Tall Skinny Kiwi Tall Skinny Kiwi

5 Year Blogiversary and the Downfall of TallSkinnyKiwi

UPDATE. June 3.

Hey – HAPPY BLOGIVERSARY to TallSkinnyKiwi. 5 years. Thanks for stopping by today and also for being a part of my life and this blog. Thanks also for your comments over the years that have made this an interesting ride.

Here is how my blog looks when i graph it.

Tallskinnykiwi.Comgraph

Some of those dots are you guys.

This year I want to give an account of my 5 year downfall from blog celebrity (Number 3) to serious blogger (Number 381) to just another blogger (numbered in the thousands). This sounds like Donald Trump’s Downfall but without the Art of the Comeback sequel.

TallSkinnyKiwi at Blogspot (2001 – 2003)

1078 posts

How many hits? Probably an absolute infinitissimal astronomical number never before seen displayed on a computer screen. The kind of number that dumbfounds mathematicians and explodes calculators, a number so high that even God himself had to write it down so he could remember it when it came time to chat about blogs among the angels and heavenly creatures. A number unknown to me because either;

a) God decided to keep me humble and the earth safe by hiding my page view count, or

b) because i did not have a hit counter (an egotistical tool of the devil), or

c) I did not count because it may not have been nearly as many as I thought, thus dealing a humiliating blow to my manhood

But enough hits were registered to get it rated Number 3 Blogspot blog one week, beating the Iraq blogs, beating “Where is Raed?” and even leaving in the blog-dust the venerable Dave Barry, who I once met at Powells Bookstore in Portland Oregon with my friend Chip MacGregor. Well, not really “MET” . . I heard him speak . . from a distance. He probably SAW me in the crowd. Maybe.

As for the rumor that Dave Barry is still licking his wounds after his momentary defeat and installed a tall skinny dartboard on his wall with my face on it . . . I would say that is a rumor that cannot be verified and was probably started by some insecure blogger with a grudge.

And then I decided to leave blogger and move on to a more sophisticated system. Moving to Typepad from blogger meant that i lost all my links and my success and stardom and had to start again from the beginning, which probably wasn’t a very smart thing to do. But i did it anyway. It took me a while to build up again and I found the brave new blogosphere filled with millions of bloggers and the hard truth was that i was no longer part of an elite group but actually just another blogger.

TallSkinnyKiwi at Typepad (2004-2006)

710, 042 page views

1553 posts

7875 comments

691 trackbacks

1,593 links from 524 sites (Technorati)

Rated 2,605

See that rating. Only six months ago it was more like 381 on Feedster Top500. Now I have PLUMETTED down to the hoi polloi of blogdom and there are THOUSANDS of blogs more popular than mine. 2,605, actually. But whose counting???? I am now a mom’n’pop blog amidst skyscrapers.

Not only that. But there are also many more Andrew’s on the internet and now my first name has been pushed back to page 6 of Google.

But anyway – didn’t mean to throw a web blanket on my blogiversary. Whats great is that many of you are running better and more interesting blogs than mine and even more of you are allowing yourselves to be more vulnerable and real than I ever was. Fantastic – I need to learn from you. And if there is anything I can do to help you get beyond me, then please let me help you.

So lets move forward together in this relatively new genre of whole life blogging.

Lets resist the temptation to bump up our popularity by blogging on topics that stimulate the greatest hits.

Lets allow the overflow of our abundant lives to flow into our abundant blogs. For God’s sake.

so . . . lets play a few games.

_______________________________

ORIGINAL POST: – May 29.

June 3rd marks 5 years of clumsy blogging at Tall Skinny Kiwi. Should be a good time.

I will tell some boring stories of the early blogging years among the handful of JesusFreaks that were blogging back then. and I have some stuff to give away. actually, I am trying to download the whole blog and create a PDF – but am not successful yet. Pagesucker and Webdumper are ignoring my typepad blog. Any ideas?

Andrew

Andrew Jones launched his first internet space in 1997 and has been teaching on related issues for the past 20 years. He travels all the time but lives between Wellington, San Francisco and a hobbit home in Prague.

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