Oddhead Blog

Whew. Woblomo is over. At the last minute, I changed my goal from posting every day to every other day, and I couldn’t be happier. Sixteen posts in thirty one days is challenge enough.

First, I actually failed my own challenge. If I had stickKed it, I’d be stuck with a bill. I missed the March 9 deadline by 5 hours and 3 minutes. I woke up on March 10 in a hotel room with the sudden horrible realization that I “was fail”. I quickly published a post, ending with a quip suggesting that according to Hawaii Standard Time I had a full 53 minutes to spare. Even though every other day comes every other day (for most people an easily recognizable pattern) I somehow simply forgot. I did end up meeting the other fifteen deadlines according to my actual time zone. There’s always next year.

The exercise was absolutely worthwhile for me. I published several posts that were idling in my idea file, where I’m sure they’d remain if it weren’t for the impetus of forced deadlines. As of today, quantcast says my traffic has gone from 700 to 1,900 people per month, my site ranking from the high millions to 686,628. Google Reader says I have 416 subscribers and impressively clocks my posts/week at precisely 3.5.

I also rushed a few wonder bread posts toward the end. Dear reader: on balance do you think my blog was better during this version of March Madness?

Money Conciousness — one of four other bloggers who participated in woblomo as far as I can tell — says “I don’t think I will ever do this again in the future”. I definitely plan to. I believe it was nearly the perfect length and pace: just enough to serve as a prod to clean out the “easy” posts from my queue and force a few wingits, without leaving me completely bankrupt. I wouldn’t want to keep up the pace every month, but I could easily see doing it twice a year instead of once.

The meme “woblomo” has reached 9,430 places around the web, including the The Monthly Newsletter of the Lansing Junior Chamber of Commerce. Not exactly “wisdom of crowds” fame, but not bad.

My favorite quote about woblomo was from Anthony Towns:

Via David Pennock, who is apparently of the view that if something’s worth doing, it’s worth registering the domain and turning it into a worldwide phenomenon. And hey, why not?

Apparently so. Just wait until I get around to explaining freeralph.com.

I’m planning to take the World Blogging Month (WoBloMo) challenge in March. Join me!

The goal is simple: blog at least every other day from March 1 to March 31. Post something — anything — on every odd day of the month and you win. Skip any day not divisible by 2 and you lose.

Many bloggers already write every day or nearly so. More power to them. For the rest of us, who blog infrequently and spend copious time arguing with their inner editors, ludicrous and artificial pretenses can be a good thing.

WoBloMo resembles the write-a-novel-in-a-month contest NaNoWriMo and other timed artistic challenges prefaced on the idea that quantity and quality can be friends. By suppressing the Spock-like perfectionist inside you, you can bring out your inner Kirk and “just do it”. Agonizing over details always has diminishing returns and sometimes, perversely, can make things worse. Or so the theory goes. You be the judge once (if) my WoBloMo fountain erupts.

Added 2009/02/26: Full disclosure.

I joined the quantcast audience measurement service. It took about two minutes to sign up and initiate tracking. I’m impressed with the ease of use, the utility, and the inroads the company has made in the year or so since former Yahoo Mike Speiser first showed it to me.

Looks like I’m getting about 1000 visitors a month, roughly 3/4 that of Chris, 1/6 of Robin, 1/10 of Lance, 0.00079% of my employer, and 0.00073% of my employer’s frenemy.

I also joined the scribd document hosting service (“Youtube for documents”) and used it to embed a PDF in my previous post. Again, from signup to service took a matter of minutes. (I think scribd could be great for hosting my publications which are in need of both a content and interface update.)

Probably there’s some sort of business axiom here, probably already blogged and book-ed: the two minute rule of successful web services.

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1011 Update: Twain Jobs Favre now Fortnow: return! Demise reports exaggerations great