Prolog

It has been a while since i wrote on this blog. Thankfully Abdul Fakhri and Priya Raju have been doing a wonderful job of picking up the slack. 

Fine Tastings

Since this section has not been carried in a while, i decided that it may not be wise to list all the links i liked, many of which i share on my twitter account. Instead i decided to recommend 2 books that i read recently that have had a huge impact on me. The first one is world renowned executive coach Marshall Goldsmith’s What got you here won’t get you there. Marshall has plenty of free resources on his website that you can take advantage of. I am indebted to Sanjay Radhakrishnan for bringing this book to my attention. The second one is Carol Dweck’s @#$%ing brilliant book Mindset . We have been searching for the Soul of Success on this blog  . I would say Carol Dweck has captured the soul of success in her  book. I am indebted to Rajkumar Ravindranathan for recommending this book to me. If you are a parent or a leader, you must read both these books. 

Blog Milestone

I am so happy to announce that we completed 5 years on this blog on June 27, 2009. What a tremendous feeling it is to see this baby that myself and Ganesh hatched grow into a fine sparkling child.  We have now logged a whopping 5,071 comments as of today with 552 posts published.  Compared to last year, we added nearly 2,300 comments in the past 1 year, which is nearly the amount of comments we logged in the previous 4 years combined. The amount of learning that i have received through this blog and the career impact it has had dwarfs the previous 37 years of existence on this planet combined.

My informal surveys amongst the twitterers showed me that blog traffic through RSS is significantly down for the twitterers. I was worried that our blog traffic may have gone down significantly. Fortunately, that is not the case, the traffic pattern seems to be at the same levels when we hit the million page views.  All of these accomplishments would not have been possible without all of you the readers/commenters. Special thanks to commenters –  Subba Muthurangan, Senthil, PK Karthik, Vamsi Poondla, Saraswathi..  

Thank you to all the bloggers specially Abdul Fakhri, Priya Raju, Ganesh Vaideeswaran who have written some fantastic posts in the past 1 year. Hopefully, our not so active bloggers Sreedhar, Sujatha, Sultana, Sibu will blog more this year.  I am also happy to announce that Kumaran Anandan has expressed an interest in contributing to this blog. We look forward to his posts. 

Special Thanks to John Keegan and the Pressharbor team who do a fantastic job of hosting this blog.

Career Milestone

I turned 42 last month and I have been in the midst of making some life changing decisions, in part inspired my Dr. Randy Pausch . After 21 years in the industry, and 14 years in the current firm, i have taken up a part-time role in the same firm as SVP/Head of Innovation. No words of gratitude are enough to thank my management for allowing me to do this.

During the past 3.5 years, i served as the CKO and had the once in a lifetime opportunity of bringing a breakthrough innovation Cognizant 2.0 to production - thanks to a brilliant idea that  my team mate came up with. The teams that i worked with have some of the best people that i have ever seen. They are definitely going to accomplish bigger and better things. I will of course be watching with delight from a small distance away from them. The affection and kindness that my teams showered on me last month is something that will be seared into my memory. Again, mere words are grossly inadequate to thank everyone. 

What Next

While i continue work part time in my current firm, in the other part of my time, i want to chase some of my dreams. One of them is to help Priya Raju with the social entrepreneurial venture she started recently.  The second one is to work on researching the Indus Valley Civilization. I have joined a local research group – Indus Research Center, which is part of the Roja Muthiah Research Library.  There are some passionate people working in that group. I hope to contribute to the initiative and hopefully see that the Indus Script is deciphered soon.  Please wish me luck, as i pursue something that is so far away from my skillset/educational qualifications/work experience.  

Epilog

This is something i always ask every time i do a celebration post. What else can we do to improve your blogging experience on this blog? Please fire away your comments. 

This blog has not exactly had a spectacular run. We have had the occasional links from Desipundit and a few Carnivals, but that is about it.  Last November, we had completed 3 years and 5 months of existence and  the total page view count was 92,443 (from Sitemeter stats for 2.5 years. the first year we didn’t measure the stats).   Last November we switched to wordpress and at that time, we had 450 posts and 850 comments.

As i have said before, i stopped checking the stats long ago. A few days back, i had to pay Pressharbor the hosting fees for the next year and I decided to check the stats just for the heck of it.

For the period Dec 1, 2007 till date, the blog had received 1,089,829 pageviews ! I couldn’t contain my excitement when i saw that. Wow! After drilling down to the monthly stats, I calculated the page views generated by the key crawlers – Googlebot, Yahoobot, Cuill and others to be approximately 7.5%. If you look at the net page views excluding crawler page views, the page views stands at 1,010,299 !

We now have 520 posts including this one and a whopping 3,842 comments – 3,000 of which were logged in the last 12 months. During that time, we did 10 times the page views of the past 3.5 years combined.

Observations

1. Overall traffic from search engines is now less than 5% of the total traffic. It was exactly the other way around before this blog moved to WordPress. This means most of the traffic is coming from regular readers.

2. The addition of new authors and the sheer variety and quality of their posts – Priya Raju, Dr. Abdul Fakhri, Sujatha Manivasagam, NK Sreedhar and most recently Sultana Fakhri, seems to have increased the subscriber base of this blog dramatically.

3. Every month, a portion of visits comes via Google using the keywords -”Sukumar Rajagopal”, “Priya Raju” and “Sastwingees”.  I deduce that these are regular readers but use the search engine to come to this blog. My recommendation to these readers is to use a feed reader. I wrote a post a while ago on how my productivity improved when i started using the Bloglines Feed Reader . You may want to go through that. I now have switched to Google Reader which i think is much better than Bloglines.

