literally just 1 or 2 key strokes shy of publication.   Hey, why am I writing about writing?  I’ll just wrap up one of those posts right here, right now.

There.  Allow me to present a relic from the pre-Meme Menagerie era:  “Myers-Briggs is so EXPIRED  (or, why this blog is called “INTPraneur’s Outpost”). 

Amazingly enough, I didn’t have to edit or add a single word in that post… I guess I was shy about making it public since I (fortunately) decided against adopting that blog title… and probably just as soon as I finished typing the post. It sits right next to a similar early-stage entry,  How to Name Your Blog which in turn got superceded by Blog Title Revision.

Pick it up

Lastly, WordPress tells me that I posted 47 times this year, not including this one.  This means I did not reach my post-atleast-once-per-week goal, never mind a higher goal.  How did this happen?  Ah, I see why… the month of May was a bit of a black hole…  final projects for school, a ton of travel for work and a very demanding, thankless client project (both the client and the project were thankless and demanding)… which yielded the Plate Too Full post on June 1st… okay, I just re-red that and wow, I’m so positive… let me say now that the aforementioned client/project situation in May really, really, really, truly sucked.

Onwards and upwards to 2012!

What’s Does the Process Look Like?

Step 1) Harvest:  What happens is that I start writing out ideas as they come, but as with many ideas, they start out half-baked. It doesn’t matter… the goal here is simply idea capture. I might dash out a few sentences, paste-in some URLs from the (too many) open browser tabs related to the topic I’m thinking of, or even just rattle off something into Dragon Dictation and email it to myself. While I don’t initially have the time to fully explore or express the idea, I’ve learned that it’s best to capture a quick rough draft while the thought is still fresh.

Step 2)  Winnow and Grind:  The raw captured ideas eventually need to be processed and turned into posts.  Often a few nascent posts get combined… I do, after all, repeat myself over periods of time… although lately I’m thinking I need to split up my posts into even shorter posts, but more on that below.  In terms of grinding and polishing the posts for “publication,” I don’t have a staff of writers or a formal editorial calendar, but I do try to keep up my discipline of writing early and often… once per week or more.

By capturing the ideas immediately and then keeping them refrigerated in Draft mode, I’m able to work of them and release them weekly… although sometimes, it’s very weakly.

So When Was This Post Written?

This post was first drafted over a month ago, after I finished delivering a Business Writing course. I was feeling that, as good as the course was, it was a perfect example of the limitations of single-event-based training. In particular,  a business writing course should be a course… something that takes place over the course of 8 weeks, 8 months or 8 years… but not just 8 hours in a training room.

Skills like writing are not developed in a single session. You need to be constantly writing, to improve your writing.

Serendipitously (and very likely an example of the Reticular Activating System at work), just as I was drafting this post, Seth Godin blogged on the idea of writing more often, as a way to develop that ability. He covered the idea in a very compelling way — Seth Godin is like that — by comparing the idea of learning to write to the idea of learning to speak.

Um, Yeah… What Seth Said…

Here’s a shortened version of the already-succinct words of Mr. Godin:

No one ever gets talker’s block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down.

(…)

The reason we don’t get talker’s block is that we’re in the habit of talking without a lot of concern for whether or not our inane blather will come back to haunt us.

(…)

We talk poorly and then, eventually (or sometimes), we talk smart. We get better at talking precisely because we talk. We see what works and what doesn’t, and if we’re insightful, do more of what works.

(…)

Writer’s block isn’t hard to cure.

Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.

Do it every day. Every single day. Not a diary, not fiction, but analysis. Clear, crisp, honest writing about what you see in the world. Or want to see. Or teach (in writing). Tell us how to do something.

That last point is important:  If you’re going to do this, it has to be real writing…. pithy tweets, re-tweets, pluses, diggs or FB status updates don’t count. Your writing should be S.A.I.N.T.-ly, which is to say, it should…

Summarize,

Analyze,

Instruct

Narrate, or

Theorize

..about something.

Here’s an even more succinct version of Godin’s post, in a quote attributed to one William Hull:

If we taught children to speak, they’d never learn how.

Yes, reading that post by Seth Godin gave me the inspiration to increase my blogging output.

