Open Road: Annual report
I just realized that a little over a year and 2,064 posts ago, this blog was born. I've had a lot of fun with the blog. While I'm not always right (a nice way of saying "often wrong"), I appreciate the patience and insight that many readers share in the comments section, and in other blogs that reference The Open Road.
Because of such references, the traffic for this blog has increased significantly. How significantly? Put it this way: Traffic has gone up 1000 percent since July 2007. We've had millions of visitors and page views in The Open Road's inaugural year.
Traffic on the Open Road blog
Over the year, it has also become increasingly clear from which sources most people learn about posts here. While an increasing number are repeat offenders who subscribe to the blog (including a significant number of people who hate the blog but can't seem to leave :-), 76 percent are net new visitors. The big traffic generators? In order of traffic:
CNET, Google (Search and the Google Reader application), News.com (CNET), Digg, LinuxToday, News.Google.com, Slashdot, Reddit, Stumble Upon, and My.Yahoo.com (RSS reader).
I can't really track RSS readers since CNET has chosen not to use Feedburner or other technology to track it. I really, really wish that I could.
My commitment for the coming year is to focus on improved fairness and accuracy if ever I'm going to write something negative about a company. I also hope to avoid ever writing something negative about a person. I'm a highly imperfect person, so help me keep my word.
In the meantime, thank you for reading and be sure to let me know areas in which you think the blog can be improved.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Keep up the great work and let's hope for even more success in the year to come.
Roy / Magento
Congrats.. .great to see that graph. Keep it up.
I'm also a blogger but I just don't understand how you come out with atleast 5 posts a day where as I just come out with 4 a month. I run a technical blog though that doesn't have much on op-eds.
However, just curious, how much time a day do you spend on blogging? What is your blogging mechanism? I mean, let's say you read a post from your feed. And as you read it, do you simoultanously just write out a post? Really curious Matt, it seems you have all the time in the world!
Regards,