I was paging through my posts as I could have sworn that I wrote about a topic but I could not find it. Then I noticed that the first RegularGeek post was written on December 12, 2007. So, happy birthday to the blog! In addition to this fact, I realized that I had not done a “State of the Blog” post in a while as well. First, I want to say thank you to my readers, who have made the first year go by quickly. Everyone seems to be OK with my rambling, so I will not be changing anything of that sort in year 2 of the blog. I was thinking of adding posts from my Google Reader shares, so if you have an opinion on that please let me know.

So what highlights did I have in the first year? Well, there were 2 Digg front pages, or at least Tech front pages. The blog was highlighted by Louis Gray back when it was still fairly young. The conversations that took place here and on other blogs spawned YackTrack, the social media conversation tracker. This blog eventually got me a contributor role at Mashable, and a similar role now at LouisGray.com. All of these factors contributed to being accepted as a member of the GrandEffect blog network, that little group of sites at the top of the page. I am sure more has happened, but more importantly I am still having fun. To close out the highlights, here is a list of the 10 most visited posts from the first year:

• Who Woke The Sleeping Giant
• Required Reading In Social Media
• Google Should Buy StumbleUpon
• Is Bebo Worth $1 Billion
• Fear is Not the Answer, It Is Time To Adapt
• Personalized Homepages Review
• Quick Guide To Social Media
• Plaxo Price at 200 Million is Absurd
• Facebook is No the Place To Blow Off Steam
• Twitter at the Crossroads

Those posts are only based on pageviews, and are not what I would consider my “best” posts for the year. That is likely the topic of another post. Finally, the big question of how are we doing now? As I have done before, I am just going to dump the numbers:

• Months Blogging: 12
• Posts Per Month: 12
• Words Per Post: 697
• Total Words In Posts: 90672

The past month has been even more active than before and longer as well:

• Posts this Month: 15
• Words Per Post:783
• Total Words In Posts: 11744

At the end of the summer, I decided to write shorter posts in the range of 400 or 500 words. Given that my posts keep getting longer, I am not doing very well. However, I keep getting subscribers, so I am assuming that things are OK. Of course I have to answer the question, how do the “major” ranking statistics look:

• Technorati Authority:95
• Technorati Rank: 51898
• Feedburner: 578 subscriptions, this is an approximate number as bloglines was 27 but currently missing entirely.
• Google Page Rank: 5

The Technorati numbers are wildly different now as they had some database issues along with a spam cleaning session. So, I lost links from 6 weeks between July and September. I am keeping track of it more as a growth metric. Overall, I think things are going fairly well. The blog keeps growing and I have not lost the desire to write either. So, again I thank my readers for keeping it interesting and I hope you continue to find this blog a worthwhile read.