SchmoBlog 50,000!

Sometime last week (Sitemeter gives total sums from visitors with data a week old), Joeschmo's Gears and Grounds hit 50,000 unique visitors. I only hit 40,000 last September, but the other big round numbers of 30k and 20k each took two years to aggregate. What happened, besides just me blogging more? Take a look.

Something happened last August, and the September numbers started to reflect that. What happened in August? I added the feature 10 Second Anime. People like pictures, and if they move, they like them even more. Add in niche culture with not uncommon flights toward art, and people will jam their search engines looking for it.

I have been watching anime since before I started the blog, but never wrote much about it. But once I found a quick workflow for making animated gifs, and married it to one of my interests, which can make blog posts that aren't just walls of words, my own blogging hobby revitalized. I don't write much about coffee these days, and the gears and grounds parts mainly refer to my cycling habit, but anime is definitely technology in pop culture. Blogging used to be the social media back in the mid-2000's, because even then, adults didn't really want to be on myspace. Now with more mature social media platforms, blogging has become more corporate, because the personal blog for most people was what they were looking for before Facebook, and then Twitter, provided that way of easily sharing stuff found on the web with their friends.

For me, I still like writing long posts, but for people to find your posts, you also have to make something to go with it. Blogging has to include some kind of media now for people to find it, to grab their attention, or to react to it. That could be pictures, video, or even links. Facebook looks more like a blog these days, with multiple columns, but a main body with many "blog posts." News sites look like blogs. Time wasters like I Can Has Cheezburger still follow the same form. So, blogging never really went away. It's just that people found a way to make money at it. Not me, though. This is pure fun for me.

To the people who actually read every post, thanks for coming along for the ride. To all the google image search people curious about the main page, thank you too, but just scroll down quickly to get your animated gif fix.