my 5 best trafficked, most interesting and other posts of 2012

I like to wrap up each year by looking at what I’ve written about here. To do it a little bit differently, I looked at three different measures of content: what was the best trafficked, what got the most engagement (email, conversation, social chatter) and what I ones I most want to follow up on.

Best trafficked of 2012 — as always I point out that my blog here rarely bests 7,000 page views a month, so the numbers are small

1. Corporate jargon: a collection and translation of common business slang
2. 5 ideas for hackathon projects
3. Neil Budde named founding CEO of Philadelphia Public Interest Information Network [Press Release]
4. Baseball cards: 10 business lessons from my time in the sports memorabilla bubble
5. A Brief Timeline of the History of Daily Newspapers in Philadelphia

• Takeaways: The first, second and fourth posts were driven in part by Google image search results, which means many of those visitors weren’t here for the content, that’s meaningless web traffic. The third was in the ‘breaking news’ spirit, just because I pasted a PDF press release up when some news broke that interested a small community of my colleagues. The fifth was the only item of my five most trafficked that was largely the result of some actual ‘reporting,’ by way of me bringing together some resources and curating them in an informative way.

Most engagement — this is an anecdotally-selected choice based on the posts I heard the most about in conversation or online with colleagues

1. Why 10 percent unemployment and worse is our future, unless we rethink our economy
2. Puritan Boston, Quaker Philadelphia: notes on 1979 research from E. Digby Baltzell
3. Inbox zero: email techniques for more efficient knowledge workers (like reporters) [VIDEO]
4. Reporters: today, your competition isn’t other journalists, it’s the source itself
5. There are no good U.S. presidents, just good times to be president

• Takeaways — Excluding the fourth, all of these 5 posts that I had the most engagement after publishing had nothing to do with media, which is what I most write about. The second and third were existing concepts (including a 30-year old book and a 10-year-old workflow concept) that I put in front of new audience. The first, fourth and fifth were ideas I’ve been wrestling with and, it turns out, others had been too.

Most interesting — these are the other topics that I want to revisit

1. Philadelphia should own social entrepreneurship: presentation for Knight Foundation, others
2. Journalism is still letting revenue models slip away: my greatest fear for the future of news
3. Why are city assets shared by a region but not problems (and solutions)?
4. Relationships are currency
5. 15 things I learned three years after launching Technically Philly

• Takeaways — All of these roughly fit into this idea of trying to make news have impact. The challenge is quantifying it or otherwise proving it is there at all.