10 numbers to celebrate the 10th anniversary of this #highered blog

10 years minus 10 days

I wish I were the one turning 10, but unfortunately… I’m already 25 (been that way for a few years now ;0).

In 10 days, collegewebeditor.com, this little blog I started without a big master plan on February 12, 2005 will have been around for a whole decade (I’ve been blogging for 16 years – got my start at About.com).

A lot has happened for the past 10 years in higher ed digital marketing and communication — we didn’t call it this way back then for starters.

That’s why I want to try to write 10 posts to remember, discuss and reflect with you, my dear readers, what made this decade memorable.

So, let’s start with some navel gazing by looking at the story of this blog through interesting and suprising data points.
I’ll give you 10 of these to keep with the theme.

1) 1,023 posts published

While I’ve posted more tweets (14.6K in 7.5 years), collegewebeditor.com is definitely the platform where I’ve published the most words over the past 10 years.
I don’t have a precise word count, but a very conservatitve estimate of 500 words on average per post results in a bit more than half a million words. Not bad.

2) My 1000th post

While it’s ok to estimate some numbers, it’s better to provide credit where credit is due. While this post is the 1,023rd published on this blog, it’s actually the 1000th post I’ve written.

After doing some research, I’ve found that 23 posts were written by guest bloggers – most of them as they live blogged several conferences in 2006 and 2007 at my request to help share great conference takeaways with the larger community.

For anybody keeping counts, 1,000 written posts on this blog doesn’t make me the most prolific higher ed blogger in our community. I think this title should be given to Andrew Careaga with 1,141 posts – as of yesterday – published on his blog launched in November 2005. Nor I or this blog are the oldest either as Michael Stoner from mStoner has been blogging since June 2003 while signing 366 posts of this own. Kyle James who created eduGuru – that has been recently taken over by a vendor – wrote 279 posts.

3) More than 2.6 million spam comments

Before social media, blog comments or forum postings were the way to go if you wanted to be social (yep, kiddos ;-).

In the early days, spammers were going full force (they still do, but the technology has caught up) with spam comments. In the first couple of years of this blog, I spent a fair amount of time deleting spam comments during the pre-Akismet period (THE anti-spam plugin savior for all WordPress bloggers). I remember fondly (NOT) having to delete them 1 by 1 with WordPress 1.2 at the beginning. I did have a party when they introduced the “select-all” feature to do the job.

4) 2,939 published comments

This is one of the mystery of this blog. I’ve never managed to get long passionate conversations going on this blog. That’s the reason for this low comments/posts ratio: not even 3 comments on average.
Nothing to write home about, I agree.

5) Visits from 216 countries

According to WolframAlpha (thanks, Siri!), there are only 206 countries in the world, but my Google Analytics account data for this blog begs to differ. It reports visits from 216 different countries over the past 10 years. I don’t think we lost any country over the past decade, but if you’re a better informed citizen of the world, feel free to enligthen me on this topic.

What’s even more puzzling is the fact that Google Analytics reports 6 countries with no visits at all to this blog: Turkmenistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Chad and Niger. So, according to Google Analytics, there are 222 countries in the world.

I’m also happy to report that in 10 years of blogging, I did manage to get a single visit from Vatican City, although I’m still wondering why…

5) Visits from 15,669 cities

What’s probably most interesting than the total number of cities is the top ten as it confirms the international reach this blog has had over the past decade:
1) New York
2) London (UK)
3) Chicago
4) Washington
5) Los Angeles
6) Montreal (Canada)
7) Toronto (Canada)
8) Boston
9) Sydney (Australia)
10) Atlanta.

7) Average Time on Page: 3 min 27 seconds

While the average bounce rate from the site is pretty high at 71% (but it’s not as bad as it sounds for a blog as you usually read the latest post and go your merry way), the average time on page for the past decade – at above 3 minutes – is a testament to the quality of the information provided on this blog (well, that’s what I like to tell myself when I wonder why I should keep blogging ;0)

8) $0 taken from higher ed vendors or agencies (or any link buyers)

This blog has been proudly independent since day 1.

Since it’s not without costs, it’s supported 100% by Higher Ed Experts, the professional online school I founded in April 2007 – which is funded exclusively by the professional development dollars of your higher ed colleagues taking our professional certificate online courses (since Sep 2011) or attending – with their team – our online conferences (since June 2007).

No plan to sell or to sell out in the future, so if you need professional development…. (Ok, THAT was a plug ;0).

9) 1,000,000 thanks

That’s what I want to give you for having this blog in your reading life. When it was almost the only one around, it was a no-brainer I guess, but today there are so many possibilities…

So, I really appreciate the time and attention you give to this blog.

Hopefully, you’ll stick around for the next 10 days as I try to write a post a day about the last decade in higher ed digital communication and marketing.

10) What’s YOUR data point?

I’ve said it above: comments have never been the forte of this blog’s readers, but I can still try, right?

So, why not share wth us in the comments below the data point or number that tells your story with this blog?