My blog has a birthday! It was one year old yesterday, March 28th. Woot woot. Since I host my blog on my own domain that I control, I have access to various statistics about the site. The graphic on the left shows the top 25 countries that have visited my blog this past month. I went from about 700 visits/month during my first full month online to about 2400 visits/month for the current month. A very small fish swimming in the big Internet pond. Blogging serves as a useful diversion for me when I get the urge to write about something. However, I don’t expect the New York Times to be knocking on my door any time soon with an offer!
What some people may not realize is just how pervasive blogging has become. Every Tom, Dick and Harry, myself included, is doing it. There are millions of blogs on just about every subject imaginable, and then some. What I found most interesting was discovering that other websites and blogs had links on their sites to my various postings that I’ve written over the past year. There is a technology out there called web robots, or bots for short. Bots are sophisticated software applications that can scour the Internet at tremendous speeds and gather and catalog all the information available on a website. This is the technology that Google and other search engines use to provide you with the ability to find things on the Internet. In my case, companies or individuals are using their own bots to find sites that have certain keywords that they want to catalog and list on their sites. For example, they might be interested in articles that have the word “religion” in them. If their bot finds this keyword, their site will generate a link to that article. They might also extract the first few sentences of the article and include it in their posting. For those of you in the technology business, this is no great revelation. However, it might be interesting to the non-techy type that is reading this blog.
Well, I guess I’ll go now and bake a cake and stick a little candle in it. No, not really. Those that know me know that I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea of how to bake one. I’ll just sing myself the birthday song. Happy birthday to my blog, happy birthday to my blog, happy birthday…
