Blogaversary # 6

I started writing this blog 6 years ago on August 24.

I enjoy statistics, it's just the way my mind works.  So, I find it interesting that during the past six years:
* I have written 957 posts.  I am closing in on my 1000th post, which will probably be made sometime in November or December.
* Blogger has recorded 89,411 Pageviews, which means that there were 33,120 page views in just this past year which is more than half of the  56,291 page views in the entire previous five years.  So I guess my readership is growing 
* Readers have left 2,929 Comments.   Which works out to approximately 3 comments per post or 1 comment for every 30 pageviews.  The numbers of readers may be increasing but, clearly, I don't evoke much of a response from my readers.
* I also have 211 followers.

My 30-something children tell me that blogging is passe and that Facebook and Twitter are the real social media.  I tried joining Facebook last year but found it confusing to navigate and quickly withdrew.  I have never tried Twitter.  It seems to me that FB and Twitter call for such abbreviated messages that, on my less optimistic days, I fear that within a decade people will have lost the ability to communicate in full sentences.  Literature will be a thing of the past.  Eloquence will be a mere memory.  We will return to the level of the caveman, speaking in a series of linguistic burps [which those  who like this  short shrifted conversation call bullet points or economy of language].  And the irony of it all is that people are too busy for full sentences or, heaven forfend, whole paragraphs because they are so plugged in to a multitude of communication devices that they can't give a real person any face time, a modern phrase I find appalling but very revealing.   The laptops, IPads, Blackberries, SmartPhones, Droids, etc. are all competing so fiercely for modern man's attention that he has no time for other human beings.  Of course, I am over-stating my case but pity the former English teacher who sees the language she loves being reduced to a mass of bizarre texting abbreviations loosely strung together by a preposition or two.

All this is prelude to a short survey about blogging.  Please answer the following questions about blogging in the comment section.  I will be sending a $10 gift certificate to 123stitch [an online shop] to one of the respondents chosen at random.

1. How many blogs do you read regularly?
2. How much time do you spend reading blogs each day?
3. What sort of  content attracts you to the blogs you do read?  For example:  photos, musings about the needle arts, the style or personality of the blogger, humour, etc.
4. Do you enjoy message boards devoted to stitching?  If yes, which ones do you read?
5. Do you use Facebook and Twitter to keep in touch with cyber friends who share your love of the needle arts?
6. Do you belong to a stitching group that meets in real space and in real time and promotes person-to-person sharing?

Okay, that's six questions, one for each year I have been blogging.  I'll choose a winner of the gift certificate and announce it on September 4.