Quarterly report

Today, Freemania is three months old. To mark this, I’ll be having some cake with lunch; if it’s a really slow day, I may post on how tasty it is later on.

I’ve also commissioned Sir Nicholas Stern, Lord Butler, Lord Hutton and the ghost of Rod Hull to conduct a review of how much progress the blog has made towards achieving its mission statement: “I’m going to write some stuff and see how it goes, you know?”

I’ll spare you their full report, but the gist of the exec summary is that I have both written some stuff and seen how it’s gone. And they add that yes, they do indeed know.

According to the external auditors, I’ve produced 95 posts, of average length 370 words – a total wordcount of 35,204. Weekly average 7.3 posts or 2,708 words. (That’s about the rate of writing that I did as an undergrad. Sorry, no, that’s about the rate I should have done as an undergrad…)

Sadly, the figures evaluating the quality of the output have been misplaced.

One thing I have no numbers on is how much traffic comes this way. I presume it’s not very much, and I know I could find out without too much trouble – but I don’t think I want to. If it’s pathetically low, then that might dishearten me; if it’s surprisingly high, then I might become (more) big-headed and start playing to ‘my public’, which is a horrifying notion.

Basically, though, this blog is largely a selfish endeavour. Most of the people I know aren’t really into politics, and I fancied having some sort of outlet for my main interest. Also, I like to mull things over a bit before sounding off, and I quite like to be able to lay out a case without risk of interruption, so a written medium probably suits me better anyway. And because this allows me to go on at some length – to potentially any number of superbly informed readers – it forces me to whip my thoughts into better shape than they’d be in just bouncing around my skull. This is the main reason I blog: self-improvement. And if other people like some of what I post, then that’s great; if people have interesting comments to make, that’s even better.

Blogging, for me at least, is usually partly reactive. I try to avoid posting drivel just for the sake of posting regularly, but I do feel that I ‘ought’ (in some way) to be producing stuff reasonably often. This means that I take a much keener interest in what other people are writing on their blogs – as well as the mainstream media – and if I see something interesting (or outrageously wrong), then that’s a good starting point for corralling some of my own thoughts. So I find myself naturally being drawn into… I loathe the word ‘blogosphere’ but there you go.

Thanks for being there.