I thought to myself, Well, I don’t have Godin’s army of publicists and ghost writers, so yeah, maybe I’m not set up to do daily posts… but how about two or three times a week… what do you say, Dan??

The trade-off then, seems to be length of posting versus frequency of posting.

At one end of the spectrum, you’ve got Dan-as-investigative-reporter analyzing Swiss cough drops (still an all-time fan favorite)… at the other end, you’ve got Dan’s brief, heartfelt moments.

Much of Seth Godin’s blog (and many other high frequency / high traffic blogs) could be characterized as leaning towards the latter end of that spectrum.

Let’s start wrapping a bow around this post, then…

One Post, One Idea

One way to increase my blog output will be to reduce the number of ideas presented in each post.

The content is already there… the posts just need to be split up.  This is not just about posting frequency… it’s about audience awareness and editing.

It’s a (somewhat sad) reality of contemporary culture that long-form reading — especially on screens — is going the way of papyrus. At some point during the 20th century, long, meandering, undisciplined rants became socially unacceptable… personal indulgences that would only be appreciated by the more loyal and tenacious readers.  Loyalty and tenacity? Nope, definitely not an increasing cultural trend.

It’s also a truism that simplicity sells… but more to the point, keeping blog posts focused to an idea will allow for focus on the craft of writing itself.  After all, it’s not just the process of writing things down that improves one’s writing skills… it’s really about the editing process.

TO SUMMARIZE:

Write more, right now.

Write about real things, and really edit those writings.

Like droplets of water wearing away at a rock, pretty soon it will leave a lasting impact.

Browsing through recently unearthed material from the Spira Permanent Collection, I came across some of my old writings from September-December 1992, mostly related to courses I took at Vanier CEGEP, aka Quebec’s Crazy Mashup of Senior Year High School and Freshman Year of College, aka High School With Ashtrays, aka My Great Academic Awakening. These writings are printed on paper either by pencil, pen or the unfaded ink of my Apple ImageWriter with those nifty Mac Plus fonts (Athens, Chicago, New York, Toronto, Venice, all good… and even San Francisco once in a while… never was a fan of Los Angeles, but then what do you expect from a nascent Comic Sans snob?) .

There’s probably a 3.5″ disk somewhere out there with the MacWrite content on it, but at this point the easiest thing to do — for the purposes of building the backwards-blog section of the Menagerie – is to scan and/or transcribe bits of the paper output rather than resurrect the source data from its Mac System 7 operating system tomb (extracting dinosaur DNA from fossilized mosquito saliva in amber would be easier).   Yeah, in the scheme of the cosmos, it’s all transient anyway… but for now, long live paper-based media… and WordPress.

In any event, here are some reflections on this stuff that I wrote 19 years ago, stuff that I don’t remember writing but apparently wanted to keep for use at some later date.  I will honor late-teen Danny Spira by looking back at, interpreting and drawing insights from his writing… now with double the years behind me… and maybe… just maybe… a different perspective on things:

• Rule #1 :  Everything has already been already written… and already written better than you or I are about to write it.  We shouldn’t let this stop us from writing, though.

• Rule #2: No matter how good we think our writing is, no matter how profound we think our ideas are, there’s someone out there who is going to read it and think it was written by the intellectual equivalent of a self-important 19-year-old.

• Rule #3:  I tend to repeat myself, especially when observed over long periods of time. Shorter periods of time, too.

• Rule #4: My best friends and favorite books from the ages of 17 – 23 had a profound effect on who I am.  Some I’ll readily admit to (HT Nareg!) …others, not as much.

• Rule #5:  Pieter Sijpkes wasn’t completely wrong that most people only have one idea…. it’s more like two or three ideas, but still…

• Rule #6:  Why am I writing these observations as “rules,” anyway?  (Going “meta” is an example of Rule #5 above, just sayin’…) Does this exercise risk me getting infected by the fossilized saliva of a teenager, devolving me into an earlier form?

To summarize, as written by hand, apparently on “12/29/92 @ 9:47:43pm 3rd Dimension:”

MAYBE I SHOULD START WRITING DOWN THESE REVELATIONS – I’M FOOLING MYSELF TO BELIEVE THAT I REMEMBER EVERYTHING…

(…)

The problem is, while this writing does indeed help me structure my thoughts, I’m always three or four thoughts ahead of what my head is endeavoring to do.

