Four Years On

As I approach the fourth anniversary of starting this web log, I offer a little self-indulgent look at its history. I generally try to avoid this sort of thing, but in considering whether it's worth continuing an endeavor which gathers no profit and has a clearly limited influence, I made a couple of observations which I'll now share.

In the run up to the 2004 election, I was a man possessed - convinced we stood at a critical crossroads with an opportunity to resoundingly set aside a disastrous presidency. When that didn't happen, my effort had developed a life of its own, and I continued to post, but over time found other uses for my time, and the posts waned. Nonetheless I've felt compelled to keep this going at a lower level. Here's a month by month histogram of my posts since the inception of Choosing Hope:

In the background I have utilized a couple of utilities to track visitors and how they've found me. I've tended to write about subjects that I feel don't get enough attention, and often focus on individuals who are not as widely covered elsewhere, though I write plenty about those who do have power and influence. It is interesting to me to find which individuals that I've written about have been drawn the most visitors to my site by way of search engines. After weighing a couple of such measures, I came up with the following list of the 48 individuals that have led people here, starting with the most frequent - perhaps a surprise:

Craig Watkins
Bill Moyers
Walker Willingham
George Bush
Barack Obama
Muhammad Yunus
Dick Cheney
Troy Anthony Davis
Rush Limbaugh
Vaclav Havel
Rosa Parks
Harry Emerson Fosdick
Holly Near
Hillary Clinton
Paul Loeb
Cory Maye
Martin Luther King Jr
Dennis Kucinich
Jimmy Carter
Dumisani Maraire
Margaret Mead
William Haynes Holmes
Russ Feingold
Jim Hightower
Johan Olav Koss
Anthony Kennedy
Donald Rumsfeld
Robert Byrd
Maher Arar
Tom DeLay
Laura Denyes
Molly Ivins
Alberto Gonzales
Upton Sinclair
Bud Cummins
Joey Cheek
Amy Goodman
Ronald Reagan
Thomas Friedman
Cedric Jourde
Richard Rodriguez
Ted Kennedy
Richard Nixon
Margaret Atwood
John Kerry
Wangari Maathai
Cindy Sheehan
Nancy Pearcey

There are some jarring juxtapositions there, but I'll take my place between Bill Moyers and George Bush without complaing. ;-)