Year End Wrap-Up: Blogging in 2009

I'm finally home safe from a wonderful trip to visit the future in-laws, and I can honestly say that Nebraska winters are worse than Ohio's. I've been snowed in for an extra 3 days as emergency crews struggled to clear roads that were almost immediately re-covered with snow drifting from the tightly shorn corn fields. You win this time, plains, but I still contend that Ohio is in the midwest!

Midwestern states, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau

But anyway, I've realized that this year in blogging has taught me a few things about myself. And since this will likely be my last post of the year, I decided to recap them here for your enjoyment. In no particular order, I present my list of things that blogging as taught me about myself in 2009:

1. I am a terrile proofreader.
I'm not sure how many times I have to go back and fix mistakes immediately after posting, but its an awful lot.

2. I am easily distracted.
This makes my 70th post of the year, and yet I've got at least 90 other posts in my queue waiting for completion. Some of them have since become irrelevant and will probably never see the light of day, but I hope to get to a good portion of them in the next few weeks. Some of them, like the 3 part creation museum series, is nearly completed. Others are little more than interesting links and thoughts I've scribbled down and saved - sure that they would make fine future rants.

This really isn't anything new, as my graduate advisers will surely tell you. As Chris once told me, I have shiny ball syndrome. At first I thought he was asking if I had some sort of STD, but then he explained that it meant I start wondering off to some other task as soon as any distraction or shiny ball passes by. Its not often about procrastination, but about lacking the ability to stay focused on a task until it is completed.

3. I care way more about promoting science than I do about non-belief.
Many of the blogs I often read are far more concerned with the building community within the atheist/agnostic/secular humanism/freethinking community. Comparatively, 24 of my posts were tagged with "science", as opposed to only 5 tagged with "godlessness." This may be a function of my tagging preferences, but I really feel like there are so many other, better blogs about non-belief, that I have nothing more to say about it. This is a blog written by an atheist, but it is not an atheist blog.

4. I still feel uncomfortable calling myself an atheist.
Its still probably the most accurate description of my beliefs (although I admit I am agnostic with regard to my knowledge of a god or gods), it still gives me pause to write it here. I know I'll never be a good spokesperson for the cause until I can shed this embarrassment, but its something I'm still finding difficult to do. I've been told I should submit this to the atheist blogroll maintained over at Deep Thoughts, and I still might. It'd be an easy way to expand my readership, but I'm still a total chicken about some family member stumbling onto my blog and creating a big fuss about it. Actually, the big fuss isn't what scares me. A fuss would be welcome, because then we could actually talk about the issues at hand. What really scares me is the silent judgment that might follow after I've been officially "outed." I've gotten easy instant credibility most of my life because I've widely been considered a "good catholic" boy. None of my behaviors or morals have changed, but its pretty much a given that people will assume they have. If anything, I feel most socially conscious than I was growing up. The understanding that there is no holy puppet-master following some divine script means that we as human beings are responsible for making the world a better place. Atheists just lack the social structures that make religiously-based community service easier and therefore more common. Some people, like Dale McGowan, are working to change that through organizations like the Foundation Beyond Belief:



I'm also worried that Andrea will get flack from her more devout relatives about marrying an non-believer. I almost regret giving her family my business cards with this URL on it. This weekend I was sitting around with her family playing Taboo, the board game where you have to get your team members to say a word without saying any of the related words listed on the card. I had the phrase "Ouija board", and as a clue I used "something I don't believe in." All together the family shouted "GOD!"

I thought this was pretty funny, since I don't think I've ever really talked about my beliefs with them (I must give off the vibe), but Andrea's mom definitely had some awkward nervous laughter after that. I've only sort of alluded to my beliefs while talking to her mom, but I think she'll probably have alot of questions about them when it inevitably comes up.

5. I still haven't found my niche.
As the title implies, this blog was originally meant to be about molecular and genetic evolution. However, I think I've had more posts about The Colbert Report than about molecular evolution. I think its because I feel the need to write this for the general public, but communicating complex issues about abstract topics requires an immense amount of work and planning.

I've got it in my head that I'm going to start out by breaking down the issues into blog-sized pieces and go through them one by one, and then when I start talking about new research I can simply link to earlier descriptions. This is a daunting task, though.

I've also posted on a wide range of scientific topics, from Astronomy to Philosophy, most of which I have no expertise in. A generalist strategy might be advantageous to already popular blogs, but getting people to care about what you have to say because you've studied it in depth is probably a more successful one before you gather any readers. According to my Google Analytics data, I've had 541 visitors this year. Although since there are about 4 months where it registered no visitors, I'm pretty sure this isn't accurate. Since I've re-installed the code on December 17th I've had 36 visitors, so I think 541 might have been a pretty sizable underestimation.

6. The world is a small place.
According to Analytics, I've had quite a range of readers from all over the world. The break down is as follows:

• Australia: 7
• Brazil: 31
• Canada: 8
• Costa Rica: 15
• India: 11
• Iran: 2
• Japan: 2
• Mexico: 4
• Mongolia: 2
• Pakistan: 1
• Philippines: 3
• South Africa: 1
• South Korea: 3
• Turkey: 1
• Thailand: 1
• United Kingdom: 13

This list isn't exhaustive, since there were many European countries that had 1-2 visits as well, but the fact that 31 people in Brazil and ANYONE in Mongolia has visited a website that I created is astonishing to me. There were visits from well over 200 different cities around the globe, meaning the internet has made the world a very small place, and given those that promote science and reason a much louder voice than we would have otherwise.