(…)

Hmm…. then again, this delay in being able to relay my thoughts probably helps me IMPRINT them better, and the so-called “inefficiancy of communication” is integral to the process of understanding and memory/association/integration that we call my noggin’.  (aha.)

Ah, good times.

There may not be a reason to any of this, but at least it rhymes…

“My repugnance to the writing table becomes daily and hourly more deadly and insurmountable. In place of this has come on a canine appetite for reading. And I indulge it, because I see in it a relief against the taedium senectutis; a lamp to lighten my path through the dreary wilderness of time before me, whose bourne I see not. Losing daily all interest in the things around us, something else is necessary to fill the void. With me it is reading, which occupies the mind without the labor of producing ideas from my own stock.”

- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, May 17, 1818

We all know the expression, but when is the last time you took a single action — or made a single decision — that took care of not one, not two, but many issues in a stroke? When is the last time you took out an entire flock of birds with a single, well placed pebble?

Well, taking out a flock of birds is kinda hard if we’re talking about seagulls and the pebble isn’t laced with anything toxic… but I’m seeing some real possibilities if we’re talking about a V-formation of exhausted migrating Canadian geese and some high velocity shards of granite… to say nothing (really, nothing) about high velocity angry birds… 

When you choose that single “stone,” there is a world of difference if that figurative geological material is strategic or tactical in its composition. With good tactics, you can dispatch a couple of avian entities with a small effort. With good strategy however, you can effortlessly annihilate an abundance of fowl… metaphorically speaking, of course.

Two Birds with One Tactic = Optimization

Tactical “Two Birding” is simple optimization, like listening to an audio book or looking at an ebook during a long commute… or making sure you have a paper book to read in your hand, as you get onto an airplane, so that you can be productive while existing in that no-man’s-land of travel, free of power outlets or lawful access to your cell phone and other portable electronic devices, as you slowly-but-not-so-surely make you way between the entrance to airport gate c24 and maybe 7 hours later, hear the distinctive ping of a seatbelt sign and a murmuring pilot’s voice saying the words “cruising altitude of 30,000 feet” and “experiencing some turbulence.” Yes, you managed to travel a distance while catching up on some reading (two birds, in a metal bird, with a single tome?) but in today’s world of multi-tasking and plates that are too full, this is simply a minimum requirement.

Minimum requirements just won’t cut it anymore. We’ve gotta “next-level” it.

Many Birds with One Strategy = Alignment

Strategic “Multi-Birding” are decisions that create a system of interdependent effects that are self-reinforcing, like the effect of strings when they get braided into a rope. The best examples of this are when a person finds way to align different aspects of their life and create synergies (the real kind, not the fakey buzzword kind) by having things overlap in just the right way.

Traditional Alignment Strategies 

There are some very common and traditional examples of people who align different aspects of their lives in order to maximize how they spend their time. Some of my clients in the upper echelons of the financial services world do this very consciously by braiding their work, social and philanthropic lives into one tight network of friends, deep business connections and a culture of “giving back.” Weekends and evenings are spent together helping out causes or communities while simultaneously strengthening bonds between members of the group. Some call it the Old Boys Club, but whether you call it that is more a statement about membership requirements than strategy. In other words, some folks (though, not all of ‘em, to be sure) do this within the context of a diverse demography of age, race & gender. Lest you think this strategy is only for the well-heeled, picture almost any community house of worship, where time spend socially is also time spent religiously. In that case, both the social and religious elements are mutually reinforcing and the experience of both is augmented in ways that go beyond “two birds with one stone.”

