Four month anniversary

This weekend I reached my 4 month anniversary as a blogger, so it seems like a good time to pause and take stock. First a few numbers:

• I am now maintaining 4 blogs: Darwinianweb.com, Mashup.darwinianweb.com, Ruby.darwinianweb.com, and OPMLcamp.com. One Ruby project turned into RubyRiver.org, which is an online RSS aggregator that runs automatically. So I have a total of 5 active sites.
• I have written 400 posts across these blogs, with the majority here on Darwinianweb.com.
• The total traffic for all of these sites now averages 1,500 visitors a day. This includes RSS subscriptions, but not the people who read RSS feeds at online aggregators.
• Technorati.com ranks the Darwinianweb.com domain at 13,506, and seems to lump all the subdomains together. Which puts it in the top 0.05% of the 29 million blogs that Technorati tracks. I guess that's pretty good for 4 months, but it also demonstrates how little traffic the average blog out of those 29 million actually gets.

I wasn't sure what I wanted to focus on when I started, but felt that the general area of Web 2.0 would be most interesting. I've looked at a lot of Web technologies, but my focus has clearly narrowed down to RSS, OPML, and mashups over the last two months. I've also found myself drawn to the social and political forces controlling the Web and the blogosphere. This may seem surprising for a technologist, but it matches fairly closely the way I ended up spending my time as a dBASE guru in the Eighties and early Nineties. I love software, but software is built by people, and you can't understand why they build what they do if you don't understand their motivations.

One reason why I became a blogger was the hope that it would allow me to meet people who are doing cool things with software and the Web. That has certainly worked out. I've gotten to know dozens of new people in the tech world, many of whom are doing exciting development work or writing interesting things about technology. I also wanted to meet younger developers who I might be able to advise on their products. I get a real thrill from helping to design desktop software and online apps, and I'm now working closely with a few startups with real promise. I don't want to get involved with investing in any new companies yet, so my relationships are purely taking a mentoring role.

Over the next 4 months I'd like to do a lot more work with APIs, help a few products get launched, and see if the OPML Camp idea can go anywhere. I'm finding the Camp phenomenon fascinating. I had to get my capitalist head into the anti-capitalist Open Source space in the late Nineties. Now I have to adapt my control freak experience of running seminars and conferences to the idea of an anarchic model of running an event.

One thing I must try not to do in the coming months is start any more blogs. I have more than enough of those.