My soon-to-be-wife often criticizes that I spend too much of my life attached to my MacBook Pro. This assertion has now been validated by the Vancouver Sun and NowPublic, who graciously ranked me at #15 in their article documenting Vancouver’s most “online” personalities. When fellow list members like Matthew Good are driving tens of thousands of visitors per day, lots are griping about the others among us who… uhh.. aren’t. Why did I make the list, with only a handful of monthly postings and a meagre few thousand visitors per month, you might ask?
It would be a mistake to view this list as a ranking of popular blogs in the city. My friend Dick, who edged me out at #11, last posted on June 18.
Instead I’m going to guess that my appearance on this list is because I spend a lot of time writing and discussing various things not only on my own blog, but on others as well. I’ve also cultivated, in part because of my time spent south-of-the-border, a rather extensive network of friends and associates from a diversity of internet-centric businesses. As such I am often a featured LinkedIN member (who knows how that algorithm works?) and claim to know lots of people on FaceBook (my profile was recently locked down due to freakish invasions of my privacy by a certain individual).
What many don’t know is that starting in 1998 I maintained an open mailing list called FOIB for more than five years which had hundreds of subscribers and was soapbox for my more controversial ramblings and opinions on politics, culture, the environment, and technology. So blogging, per se, is not new to me.
In essence I have chosen to live my life with reasonable transparency on the web, and share my thoughts and opinions all over the place, whether they’re welcome or not. Here I am on twitter and flickr.
To some extent, being voted one of “The web’s 20 most-visible” people is a self-fulfilling prophecy: it will lead to more connections, likely more traffic to this blog and others I frequent, and increased visibility for my thoughts and validations. I’ll do my best to keep it interesting, and worthy of your time. And to the team at NowPublic, I am most humbly grateful.