Looking ahead to 2009: The Year of Change
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For many people all around the world, if they had but one word to pick to reflect upon the year 2008, that word would possibly be “Change”. It was, after all, the word that Barack Obama ran his historic campaign on, and his election was a celebrated event all across the globe. But did 2008 really represent Change for America, or for you for that matter? It certainly didn’t for me.
At the end of 2007, which was a fairly decent year for me—I moved from Europe to California in 2007, fulfilling a nearly-lifelong dream of mine—I had looked ahead with great enthusiasm to 2008 and was hoping for it to be a year of change for me. I’d planned to get my sites up and running, start some more pet projects (more websites), get started with more actual, concrete Django development and a whole lot more.
Almost none of it happened.
2008, it turned out, was a pretty mediocre year for me. It ended up being a year that, for me, would be captured much more accurately in the phrase “The Promise of Change” rather than just the word (and any actual) Change. Oh sure, there was plenty of change in my life throughout 2008: I moved to San Francisco, I dated and eventually broke up with a really fantastic girl, I changed departments at work, and made tons of great new friends. 2008 wasn’t exactly static for me, but it exhibited almost none of the things I’d hoped for at the end of 2007.
So here comes 2009: for Barack Obama, it’ll be the year wherein he gets his chance to truly bring about the change he’s promised. As for myself, I intend to follow his example in my personal life and bring about some change as well. What 2008 taught me, more than anything else, is that change typically doesn’t come to you — when it does, it’s likely a negative kind of change rather than a positive kind. Positive change is something you bring upon yourself, through aggressive action and undertaking. It’s the only way to grow in life at the fastest possible rate.
Over the course of the next twelve months, I plan to bring about change not just in my own life, but also in yours. We’re living in a world that is connected internationally through the World Wide Web, but our society and our culture still thinks far too domestically and inwardly in comparison. There is still a great deal of intolerance and misunderstanding about other cultures, other religions, other sexualities, other people—and it’s time we change that. Throughout 2009, I’ll urge you to join me in a series of independent efforts to spread more global awareness on a series of subjects. Obama may be President of the most powerful country on the planet, but it’ll take all of us to truly change the world.
Let’s make 2009 become the Year of Change.
The misconception of traffic
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Yesterday I wrote a post explaining my disagreement with Andy Ihnatko's assertion that “every important and game-changing product Apple has introduced in the past ten years (beginning with the first iMac) started on the Tuesday morning keynote address at Macworld Expo.”
By the end of the day John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame linked to it, giving me a big surge of traffic. This morning I woke up to find a couple messages on my phone congratulating me on being "Fireballed", as the expression goes. This struck me as somewhat silly, and it led me to think a bit about what traffic really means.
In the music industry, bands or artists that have only one highly successful song are called one-hit wonders, a moniker that in some cases gets slapped on them only to unjustly doom their every next release. In the world of blogging, being Fireballed can be seen as somewhat similar to having made such a one-time hit: you get a big surge of traffic which lasts for a while, until your songarticle is old news and you're back to where you were: an unknown.
Of course, with music there will be a good bunch of people who enjoy the artist's other songs as well and become devoted fans; with blogs, some of that surge of traffic will subscribe to your RSS feed. In both worlds, if you can manage to squeeze out a couple more hits you're likely to receive a couple more bouts of attention and do this long and well enough and you'll no longer be that one-hit wonder.
Getting back to the subject of my blog and aforementioned article: while it's certainly nice to receive a lot of new visitors (Hi mom!), I feel that to congratulate on traffic is to have the wrong goal in mind. I write not for the sake of getting traffic—although there's a point to be made about getting traffic, more on that in a future post though—but instead I write to try and become a better writer, to express my opinion and to hopefully inform or educate or inspire others who happen to come across my writing.
I took a moment yesterday to check my traffic stats of my old site, KuraFire.net. It still receives about 6,500 visitors a month even though I haven't really touched the site in two and a half years, and even had it offline completely due to domain registration and hosting issues for about four months this year. What's getting it persistent traffic is not something like being linked to on sites like Daring Fireball, but a moderately sized archive full of useful (and plenty of not-so-useful) articles and posts.
By the end of this month, this particular site will probably have reached about the same number of visitors as, if not more than, my old one that I've not updated in years. But unless I write another useful article here, traffic to this site will drop down to pre-Fireball levels. Should I, then, feel ashamed or sad about the "lack of traffic"? After all, I am being congratulated for the surge of traffic, right?
Wrong.
Implicitly, of course, the congratulations are about having written an article that was linked to by a high profile, high traffic website. Implicitly, they say "congratulations on a well-written article" — but implicitly is not how humans absorb things most of the time. We take things at face value a lot more often than we do any other way.
So while I appreciated the kind messages of the morning, I did so with a tingle of regret. Instead, it would've been so much nicer to receive some kind words on what I actually wrote, and not where it gained traction.
But I guess that just makes it a challenge for me to write even that much better.
Good reason, faulty argument
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Andy Ihnatko, in an otherwise perfectly great piece in the Chicago Sun Times, has a brief lapse with a flagrant disregard for Apple product history:
Every important and game-changing product Apple has introduced in the past ten years (beginning with the first iMac) started on the Tuesday morning keynote address at Macworld Expo, during which the new whatsit was unveiled with great fanfare and panache by a dungareed-and-mock-turtlenecked Steve Jobs.
I have great respect and admiration for Mr. Ihnatko, and his grasp of all things Apple has typically been very spot-on but this is just wrong, wrong, wrong:
- Original iPod: Tuesday, October 23, 2001
- iTunes (Music) Store: Monday, April 28, 2003
- iPod nano: Wednesday, September 7, 2005
- Transition to Intel processors: Monday, June 6, 2005
- Boot Camp: Wednesday, April 5, 2006
Perhaps you don't consider the iPod nano or the whole Intel transition/Boot Camp "game-changing" enough to warrant their own mention, but they have been every bit as significant if not more significant to Apple's historic rise to success over the past ten years as the original iMac from 1998 was. So, too, were the iPhone 3G and the iPhone SDK / AppStore, neither of which were announced at Macworld Expo.
Macworld Expo may have been an important venue for many historic Apple announcements, but it's certainly not been the only one over the past ten years and it would be a mistake to give Macworld Expo that kind of credit, as it implies that Apple could somehow not have gotten where it is today without it. That may have been true for the first few years after Steve Jobs' return to Apple, but ever since the launch of the original iPod in 2001 the role of Macworld Expo has been helpful at best, maddeningly frustrating at worst.
The remainder of Ihnatko's article is excellent as per usual, so do make sure to read it.
Update: John Gruber correctly points out that even the first iMac, Andy's noted example, wasn't announced at Macworld.
Disclaimer: the opinions expressed in this post are solely my own and do not reflect the opinion of my employer or any other company or group I am affiliated with.
