This list naturally draws most of its material from the blog. Thus, it makes sense to recognize the posts and changes that are significant here at MT.Net.
From the propeller-head side, I migrated my blog’s software from its old Drupal beginnings to WordPress. With this change came the addition to the archives of my very first blog posts, originally posted in some of the first primitive blogging software, bplog. I think its fun to read how my blogging has progressed over the years.
When I heard of the death of Jason Ray, the UNC student who played the UNC mascot Rameses, I felt compelled to write about the emails my wife had exchanged with him shortly before his death. While neither Kelly nor I can say we knew him well, the world still beat a path to my blog through Google searches. My posts on his passing (plain as they were) almost instantly became the most widely-read posts ever on my blog. I’ll never forget being bowled over when I saw all the incoming hits flooding my site.
By far the most significant posts this year were the ones on the Einstein Bee Quote. I don’t know where I first read the quote, but I didn’t waste any time posting how I doubted its source. It was only after I read it again on BoingBoing that I decided to dig into it further. I requested and received a quote from Walter Isaacson, who also hadn’t heard of the quote (how I became more credible by adding a quote that I could’ve just as easily made up like the first is really beyond me, but no one’s ever called me on it).
Boom! In less than 20 minutes I’d done more research into the Einstein quote than any of the news outlets who reported it. Immediately my blog was riding a huge wave of interest from across the Internet. Suddenly my little blog was not so little anymore, as thousands of people found my site while looking up the source of the quote.
The episode taught me a lot about the quality of news reporting out there, especially how the accuracy of the story isn’t dependent so much on the name of the news outlet as it is how diligent its reporter is. I also learned the awesome power of online resources for ferreting out facts. The Internet lets one do an astounding amount of research without ever leaving one’s seat.
This year has been a very good year for MT.Net: one that will be surely tough to beat!