One Year

One Year

On Wednesday this little blog celebrate its one year anniversary (first post), while I was suffering from a bad case of the common cold. However, two days have passed, and I feel strong enough to commemorate the occasion.
A word of warning - this post will not be about augmented reality, but rather about maintaining an AR blog, and a quick look-ahead to the future of this joint. Note that I'm only looking at Augmented Times statistics, and don't consider my Games Aflresco readership.

• This year I've published 246 posts.
  
• I've made a neat $0 through this blog. It was never about making money, and therefore you won't find any ads or affiliate links over here.
  
• Augmented Times had 40333 visits, 21969 unique visitors and 61955 pageviews. The numbers are quite low, comparing to Games Alfresco or The Future Digital Life, but I'm quite satisfied. During my first month I had 0 visitors (or it may be that I've installed Google Analytics to track visitors only later).
• On the brightside, Augmented Times has 448 subscribers to its RSS feeds using Google Reader, second only to Games Alfresco, and far ahead of any other AR-specialized blog. I've tried to make all my posts fully-readable via RSS, and avoided using any "click-through" tricks to bring more readers to the site itself.
• I have 564 followers on Twitter (@augmented) and new followers are added every day. But it is still nothing compared with Metaio's Danika following. (though I have a better followers/following ratio)
  
• My top post in terms of readers was "Augmented Reality in Your Hands" about a research project that used hands in lieu of black and white markers. A close second is "My IKEA has a Live Demo".
• My top sources are Google, Games Alfresco and Twitter.
• On Google, the top search strings leading to my site were "augmented times", "augmented reality blog", "srengine" (!) and "ikea augmented reality" (you people really like IKEA). I also had visitors looking for "freaky nudes" , "pimping cars", "how to become optimus prime" and "christmas porn greeting cards" (what?).
• Finally, I have become popular enough to make Dutch tech company deLight buy the domain augmentedtimes.com and point it here, for some strange reason.
  

Now is a good time to send my sincere apologies to those that I have offended in the last year, mainly Sequence Point Software and Mobilizy. As for the year ahead - frankly, I don't know. Maintaining Augmented Times is a time consuming task with little reward on its side. A lot has changes during this past year, and many skilled people have created their own sites covering AR. Whether there's any place to my unqiue point of view (if it's unique at all) is still to be decided. Till then, I try to learn everyday a new thing about the technology that's going to rock our world.