Blogging Review of 2012

Apparently I have a PhD in Biostatistics, which is quite a surprise to me, since I know very little about statistics. Apparently, I also teach statistics at the university level, which further confuses the previous sentence. And apparently there’s a whole new suite of statistical tracking tools available to bloggers, none of which were available when I first starting blogging.

As this is 2013, I am very proud to report that this year marks the TWENTIETH anniversary of the Deonandan.com website. It’s been through many many changes… in purpose, style, host, content, name, everything. What started out as a place to post updates on my upcoming book quickly evolved into a real online community…. and that was something new and exciting, before the days of social media.

It was a time before anyone was thinking about archiving or permanence, so I’m afraid my earliest content has been lost to time (like anyone cares). But I do have posts going back to July, 1999. So I guess the blog portion of the site has been running for 14 years. Still, it’s nice to have been part of the early explosion of the era of individual publishing, of the extrusion of personal content into the world market, without the need for a publisher or arbiter. I’ve archived that earliest content here.

In the pas 14-20 years, the most popular thing that I’ve written here is my brief post about the death of Yuri Gagarin.

Anywayyyyy…. this post was supposed to be about what this blog was up to in 2012. The online experience continues to evolve. Whereas I used to write hours of content each and every night, much of which resulted in some very heated exchange amongst the visitors of Deonandia, in recent years the advent of first Facebook and now Twitter have rendered the value of the blog as a community-building device rather questionable. As a result, I haven’t been posting much original content here.

But the Deonandan.com experience now extends to Skiffy.ca, Podium.deonandan.com, VakInternational.ca, RISS-IJHS.ca, hssbuddies-amis.ca, HistoryofthePill.ca (now defunct) and the temporary home of Deonandan Consulting Inc. Later this year, I plan to launch the Skiffy podcast, and have been refining the podcasting production process via the CSEB podcast.

Meanwhile, what did we do here in Deonandia, other than dump my Twitter feed and keep track of my Facebook profile pics? Well, according to the new stats utilities that I referenced above, these were the most popular search terms driving people here:

Gay cats? Really? Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, because here is a list of the blog posts that were most visited this year:

My most popular post this year was one that I wrote in 2007, about the new versions of the Japanese anime classic Evangelion. It explains why I get mega-traffic from Japan.

And the post most read specifically by Facebook users was one that lead to both a Toronto Star article and a series of public lectures, about the Stop Kony 2012 campaign.

With the greater integration of blogs with other forms of social media, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include my favourite Youtube video(s) of 2012. Hands down, this one wins: