Merry Christmas! Because that’s what today is

25 December 2018 by Steve Blum
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Christmas vacation

Thank you, Gentle Reader, for the best Christmas present a writer can wish for: an audience. If you’re reading this on Christmas morning, you are doubly valued and thrice blessed. And you might even be interested in a blog post about the blog. If you aren’t, please forgive me and be assured my usual rants insights typing will resume tomorrow. If I were reading this, I’d just click here and listen to Jimmy Buffet and Linda Ronstadt instead.

The top three posts for 2018 were about 4K television, with the number one slot going to an analysis of 4K bandwidth requirements. With video already the biggest source of Internet traffic, upgrades to 4K and 8K formats, and beyond, will determine network capacity requirements for years to come. Big thanks goes to Danielle Cassagnol at the Consumer Technology Association for the stats.

The top ten included two posts about Tim Draper’s second attempt to break up California, this time into three states. The news that it was blocked by Californian judges finished far down the rankings, though. Frontier’s California travails also hit the list twice. The top ten was rounded out by posts about vertical integration, fiber maps and wildfire prevention.

It’s tricky to estimate how many people read this blog. I think my audience is something like 5,000 unique readers a month, including social media distribution, but it’s hard to know for sure. It’s stayed more or less even over the past year. If I include my occasional articles for Santa Cruz Tech Beat, which are usually republished here, the average goes up by untold thousands. Special thanks goes to SCTB editor Sara Isenberg for her patronage.

I’ve been posting every day, seven days a week for more than six years. At one point, my plan was to cut back to something like five days a week, but I couldn’t let go. For 2019, I really mean it. After CES, anyway. I made a deal with myself, and please hold me to it: write fewer but better posts. I’ll occasionally post on weekends when something is happening, and I might skip a holiday, when something is not. During the work week, I’ll maintain the schedule. Other changes are in the works, too.

Again, thank you for reading!