The Blogging Life: 16 Months and 87 Countries Later

This blog has been around for 16 months, so it’s time to take stock. Some posts have been better than others, admittedly, and there have been dry periods, when other projects have distracted me from blogging for weeks. But I’m stickin’ to it until I literally run out of words.
Since I’m taking stock, I’ll be egotistic for a moment and share a few amazing facts about my readership. One of my favorite analytic tools is FlagCounter, which you can see in the right-hand margin of my blog. Flag Counter, among other things, tells you from where in the world your readers have visited.

School Communications 2.0 has received:

1,782 visits from the United States (I’m going to assume that 100 of those visits were from the author)

290 visits from the Philippines

243 visits from Canada

169 visits from the United Kingdom

141 visits from India

107 visits from Malaysia (who knew?)

77 visits from the Netherlands

66 visits from Australia

And the list goes on, with a good number of visits from countries in Europe, as you might expect. But it’s when the numbers begin to dwindle down to single visits that I’m reminded how awed by the Web I continue to be. Here are just a few of the visits that fascinate me:

4 visits each from Jordan, Vietnam, and Kenya

2 visits each from Croatia, Moldova and Oman

1 visit each from Mongolia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Islamic Republic of Iran, Kazakhstan and Morocco.

And finally, on March 27, I received a single visit from the Holy See (Vatican City State).

My guess is that someone at the Vatican stopped by to read my post about the Pope’s YouTube page. Perhaps the Official Papal Social Media Guy. Whatever. The point is, he stopped by.

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What is Social Media?

I found an interesting eBook, “What is Social Media,” that’s worth reading when you have time for 40 pages. The good news is that you can come here anytime you want to catch up on your summer reading. It’s a well-organized and easy-to-read guide to the basics — blogs, Youtube, Digg, Delicious, and more. Once you read it, you’ll understand all those crazy terms that have been leaving you behind in the dust!

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Using iGoogle to Start Your Day

If you don’t have iGoogle set up on your computer, then you might as well start your day an hour later than everyone else. As school communicators and school superintendents, it’s important to get off on the right foot. I will likely spend the new few blog entries showing you how to set up iGoogle as user-designed news and blog feed repository, or in non-geek speak, an easy to use place to store all your favorite websites and blogs. What’s more iGoogle has such an easy user interface you’ll find it a breeze to set up. Stay tuned and I will show you how to accomplish all this in my next post.

Today I Presented…

…a two-hour workshop for the Westchester Rockland School Public Relations Association on social bookmarking, online press releases, eNewsletters, blogs and Web 2.0 in general. We discovered Facebook as a group, online collaboration and networking, Google Docs, and a host of other tools that we hope to begin implementing. Already, my small staff is jazzed about this and we’re starting small. We are responsible every year for writing profiles of our organization’s retirees, and those profiles are published in our newsletters and are used by our District Superintendent for his annual tribute to our retirees at a June Reception. We will work as a team this year, sharing our profiles via Google Docs and tracking our progress as we struggle through some 20 profiles.

I really do want to share the presentation with the world, so feel free to take a look. Enjoy, learn something and whatever you do, catch that train before it leaves the station.