Intellectual Alignment Strategies 

Going to school and trying to hold down a job? Make sure your school projects relate to your job, and/or to each other. Recently I did this by enrolling in two courses that were closely related to the same topic and also closely related to a couple of work projects that I had. This not only provided a level of simple optimization (i.e., research certain content once, use it multiple times) but it also allowed me to perform my work at a much greater depth and nuance because I was approaching it from multiple angles at once. This is something that I started doing back in high school, so for me it probably doesn’t count as a “strategy” as much as it is just my way of assimilating information. My blog also reflects that tendency. Of course, I resist the notion of making my blog a specialist, single-subject, self-promotional tool that reliably cranks out variations on a narrow theme… I’d like to have 2 or 3 running themes, possibility self-contradictory themes, please. When I work on certain projects, I find tremendous leverage (again, true leverage, not just buzzword “leverage”)  to direct my blogging energy and attention towards that topic. Everything flows much more easily and I don’t experience as much “task switching cost” between school and work activities.

Aside from the above “garden variety”  configurations, you can create your own novel combinations. Choose your goals or set up your projects so that they integrate with multiple aspects of your life, be it work life, social life, hobbies, community service, spiritual life, family life or whatever other “categories” you have.  Don’t take it to an extreme, though… we’ll discuss that shortly… but first, another strategic alignment strategy:

Portfolio Career Alignment Strategies 

There was a dinner table question that I used to dread. It went thus: “So, Dan, what do you do?”   It’s taken me a few years to figure out how to best answer that question — both correctly and succinctly. Part of getting the knack of that social situation has been by understanding the distinctions between a having a single career, a serial career (i.e., career/job switching), multiple part-time jobs, and having a portfolio career.  

What is a portfolio career?  A friend and colleague, David Holloway, explained to me something that I had previously been unable to put into exact words. In a Hired Gun blog post, “Is a Portfolio Career Right for You?” he writes:

A portfolio career is a carefully organized set of independent income streams.  (…)   In the future, your income isn’t likely to come from just one job that someone else provides to you. It will come from a series of different services, products, and/or investments–all of which you will have to conceive and orchestrate yourself. But if you can do that right, you will never have to worry about losing your “job” again. You will be able to blend your creative, philanthropic, and personal passions with your work. And you will truly be CEO of your own career.  (…)   It … embraces, rather than denies, the change and disruption going on around us.

Holloway’s view of portfolio careers is that it’s more than simple hedging between multiple jobs or income sources. Done correctly, the elements of a portfolio career are self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating. In other words, it’s a synergy… you become a conductor of a symphony that is your working life. If you’re going to march to your own beat, better to do it with a band of your own making.

Too Many Birds with One Strategy = Environmental Collapse

All this talk about aligning your work and non-work interest begs the question:  When is there too much alignment?  When does that one stone become a snowball, then become an avalanche, then become a storm system, triggering climate charge and environmental collapse?  If you kill too many of the birds — if you don’t let enough of them fly freely — it’s going to be bad news for you down the road.

In other words, how to avoid having your life consumed by that one thing, which, if and when it changes or gets taken away, leaves you with nothing?

In all this Two-Bird Optimization and Multi-Bird Aligning, you also need to take a break.  You need a sanctuary — either in space or time – where you can recharge and be a whole person, too. 

So it’s okay to put down that book — or that game of Angry Birds — and close your eyes and take a deep breath.

Okay, yes… I’ll play along… especially because you’ve been so good to me, WordPress.  Let’s see…  I’ll pass on the first question and don’t feel like speculating about the third, so yes, I’ve settled on addressing the second question, which the software thinks would be a good topic probably because of some higher-traffic past posts (e.g. “Learning the Forgetting Curve” and “Forget Me Nots“).

Also, realizing that my friends have a tendency to post their comments on my posts via Facebook where their responses don’t get recorded in the official Meme Menagerie Book of Memories,  I went ahead and posted the question within the more transient, semi-private confines of my Facebook connections. That’s right, I’m letting the social media software run things this week.   

So with my heartfelt thanks and your implied consent (opt-out available), here is what you people had to say, on the question of what are you good at remembering:

VF: song lyrics

SI: Birthdays!

ME: names, faces, phone numbers, birth dates, every single person & event since the age of 3 1/2,music (not lyrics), ….I think it’s time to free some hard drive

NA: Woke up to the sound of pouring rain
The wind would whisper and I’d think of you
And all the tears you cried, that called my name
And when you needed me I came through

YF:  uh… umm… I am not sure… err… lemme get back to you?

