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More Than Two Years of Blogging

There’s been a lot of buzz on the Internet about blogging the last couple of days. In one post, Fred Wilson of Union Square ventures recently reflected on his blogging experience over the past years. Not only did he mention that he’s written over 5,600 blog posts but he said he might even be coming up on 10,000 hours of writing. Just yesterday, Om Malik put up a similar post. In the post he discussed his experience blogging over the past ten years and some of the lessons he learned from his 11,000+ posts. Well … given those posts, I wanted to look back at the last few years that I’ve been blogging as well.

Looking back, I’ve been blogging about two and a half years now. Objectively, two and a half years is a long time by almost any account. It’s especially long when you go through 1L and the first year of business school during that same time period, as those are two of the most demanding time periods you can experience.

But despite being busy, I always saw blogging as something that was worthwhile. Not only was it something that was fun but it also seemed quite useful.  It was a way to organize my thoughts and keep track of events. A way to think about the lessons learned during pivotal periods in the JD-MBA program.  A way to continuously improve my writing, as Fred and Erick suggested. And most importantly, a way to give back by answering questions and talking about experiences that a lot of people were interested in.

I’m not at 5,600 blog posts like Fred or at 10,000 posts like Erick, but I still agree  that writing here has been tremendously beneficial. In addition to making me a faster writer, I’ve also gotten better at telling a story, being more concise, and checking the background facts among other things.. And I’ve also gotten even better after writing so much during law school last year.

As I look back on the number of posts I’ve had, I’ve posted every 2 to 3 days over the past two years. This year, I’ll also write more posts than last year, though only by a small margin. And over the last two years, I’ve had a fairly even distribution of posts over the different months. There also doesn’t seem to be any trend to which months get the most posts. In 2009, I posted most in July. In 2010, I posted most in January and June. And in 2011, I posted most in March and November.

Here is a graph of my posts from 2011.

Here is a graph of my posts from 2010.

Here is the trend for the number of words per post.  And there is a very clear trend for my posts to have fewer and fewer words. This could be happening for a number of reasons – my own time constraints, better at writing more concise posts, shorter attention span of readers, accident, or all of the above.

Given how often I post as a student, I frequently get asked whether I’ll continue blogging after school. I definitely intend to keep blogging and I’ve been thinking a lot about how I should reinvent my blog if I do. Some people have suggested incorporating video content. Others, suggest more Q&A. And others suggest focusing on my professional field once I graduate.  I don’t know how it will evolve. But what I do know is that I do plan to turn up the volume in the next few months. Maybe like Fred and Erick, I’ll even start posting daily.

Thanks for the inspiration gentlemen!

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To see Fred’s post CLICK HERE

To see Erick’s post CLICK HERE