But I can’t let my blogiversary slip by without comment. As I noted last year, most bloggers have quit long before two years’ time. So I’m kinda slow, but I persist to the end. That’s the way I ran a marathon, and that seems to be the way my life works in general. (My wife is a much more frequent blogger.)

Since last year’s anniversary, I’ve about tripled the number of unique visitors, but they still come for the same reasons, the WordPress plugins I develop.

The most significant change this past year was the arrival of my son Sam. I adore the little guy, and I’ve loved being a daddy. No doubt he’ll be precocious, so maybe this time next year he’ll have started his own blog.

Until yesterday I just avoided the problem by moderating all pingbacks and trackbacks. But I got so tired of having to run my eyes over all of it that I just activated the Akismet plugin. It works so well that I’ve stopped using a captcha for comments, letting Akismet handle that too. (By the way, the captcha has been almost completely effective for me–the only spam in the last year came from a couple of human spammers).

So, bravo to Automattic, the folks behind Akismet.

UPDATE May 22, 2006 Matt Mullenweg’s Akismet statistics confirm that my experience isn’t unique: blog spam (as opposed to legitimate comments, or “ham”) seems to be increasing exponentially.

My first entry was long and tedious. Like a number of my blog posts, it’s more of a reference for me than of interest to others. At the time I was hand-coding Perl as the back-end to several MySQL-powered sites, and not finding any other guide to highlighting text searches, I wrote my own.

Anyways, according to somewhat old (for the blogosphere) data, about half of bloggers quit after three months, so if nothing else, I’m persistent.

At this point I get over three hundred unique IP address visits per day. Most of those seem to be interested in various of the WordPress plugins I’ve created. Usually the blog posts that attract the most attention surprise me. For example, I mentioned just briefly that I was fascinated by a new cooling technology most useful for third-world nations. Google the company that makes the product, Dissigno, and my blog entry appears second in the results, with the consequence that I occasionally receive emails from some confused people who think I am Dissigno.

One of the most popular entries is one of a photo of my wife’s Yoda origami. On average since I’ve made that post, every day and a half someone searches for “yoda origami” or some variant and lands on my blog, proving that no matter how obscure the interest, crowds of other people share it.

The lead developer of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, has the distinction of being the #1 “Matt” according to Google. I can now claim the same of my screen name, “filosofo.” Hmm; think I can put that on my C.V.?

Your voice gives you a unique place–your combination of business leader and entertainer. How does that shape your role?
I see it more as a calling. We live in a society that doesn’t pay attention to you unless you have money or fame . . . . The responsibility of people who have money and fame and some kind of clout is to use that in a meaningful way. There is also responsibility for me to always be thoughtful and never flippant.

Does that stifle you?
No. It’s actually more stimulating because it means . . . you have to go to a deeper place where nothing is coming from just off the top of your head.

Prattling off the top of one’s head is a constant danger for everyone and especially bloggers, because the nature of their craft requires continual content. So I like the way Winfrey sees that danger as a challenge for greater intellectual responsibility.

On an unrelated note, US News includes columnist Thomas Friedman among its leaders. You know how one event can color how you see something ever after? That happened to me years ago when I ate peanut brittle immediately before getting the stomach flu–I know it’s the post hoc fallacy, but ever since I despise a food I once loved. Well, a less extreme version of that occurred when a friend pointed out this wonderful roast of Friedman. I know it’s unfair and at times needlessly vulgar, but it so delightfully skewers him that that article has permanently framed my picture of Friedman. I imagine that’s like the golden note struck by Thomas Nast in his cartoons of Boss Tweed: a ridicule so powerful that no one can think of Tweed without Nast’s images.

8. Mixing Topics

If you publish on many different topics, you’re less likely to attract a loyal audience of high-value users. Busy people might visit a blog to read an entry about a topic that interests them. They’re unlikely to return, however, if their target topic appears only sporadically among a massive range of postings on other topics. The only people who read everything are those with too much time on their hands (a low-value demographic).

The more focused your content, the more focused your readers. That, again, makes you more influential within your niche. Specialized sites rule the Web, so aim tightly.

If you have the urge to speak out on, say, both American foreign policy and the business strategy of Internet telephony, establish two blogs. You can always interlink them when appropriate.

