101 Reasons to Stop Writing

101 Reasons’ Technorati rank hits 101. Time to sell.

November has always been a great month at 101 Reasons. At least, the two Novembers we’ve had have been great.

Last year, when the site was only a few days old, I kicked off National No Writing Month, and conducted a series of softball interviews with NaNo participants (several of which are still regular readers here, which shows how easy I was). I also started the tradition of posting monthly Highlights, a tradition I quickly abandoned because at the time the only metric I had available was the number of comments each entry attracted. I started the month with one reader, and finished the month with about ten — maybe twenty, if you count the lurkers who stayed just long enough to decide I was an evil jerk, then dashed off to whine about me on their LiveJournals.

This November has been great, and this time I have a few more performance metrics to measure its greatness. We started the month with a big spike in visitors thanks to a link from Metafilter, then a smaller spike from the forums at NanoWriMo — several hundred NaNos visited, stayed just long enough to decide I was an evil jerk, promptly confused me with some other evil jerk who has similar opinions on NaNoWriMo but is vastly less funny, then dashed back to the NaNo forums to whine about me and the other guy.

The last week of November also brought a horde of semi-literate visitors from the latest new-media experiment by the Brachiosaurus of old-media dinosaurs. (The New York Times must have been hard up for content that week, because half the article is quoted from me.)

I mention these links because today I noticed that my Technorati authority had risen to 101. Phew, now I can stop caring about it. Thanks to everyone who has linked to 101 Reasons since I launched the new site. Without those links, I’d have one less performance metric to care about. I also noticed that the subscriber count on the 101 Reasons RSS Feed is now the enticingly noneven 249. Yes, there are 249 people in this world that enjoy 101 Reasons enough to want to read every update, but are too lazy to actually visit the site every now and then. Next they’ll be expecting me to call them at home and read the latest entries aloud.

If you’d like to keep up to date with 101 Reasons, but you think an RSS Feed is something you give to cows destined for the grill at McDonald’s, you can subscribe to get updates via email, in the sidebar.

The following articles drew the most readers during November 2007. If you’ve missed some of them, shame on you:

• Poll: The One Month Novel
• The Decline of the One Month Novel
• Where’s the Fire? Amazon’s ‘Kindle’ Fizzles
• Interview: Sean Lindsay on NaNoWriMo
• Stop Writing 2008 Calendar
• Top Ten Reasons Your NaNoWriMo Novel Sucks