Thank You

A celebration is never complete without thank yous. First a big thank you to the readers for reading and commenting and making it worthwhile for the authors of this blog.

Special thank you to regular commenters – Senthil, Archana Raghuram, PK Karthik, Subba Muthurangan, Vamsi Poondla,  Saraswathi, Jaskirat, Ananth  and many others.

Special thank you to Ganesh, my comrade-in-arms who has been with SAST Wingees since Day 1.

Special thank you to Priya Raju, Sibu Kutty, Sujatha Manivasagam, NK Sreedhar, Dr. Abdul Fakhri and Sultana Fakhri – the quality of your posts is what is driving the traffic to this blog. Keep up the great work.

Go SAST Wingees!

Survey

This is to the readers who typically don’t comment -  Are there topics you would like us to cover?   If you can leave that as a comment, we can try to get those covered.

If you are passionate about writing on topics and you would like to be a contributor, please let us know. We welcome new contributors who can expand our vistas.

Updated July 10, 2008 : This post has been Desipundited. Thanks a lot Patrix.

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Prolog

I generally avoid milestone posts, but i could not resist this one. Last week, on June 27, 2008, we completed 4 years on this blog. During that time, we have written  497 posts and received 2,851 comments.  Just 3 posts away from the 500 post milestone!

Unbelievable Journey

It is a journey that started 4 years ago as a humble experiment amongst a bunch of people struggling to keep in touch with each other.  What a fun-filled, emotion-laden journey it has turned out to be - i have made so many friends,  blogging has become a cornerstone of my career completely unexpectedly, learnt an order of magnitude more than all that i had learnt prior to blogging.  More than all that,  as most members would agree, the SAST Wingees of today is a thriving community that exchanges wisdom of a kind that is quite unique in the blogosphere.

Learnings

Caveat emptor: most of these learnings may not be applicable if you are trying to build an A-list blog

1.  In the initial days of blogging, i used to frequently check the visitor stats – where the visits are coming from etc.   The traffic was nothing much to write home about.  It was a complete waste of time not to speak of the depressing feeling i had. But then, as luck would have it,  around that time, i realized that i was not writing for traffic or comments but for my own pleasure. I stopped looking at the stats and i have never looked back.

2. I would react to some post written by the A-list bloggers and then email them to let them know in the foolish hope that they would link to our blog, which as i realized painfully, the same thing a zillion other z-list bloggers like me did   Over time, i realized that i should build my own voice on the Internet and that is when i found the true joy of blogging.

3. Once i was off the chasing-the-a-list treadmill, the biggest joy for me has been to read lesser-known bloggers, exchange comments/ideas with them.  By switching to techmeme.com, i have mostly eliminated the a-list from my feed reader except for a few that i really like.  That has freed up a lot of time for me to read these lesser known bloggers and i should say, i have learnt so much more in this process. I got the sense of community, only after taking this step.

4. Most people talk about blogging as a conversation. In my view, blogs are a community.  I have always believed that a single author blogging strategy would make it harder to build a community. This blog has vindicated that with the kind of community that it has managed to pull together.

5. Another thing, that most pro bloggers advise is to write a blog around focused topics. While that may be a good way to build an A-list blog, i felt that, it didn’t really match the personality of our community. We have wide-ranging interests and the blog should be a reflection of that. Also, topic blogs tend to run out of steam after sometime or the author starts getting bored with the topic – how long can one keep writing on the same topics day after day, year after year?

6. Blogging is a true meritocracy. Many people talk about this, but to experience it is truly humbling. There are no big shots, your standing in the industry or your position in the company is not relevant. Your post or comment is as good as any one else’s.  If you believe that power corrupts and want to avoid that trap, blogging can put some serious humility into you.

7. The biggest secret of blogging is commenting on other blogs. If you discover this secret, you will have a successful blog.

Thank You

It is a momentous occasion for this blog and we would not be here without the contributions of several people: First on the list is Ganesh, he has been on the journey from day one, encouraged me every step of the way, and continues to be a key contributor;  Priya Raju, my wife, who has encouraged me at every instance and is now a regular contributor of this blog;  Sujatha Manivasagam, NK Sreedhar, Sibu Kutty and Sridhar Iyer, who have written several posts on this blog.

Our regular commenters - the indefatigable Senthil, my friend Archana Raghuram, PK Karthik, Subba Muthurangan, Vamsi Poondla,  Saraswathi, Jaskirat, Ananth, April Holladay and many others.

Patrix and the Desipundit team for recognizing and linking to some important posts over the years.

John Keegan, one of the best customer service professionals i have ever come across. He runs Pressharbor which hosts our blog today.

Thanks to the Blogharbor team led by John Keegan for a smooth rollover to WordPress – my favorite blogging platform. Hope you all like the theme that i have chosen. I may be switching to a different theme as i experiment with themes some more.

You may notice a few problems:

1. Comments on old posts are closed.

2. All comments that were imported were imported as Anonymous comments. So your names have been lost in transit due to incompatibilities between blogware and wordpress. Sorry about that.

As you all know it is a tradition at this blog to change the look and feel every Fall and we have done it for the 3rd time but this time we have changed our blogging platform itself. How is that for a change?

This blog has now completed 3 years and 5 months and we have nearly 450 posts and 850 comments.

Thanks to you all for your support and encouragement without which i would not have survived this long and I would not have been able to learn all the things that i have learnt through blogging. In a quite unexpected manner, my knowledge of blogging has actually helped in my current job immensely.