Sadly, Nielsen’s right: without a focused topic area I’m not going to attract hordes of readers (and hence lots of advertising revenue). And I’m never going to have a focused topic area, simply because I’m interested in too many different things. So if no one’s going to read my blog, why bother?

Actually it’s not so bleak. For one thing, you have to be mostly crazy to blog for the money. It’s unlikely you’ll generate much traffic, but even if you do, you’ll end up using more bandwidth, so you’ll have to pay more for hosting. Then your blog might end up like the car you had in high school: existing so you can make money to pay for its existence. Instead, serious bloggers write for the love of it. It doesn’t matter whether they have huge audiences.

Also, technology comes to the rescue. I may not have a specialist blog, but blog-readers can (and do) find topics of interest by looking for keywords in blog search engines like Technorati, Yahoo, or Google. I suspect that trend–of searching for articles of interest–will continue. Already, little of my news consumption starts from one place. My custom RSS feeds look for news stories about various topics of interest to me, or I’ll glance through the list of headlines from several news sources. So I predict that soon most readers of blogs, instead of reading just a few blogs regularly, will read numerous blogs via blog aggregators. Then being a specialist won’t be so important anymore.

I’ve been saying the same thing for a long time, so it’s gratifying to see I’m in good company: First Things’ section “The Public Square” was the first blog, albeit in print. Richard John Neuhaus tries to deny that fact on First Things’ new web-blog (that supposedly also isn’t a blog; whatever it is, it’s certain to be frequently viewed in my feed reader):

Andrew Sullivan — who could be a much nicer and more sensible person if he really tried — once remarked that, as the writer of The Public Square, I was the world’s first blogger. That is not true.

It does require editing a couple of lines in the

Hopefully it will be of use to some. Let me know what you think.

Filosofo Comments Preview plugin

At one point a frustrated Purdue asked his marketing consultant, a blogger named B.L. Ochman, president of Whatsnextonline.com, how to attract readers. She recalls relaying a tip that long ago had been given to her: “Do something controversial.”

Purdue, it turned out, was well on his way to doing just that. Even before he began building his blog, his company was falling apart. The installation in February of a new wireless inventory system led to widespread confusion and missed orders. As chaos mounted, morale sank among iFulfill’s 38 employees. Customers defected. Debt soared.

Purdue, who had financed the startup on personal credit cards, saw the balance on his cards top $150,000. The company owed even more to shipping giant UPS (UPS ). Attempts to refinance fell through. So on the morning of July 25, the 43-year-old Purdue shuttered the seven-year-old iFulfill.com. “I went to work at about 5 a.m.,” he says, “and started firing people as they came in.”

And wouldn’t you know it? That’s when his blog took off. As bloggers spread the word about the drama at iFulfill.com, Purdue’s blog at last began to generate buzz — though hardly the kind he had envisioned. No, it became an online exhibit of a company’s demise, in real time. As Purdue explained why he was shutting the doors, customers weighed in with comments, many of them expressing fury. Competing shippers in the fulfillment industry popped up on the blog, offering their services.

But at least Purdue kept his perspective:

But already, his thoughts are drifting from iFulfill. For three days, while merchants were hiring trucks and hauling off their goods, he was on a Cub Scout trip with his son. Now he is preparing to file for personal bankruptcy. He says that when the warehouses are empty, he’ll stop blogging — at least until he has some new stories to share.

An ex-customer thinks he knows what went wrong:

Not all of his customers were amused. David Foy, president of Adox Fotowerke of Calgary, Alta., says that when he saw the blog go up, he worried. “Paul was turning into a philosopher,” he says. “It was about his ego.” Foy, who was already seeing performance glitches at iFulfill, began shifting shipments to a competitor in Idaho.

What’s more interesting to me is what’s not happening.

Thirteen percent of all blogs that Technorati tracks are updated weekly or more, said the report, and 55% of all new bloggers are still posting three months after they started.

Apparently about half of bloggers lose interest after 3 months, and only about 1 in 8 writes more often than once a week. My uninformed guess is that if you’re not writing more than once a week, no one’s reading your blog. So there are less than 2 million serious bloggers. I wonder what percentage of them are read by, say, the top 90% of blog-readers?