The Blog of Burgher Jon

Look for Sauerkraut tomorrow.

As the blog has grown, I’ve noticed an increasing number of hits from mobile phones.  Most of those were short because, frankly, the site sucked on a mobile browser.  If you’re one of the people who tried, you’ll be glad to know that I’ve now setup the blog to be viewable on your phone.  So setup a favorite and use it when you’re waiting in line at Primanti’s.  Or, click on the links in my twitter from your mobile phone without getting dragged to the full site.

I’m not publicly traded, nor do I make any sort of profit from my musings here and on Twitter.  However, I still think it’s worthwhile to do a bit of a quarterly status since we (both you the readers and me the writer) have invested quite a bit of time in this little effort.

I’m going to display popular posts, unpopular posts, twitter and usage statistics.  What I’d like from you is to post comments to this page of what you’d like to see in the blog.  This can be topics to cover, guest bloggers to invite, changes to the format, etc…  Anything at all.  I’ll open it up.

The 5 Most Popular Posts (based on Statistics).  This is a little pointless right now because the blog is growing so fast, you’ll notice that all of the posts are in March:

• Want to be a VC?  Try Being an Early Adopter First (3/9/2010) – 343 Pageviews
• I’m Not Ordering an Ipad – The 8 Reasons Why (3/12/2010) – 249 Pagevies
• The Case for Google Fiber in Pittsburgh from a Startup Perspective (3/26/2010) – 168 Pageviews
• Television Will be Asynchronous Part 1 – How We’re Getting There (3/19/2010) – 110 Pageviews
• Larry Ellison, Steve Balmer and an Industry Without a Clue (3/6/2010) – 100 Pagevies

Twitter:

• 107 followers (up 214% from 1/1/2010)
• 832 Tweets (not sure exactly how many were in 2010Q1)
• Approximately 320 referrals to the blog from Twitter
• Lots of good conversation with @cdixon, @mattgartland, @bobmayo and @langoschMLB

Usage statistics:

• 3484 pageviews
• 1955 unique visitors
• 1955 visitors
• 2,401 visits
  • 1,689 from the United States
    • Visits from 47 states and the district of columbia
    • 314 from Pennsylvania (almost all Pittsburgh)
    • 291 from California
    • 211 from New York
  • 712 international visits
    • 69 foreign countries
    • All 6 continents
• I don’t officially track feed readers, but based on referral statistics, there are quite a few people following that way.

Friends/Readers/Commenters,

All bloggers go in to blogging for one reason or another.  I’m in it (primarily) to help build a community around and gain exposure for the Pittsburgh Technology Scene.  Don’t get me wrong, there are some tremendous side effects; getting the opportunity to talk about technology and Pittsburgh, network with some great people in both technology and Pittsburgh, inciting people to join a cause or try a piece of technology that they otherwise might not.  In order to do any of these things though, we have to find the parts of the Pittsburgh and technology communities that want to engage.  We need to build a community of them.

With very little effort to promote the blog, I have been excited by the amount of people that come through here everyday.  The traffic, comments and emails have been so high in volume in these first couple months that I am encouraged about the possibilities for building a real community here.  With that in mind, I’ve done a few things to encourage the growth of our community.

1. I have made it easier to share individual blog posts with your friends.  At the bottom of each post (even in the RSS feed) there will be links so that you can share posts to a number of popular social networking sites.  For now, I have selected the social networks I’m most familiar with (Digg, Dell.icio.us, Facebook, Google Reader, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yahoo Buzz and Hacker News).  If you use a different one and would like to share through it, let me know and I will add a button.
2. I have added contextual links down at the bottom of each post.  These will be provided via Zemanta (a context service).  In addition to providing you with resources that may well prove valuable, this will help search engines like Google understand what the blog post is about and categorize it properly.
3. I will be using slugs on posts.  These will replace the old URLs that were jonathancavell.com/wordpress/p=### with more relevant information.

All of these have been carefully chosen to avoid interfering with the content and community that we have already built here.  If you find any of them obtrusive, please let me know.  It has been humbling and encouraging to see how well this blog has taken off and I certainly don’t want to do anything to mess with the success to this point.

Thanks,

Jonathan Cavell
JonathanCavell<at>gmail<dot>com

A friend of mine (and fellow blogger) is preparing to launch a really innovative and exciting website that will be focused on politics.  He wants to start it up in Pittsburgh and a few other cities around the burgh (I’ll keep you posted as features become available).  While he’s a native Burgher he has since migrated away and lost his pulse on the Pittsburgh political scene.  Last week he asked me to put together a list of great political sources that might help him catch up.

As I said when I created the blogroll, I want to keep the blogroll on this blog very limited.  The lack of political blogs should not be misconstrued to imply that I don’t follow a ton of Pittsburgh Political blogs though.  Here’s my list (with comments) that I prepared for my friend:

• Start for sure with 2 Political Junkies:  http://2politicaljunkies.blogspot.com/.  They’ve been at it for YEARS and are known not just locally but nationally too.  Lots of content, liberal tilt.
• Pittsblog 2.0 http://pittsblog.blogspot.com/ is a blog that’s not mostly political.  In fact it rarely talks about politicians, but it frequently talks about policy related ideas.
• Nullspace http://nullspace2.blogspot.com/ similarly rarely focuses on politicians (though he does have a fetish for the vote breakdowns in all the voting districts after every election).  This is my favorite purely Pittsburgh blog (though likely not the most applicable one for you).
• Pittsburgh City Paper is sort of an indy newspaper.  You’ll want to subscribe to their news RSS only probably http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Section?oid=oid:14781&category=oid:14791.
• MET Blogs (Pittsburgh) is not the most frequently posted to blog ever and has a tendency to cover mostly transportation issues.  Transportation issues are very political, though.  This is especially true lately with the city considering selling the parking garages and PAT cutting back routes left and right.
• Reform Pittsburgh Now http://reformpittsburghnow.com/about/ is the blog of RPN which is a PAC started by Councilman Bill Peduto.
• The Angry Drunk Beauraucrat mostly posts “onion” style stories but most are related to Pittsburgh politics or politicians.  http://angrydrunkbureaucrat.blogspot.com/
• The Busman’s Holiday is the blog of Bob Mayo (MSM reporter).  His posts aren’t all political, but when they are they tend to be very well researched and informative.  http://thebusmansholiday.blogspot.com/
• Infinonomyous.  This is a riskier blog, often controversial.  I wouldn’t present this one as news per se, but lots of good rumors and insightful discussion. http://infinonymous.blogspot.com/
• Utterly Opinionated is the blog of Eve Picker, an influential urban architect in Pittsburgh.  She doesn’t post that often but when she does her ideas often have policy implications.  http://www.utterly-opinionated.com/
• The Post-Gazette also has two blogs that are useful for politics:
  • Early Returns has a lot of great political content:  http://community.post-gazette.com/blogs/earlyreturns/default.aspx
  • The Radical Middle:  Chad Herman’s blog title may say radical middle, but it tilts right.  As often as I disagree with him, he is a gifted writer and is frequently good for sparking debate if nothing else.  http://community.post-gazette.com/blogs/radicalmiddle/default.aspx
• Honorable mention to Bram R. who was the best in the business till he hung’em up.  http://pghcomet.blogspot.com/