Four Years Blogging And All I've Got To Show For It Is?

Today this blog is four years old. This is the thousandth plus post which will be read by a select group of people. Blogging is supposedly not as popular as it once was. The huge majority of them lie inert. Some, mercifully so. But not this one. So, what have I got out of four years of blogging?

1) Chinese comment spam, ridiculous PR approaches and offers of irrelevant guest blogs from total strangers.

2) A sense of guilt at still not having made this blog more visually pleasing and more easily navigable.

3) A nagging doubt that I have nothing else left to say.

4) An awareness that you need to keep repeating yourself because ideas actually spread quite slowly and orthodoxy takes a long time to overturn.

5) A constantly renewing knowledge of bands that only five other people have yet heard of thanks to a reader who has a passion for such things

6) A stalker - albeit a very nice one.

7) A true appreciation of our increased connectivity - courtesy of the night when one of my posts went global and I watched as readership swept across the globe to the extent that more people were on my blog than usually visited in a month.

8) A whole new international social circle - such that I can look at various meaningless A lists and the wired top 100 and realise that a number of these people are now my friends, as are authors I previously admired from afar but now am able to meet in person.

9) A realisation that rankings don't really matter. I'm no longer in the Technorati top 10000 nor the top 50 marketing blogs in the world and I still get noticed by new people and read by others on a weekly basis. Famous and useful for fifteen people is indeed the rule to live by. But remember, the fifteen are always changing.

10) A deep gratitude to all the readers, commenters and bloggers who have made the past four years a lot more interesting.