“The same procedure as every year”

Towards the end of every December it seems increasingly difficult to escape from the ever more popular reviews of the year. For China this means reflecting on major events such as the Beijing Olympics or its first walk in space. For the USA the election of Barack Obama seemed to be a key event. The present economic crisis effects countries world-wide and is accordingly being reviewed around the globe. Anyway, following the mentioned trend I am using the last day of the year to reflect on this blog, showing statistics, and outlining its still ongoing creation as well as future plans.

Ningbo, 2008: “Sustainable Manufacturing in China” – blog created

On the one hand, the creation of the “Sustainable Manufacturing in China” – blog is certainly not as significant as the above mentioned events. On the other hand, I would like to think the issue of sustainable manufacturing, specifically in China being the workshop of the world, is of similar importance.

The idea…

…of creating a blog about my activities here in Ningbo came from Professor Chris Rudd during his visit to Ningbo in September. I right away liked the idea, though not having any prior blogging experience. After a quick Google-search I ended up with WordPress being my first blog-host. I decided to write a few articles, before publishing the first posts on 25/09/2008. However, efforts to publicise the blog to a wider audience were not undertaken before October.

At present…

…the blog consists of 19 posts (including this one) focusing on topical actions and events here in China but also referring to related initiatives, technologies, etc. world-wide. So far, 5 comments have been submitted to the blog.

Blog stats

WordPress provides extensive statistics, such as: How many views the blog gets every single day? Which search engine terms people use to come to this site? Which other web pages or blogs refer to my blog? Etc. Here just the most interesting ones:

Total views: 668
Busiest day: 64 – Wednesday, October 15, 2008

World map of blog visitors

By the end of October I included the ClustrMaps widget, which captures and displays the locations of most of the visitors to this page. The figure above is taken from that widget showing that this blog’s visitors come from around the world.

The majority of site hits come from China, United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. Whereas one could argue that my personal links to Germany, UK, and China could have contributed to them being high on the list, the large amount of hits from the US show clearly the rising interest in, and importance of the topic in western countries.

Summary and outlook

After three months of existence this blog has had more than 650 views, averaging to about 200 views per month. Although in my opinion that is quite good for a start, there is clearly potential for improvement.

My efforts in the future should be focussed on making this blog more popular to live up to the importance of the topic. I have learned that the key steps in building up an audience are:

• Regular blogging
• Activity in the “blogging scene” e.g. comments in, and links to other relevant blogs.
• Interesting articles of high quality

I don’t want to judge the quality of my own articles. However, I do know that I can improve on the other two points, admitting that it has been particularly difficult to post on a regular basis during this month.

Finally, I would like to take this chance to ask for feedback, so please let me know any ideas, tips, suggestions you might have to enhance this blog.