AG: When you came to visit:)

LH: Maps and locations. Can remember the name and location of every village, city and town I have ever visited, but can’t remember anybody’s name.

DZ: Similar to L’s comment, all my memories are tagged with respect to the cardinal directions on a map.

DRS: Names and how to get somewhere I have already been

AS: not as much as I think I should

MFg(R): stories. people’s histories (family trees, wedding dates, names of great aunts). ideas, if not their origins. and song lyrics.

AAS: What is the question again?

Dan Spira:   interesting female/male ratio of responses/nonresponses so far… cf. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/0802201​04244.htm  cf. http://www.ehow.com/list_6​787714_male-female-memory-​differences.html … notwithstanding those differences, NA is reliving his prom night song (or so Wikipedia tells me)…

AS: maybe that’s it–I feel guilty when I don’t remember all the things I know/think I should, as opposed to someone else in my house who doesn’t feel guilty at all about it. Or doesn’t remember that he should feel guilty about forgetting…

NA: ‎..I remember you…

Dan Spira: ‎[guitar solo]

HN:  long strings of numbers

DH: Usually useless trivia …..

As I read through my friends’ reflections of what they think they’re good at remembering (and in some cases, what they think they’re not good at remembering) I wonder how much of this is actual skill and how much of it is simply self-fulfilling self-belief, aka, self-efficacy?  How much of it has to do with the different “intelligences”  (e.g. visual-spatial acumen vs. verbal acumen) and how much of it has to do with interests or priorities?  ..and is it even possible to separate these factors?

I used to believe that I wasn’t good at remembering people’s names, but very good at remembering stories, structures, the flow of a movie plot, the flows of a dialogue, etc.  However, a few things have changed in my life that have caused me to question this belief: My job now more than ever involves meeting lots of people and getting to know (and sometimes lost in) the vast universes inside their heads. So remembering a person’s name has become a higher priority for me and as a result I’ve made the effort to improve my name recall skills. 

Yes, I do have to work very hard to remember all those names, whereas it feels effortless for me to remember the details of a story or plot. On the surface, you could argue that I still have a “strength” in terms of the types of information I’m good at remembering (stories), whereas overcoming the “weakness” (names) is something I have to work hard at.  However, I’ve also noticed that after reading a book, watching a movie, witnessing events, etc.  what I tend to do is replay those stories/events over and over in my head… in other words, it’s not so much a “natural strength” as much as it is lots of work that has become an ingrained habit or preference…  a habit where I put a big effort into coding and retrieving memories about stories and — until recently – not noticing that I was making that effort. 

Once again, you could argue that these things are inseparable — what is a strength versus what is an interest — but I think it’s a very different statement to say, “I’m good at remembering people’s names“  versus, “It’s important to me to remember people’s names” or even simply, “I’ve made it a habit to remember people’s names.”   

All of this reminds me of an intriguing story that 60 Minutes ran a little while back, about people who can remember every day of their lives.  What’s so interesting about this is how “normal” the ability is… the people with Superior Autobiographical Memory don’t remember every detail, just the details that matter to them. There’s no savantism or synesthesia.. it’s just as if they have really, really, really, really good memories for dates and events.

Preliminary MRIs reveal that certain structures in these folks brain are highly developed. The sample size is small, and it’s a bit of a chicken-egg problem as these people have developed a habit of exercising their memory and therefore reinforcing it. I like to think that what these people teach us is that anyone of us can do it… we just have to make every day of our lives remarkable and therefore memorable… but hey, this is science, we’re not supposed to get all mushy here.  Plus there are days where all I do is catch up on my paperwork and gardening. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The people in the 60 Minutes video represent the extreme end of the bell curve in terms of memory ability.  For those of us ordinary folks who like to think of ourselves being merely “Upper Middle Class” of memory ability (or at least somewhere around the third quartile of the bell curve… please?), we might wonder how much room we have to improve our memories.  

So as I’m writing this, here’s a follow-up question:  Why do you think you’re good at remembering the things you’re good at remembering?

GY: It matters? (pun intended)

VF: B/c my husband regularly challenges me on song lyrics, and he never wins. A constant reminder of my awesomeness.

