Serendipity35

It is anniversary day at Serendipity35.  My first post here was on February 2, 2006. It was called "Why Serendipity35?" and it was more of a test than a post. It explained the name choice, but even the idea of blogging was more of an experiment in using some open source blogging software than it was an interest in being a blogger.

I needed something to demo for a workshop that Tim Kellers and I were doing at NJIT on blogs, wikis and podcasting. Those were all pretty new things on campuses back then.

The blogging was more enjoyable than I expected and I continued after the workshops.

After a few weeks, the blog started to gather itself around the idea of technology and learning which made sense as I was then the Manager of Instructional Technology at NJIT.

And now it has been five years and 1,152 posts in 22 categories later. 

I don't know the actual grand total of hits but it's more than seven million. The number of visitors is down the past year over previous years. Blogs are perhaps less popular or maybe there are just too many of them. But there are still over 100,000 hits each month the past year, so there are other readers like you.

The "long tail" effect is still in place though - older posts still have the most visitor hits. Even that slight first post has had over 24,000 visits.


The Top 10 (and certainly not the ones I would vote for as the best) are:

1. Personal Video Online: YouTube and Beyond 64,187 visits


2. Public iTunes U Sites V4 58105 visits


3. Online Socializing: How Are Schools Reacting? 46,576 visits


4. This conference is only online (HigherEd BlogCon 2006) 45,230 visits


5. Back to the Future 44,281 visits


6. Classroom 2.0 Live: A Free Meetup 43,116 visits


7. Google Page Creator 42,326 visits


8. What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me about the American Empire 42,123 visits


9. About Us 2.0 41,997 visits


10. Bookmarklets and Favelets 41,744 visits

I left NJIT at the end of 2007 and moved to Passaic County Community College into a less-tech more-learning position. Tim is still at NJIT, but he moved the blog from NJIT's servers to one of his own servers.

That long tail is so long that I sometimes find myself writing a post and then realizing that I had already written about it a few years ago.

And I still enjoy looking at our stats to see who is visiting, when they visit, and how they found us. You can take a look at the stats for last month and see the countries who have clicked into Serendipity35.  Hello, all of you readers in Tuvalu!