Two Years of Being Amateur

Two years ago today I started this blog, and I wanted to say a few words about that.

Posts

I wrote 116 posts in the past year, down twenty from my first year of blogging. Here are some of my favourites.

• Kurva Jó! put one Candian team's 2006 success into a personal perspective.
• Centralize This was my experiment with Google Maps.
• WADA Doping Statistics parts 2 and 3 got a number of mentions on various message boards.
• Why Women's Hockey Should Stay was my defense of our national game at the Olympics.
• The Deep Cut and the Free Stuff was another personal story, this time about being cut from the 1992 Olympic team.
• The Professionalization of Nationality explored the issue of citizenship and the Olympics.
• Soldiers in a Larger War marked the anniversary of the 1980 boycott.
• The Italian Job discussed WADA's handling of the Mayer incident at the 2006 Olympics.
• In Amateur Medal Prediction I underestimated Canada's probable performance in Turin.

Traffic

Last week I very nearly had my first week with more than 1000 unique visitors, according to StatCounter, thanks to a link from Trust But Verify and a mention in the Daily Peleton Forums. That's not typical, as you can see in the plot above, but the general trend is upward and fairly steady. The 2006 Winter Olympics generated three or four weeks of pretty good traffic, and my post about Michelle Dumaresq got a link at There's Your Karma, Ripe as Peaches.

These numbers don't include people who read this blog at Cansport.com.

Comments

Haloscan tells me that this blog has a total of 439 comments. There were 103 in the first year, which must mean that there have been 336 in the second year. You can assume, again, that almost half of those have been by me, since I tend to get drawn into the discussions.

The post that generated the largest number of comments was my second post on the 2014 Halifax Commonwealth Games bid, I'll stop the HRM Games, Because I Know What's Good For You. That post has drawn 33 comments so far.

Other Developments

On the technical front, I switched to te Beta version of the new Blogger and had a few adventures with my template. In the end, though, that's been a very positive change.

On my one-year anniversary, I annnounced that this blog was going to be cross-published at CanSport.com. One year later, it's clearly been a positive development for the blog, and I think it has had a lot to do with the increase in traffic and the increase in the number of comments.

In the comments to this post, James Dunaway told me that without my real name attached, my writing has "zero credibility." I later had a short e-mail exchange with Mr. Dunaway, who has written extensively about athletics as an author and a journalist.

I had planned to write more about the issue of identity and credibility on my two-year anniversary. However, for various reasons I am going to cut that discussion short. I have added my real name to my Blogger profile, and it now appears in the sidebar to this page. I do not consider this an admission that Mr. Dunaway was right, although I will say that several other people I have spoken to have taken his side in the debate!

The reason for my decision doesn't have anything to do with credibility, which I still think should be based on the writing and not on my name. This decision is about accountability. My role in the Olympic Movement is about to change, becoming significantly more public. In light of this news (which will be clarified tomorrow), I have decided that my past writing should be a matter of public record.

As for my future writing, I will have more to say about that after tomorrow.