AG: Cuz we love Uncle Dan Dan:)

AAS: I totally forgot why…

Okay, so some people do it for fame, others do it for love, some people don’t know if or why they do it and some people (including myself) rely heavily on the technological tools at our disposal. Why bother remembering stuff when you’ve got an immeasurably large and ever-expanding extended nervous system?  Well, I guess even with the Interwebs at your fingertips, it’s still helpful to remember people’s names (unless of course you go hardcore cyborg and get one of those enhanced reality wearable computer contraptions… hmmm…..).

Finally, one more question (and I won’t ask it on Facebook b/c people will only play along so much), for those of you people who say you’re good at remembering people’s names: 

Do you use any of those well-known name memorization ”tricks” that the rest of us mere mortals have to use?  I’m talking about those wacky multi-sensory visualization and anchoring techniques coupled with verbal repetition that some of us out there are using  (e.g. “Nice to me you Dan, rhymes with tan van, which I imagine printed on your forehead, Dan, as you drive around town in your tan van, Dan, juggling a sizzling hot frying pan, Dan”) ? I’m guessing not.  I’m guessing all names just stick for you… really truly, effortlessly… right?  

Just wondering.

I’ve also noticed that, every so often, the algorithm tries something a bit outside the range of the songs played to date. 

If I give that a “thumbs up,” I quickly see the results in subsequent songs, as the algorithm expands the range of genres played on my personal radio station.  

If I give that new song a “thumbs down,” Pandora stops and pauses.  

Then the Pandora plays one of the “seed” songs from the earliest days of starting the algorithm — a song that I truly can’t hear enough times — and so I get my dopamine hit and forgive the algorithm for its minor deviation.

Who is training who?    At first I thought I was doing a good job “training” my Pandora station to play “good” stuff… but with its targeting of my brain’s reward system as part of its cybernetic interface, I started to wonder about that.

In my early days of blogging I would write about random things like this — Internet memes, current events, cough drops – but more and more I find myself leaning into the convention of “blogging on a topic,” or taking what could be an off-topic post (e.g. “Pandora is cool”) and connecting it back to what I typically write about (“Pandora is a metaphor of the… blah blah blah”).  Ask any social media guru and they’ll tell you that to be a good blogger you have to make yourself synonymous with a particular area of expertise… because the vast Interwebs readership you’re trying to create wants to know where to go to have a particular conversation. They’re looking for an “authority.”

Really?  Do you want to have a relationship with someone who always talks about the same thing?    

Or maybe it’s okay, as long as it’s a variation on a recurring theme.

Thumbs up, Pandora.  Keep playing.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 43,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 5 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 49 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 285 posts. There were 45 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 2mb. That’s about 4 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was January 5th with 306 views. The most popular post that day was Top Five Weaknesses of StrengthsFinder .

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were linkedin.com, facebook.com, google.com, search.aol.com, and search.conduit.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for forgetting curve, there are two kinds of people in this world, ricola, there are two kinds of people, and strong communication skills.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Top Five Weaknesses of StrengthsFinder January 2009
10 comments

There Are Two Kinds of People In The World: Those Who Think There Are Two Kinds of People In The World and Those Who Don’t December 2007
22 comments

Learning the Forgetting Curve July 2008
8 comments

Metaphors are like, everywhere April 2009
2 comments

Ricola ™ versus CVS “Natural Herb” Cough Drops April 2007
6 comments

Some of your most popular posts were written before 2010. Your writing has staying power! Consider writing about those topics again.

(Dan says: “Thanx, WP… well come on, You People, let’s see more comments… especially you lurkers coming over from LinkedIn…” )

Good news:  I’m about half-way towards having some letters to hide…  M.Ed INSDSG  (Master in Education, Instructional Design)

Better news: The field is changing so fast, those letters will mean something different by the time I graduate.   Bring it on!

Every week I have several ideas for a blog post, but lately haven’t had a chance to sit down and write, even when I block time on my calendar to do so.  Obviously, Apple/Oracle/Microsoft/Adobe have a leg up on me here… perhaps I can reconfigure my mental hardware to slow down to a crawl if I don’t get these posts out reliably once per week.   

There. I’m implanted the seed of the idea into my subconscious, Inception-style.   Let the idea grow.