Well, it has been an interesting few months of blogging. Like any blog, things started slowly and I wondered if anyone was reading what I wrote. Some days I still wonder about that, but I definitely have more subscribers and traffic now than I did six months ago. More importantly, a lot of things have changed for me this summer. Louis Gray highlighted this blog as one to read in one of his “blogs you should be reading” posts a few months ago, and basically created a snowball at the top of a snowy hill. For a small blog it was really cool to get exposure like that. The YackTrack coverage from Sarah Perez gave me some more exposure, and basically helped me get over the “is this worth it” hump. So, let’s call that a little push down hill.

By now you are probably asking what else has changed for this type of post? Well, since those times I have guest posted for Louis Gray on a few occasions and have an open invite from Louis to write for his blog. I also had a guest post on another awesomesauce blog, SheGeeks. Corivda could probably tell a good story about how paranoid I am about my writing. I have also started writing part time for Mashable which means more me in more places! Obviously, me in more places means less me here, but I am trying to keep my commitment of at least one “real” post here.

Did anything else happen? Um, yeah. A post that almost was not written, Required Reading in Social Media, front-paged on Digg, went popular on Delicious, and sent a bunch of traffic from PopUrls. Go figure.

Am I done promoting myself? Hell No! Probably the main purpose of this post is to announce that I am now a member of the GrandEffect blog network! Woohoo! Thanks go out to Sarah Perez and the whole gang at GrandEffect. You will now see the GrandEffect bar at the top of the page listing all of the members of the network. I highly recommend reading all of them if you do not already.

Lastly, I want to point out some minor blog changes and statistics. First, I have moved some stuff around on the sidebars. No big change there, and you probably did not even notice. One “significant” change is the inclusion of the blog roll as a separate page. The old blog roll was a tiny little thing that I never really updated. I figured it would be a good idea to show you the blogs that I read every day. For your convenience, they are grouped into topics so you can ignore the topics that you really do not care about.

The statistics for the blog get better every day:

• about 450 subscribers
• above 100 authority (112 currently) and top 55K blogs in technorati
• 76 posts and counting
• Almost 50,000 words written (48577 to be exact, not counting this post).

Obviously, none of this is possible without my loyal readers, so I thank all of you. Here’s to hoping that the snowball does not melt.