Over the past couple of years, blogging has attracted some renewed interest. Folks have become increasingly wary of social media for obvious reasons. There continues to be an interest in long-form writing on the web, and the long-standing interest in public outreach and low cost of entry has always made blogging an appealing option for scholars in the humanities who want to expand the audience for their work. 

At the same time, blogs have become a bit passe and fit awkwardly into changing Internet culture. On the one hand, this risk of exposing oneself to the wilds of the internet feel greater than ever as social media has accelerated and amplified growing coarseness and incivility in public discourse and created a space for the worst elements in our society to operate behind a veil of relative anonymity. On the other hand, the rise in podcasts, email newsletter, and a new generation of high-quality multi-author sites (and the decline of blogrolls, aggregators, and other web infrastructure that made the famous blogosphere possible) has created a new web landscape that makes blogging seems rather more pointless than maybe it was a decade ago.

That all being said, I did somehow manage to write slightly over 158,000 words in 225 posts on my blog this year. That’s just over 700 words per post which is the longest average post since I started blogging in 2007. This year also saw the fewest post since 2008. 

As far as traffic goes, I’ve had about 28,000 views from 17, 378 visitors. This is slightly higher than the last couple of years, but nowhere near as busy as 2013-2015. The main drivers of traffic is search engines, followed by Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress Reader, the WARP website, and various places that have reposted or linked to various posts. The most popular posts for the year were my review of Donna Zuckerberg’s book, my list of links to various ASOR Annual volumes, a post on Wesley College at UND, a review of Andrew Reinhard’s Archaeogaming book, and my little discussion of Sarah Murray’s recent article on Hesperia.  

Finally, I’ve been toying the idea of doing something different with the blog. Maybe making a weekly or month newsletter to draw attention to my post, as well as those by other people, that I really enjoy. I’ve toyed with the idea of opening up my blog to more, different voices. I’ve even pondered ramping it down to three posts a week or focusing more on projects in 2019. In the end, this is all probably unlikely, because as much as I probably need to change things up, I’m more pre-occupied with other projects to have time to think through what this change could and should be. In short, look for more of the same in the coming months.

Happy New Year!