Final Status of my blogging cloud on Thursday, August 18, 2005

As of today, Thursday, August 18, 2005, my last day actively participating in the blogosphere, my blog "cloud" is 6,940 hits in Google, but that's 195 displayed hits, and 6,770 total hits, compared to 8,860, 202, and 8,120 on August 15. My blog cloud is defined as the results of a Google search of my name in quotes and the word "blog". Ultimately, the second number is the most accurate or reliable representation of your blog cloud's size. The third number is the hits if you click the Google link that says repeat the search with the omitted results included.

I suspect that the numbers bounce around erratically since blogs sometimes have lists of recent comments, and a number of my older comments simply fell off those lists. That's life, but there is also the lesson that you need to stay current and can't thrive for very long on old contributions.

Over time, a number of blogs will simply disappear, although if they are hosted on a service such as Blogger, their archived content should stay around indefinitely.

Another issue is that Google's web crawler and database mirroring are somewhat erratic, so the numbers can bounce around even if the actual content on the web remains unchanged.

My strategy for raising these numbers had been to make quality comments on the blogs of others, as well as to post my own blog posts when I feel that I have something to say.

-- Jack Krupansky