1000th post on Geeking with Greg

This is the 1000th post on Geeking with Greg. 2 1/2 years of posting, roughly 200k words in total, averaging a little more than a post a day. Whew!

Over that time, traffic to this weblog has grown. There are 1,120 subscribers in Bloglines now. Apparently, a good rule of thumb is to multiply that by x4 to get the total number of regular readers, so this means a few thousand people are regularly reading this little weblog.

According to Google Analytics, this weblog gets about 30k page views per month (and, before you ask, yes, that is much lower than the traffic to Findory, more than two orders of magnitude lower).

In 2006, the most popular posts on Geeking with Greg were:

1. "In a world with infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power", a post that covered some information accidentally leaked by Google in some slides.
2. "A chance to play with big data" about AOL Research's release of query log data.
3. "Google's BigTable" about the massive, distributed, custom database behind many of Google's products.
4. "Kill Google, Vol. 3", a post about attacking AdSense to beat Google rather than going after search.

Many of the posts on this weblog have focused on applying personalization and recommendation technology to information. Here is a selection of my favorites:

• "Personalized search at PC Forum"
• "Google Personalized Search and Bigtable"
• "More on Google personalized search"
• "The value of recommendations"
• "Organizing chaos and information overload"
• "Zen and the art of Amazon recommendations"
• "New personalized web search at Findory"
• "Standing interests, search, and recommendations"
• "Personalized search vs. clustering"
• "Is personalized search a dead end?"
• "Personalized search paper from MSR"
• "Is personalized advertising evil?"
• "Personalized blog search"
• "Personalized TV advertising"
• "BitTorrent, Internet TV, and personalization"
• "John Doerr on personalized information"
• "Why personalized news?"
• "Beyond the commons: Personalized web search"
• "Search as a dialog and personalized search"
• "Andrei Broder on personalized information"
• "What is personalization?"
• "Combating web spam with personalization"
• "Yahoo home page cries out for personalization"
• "Personalization is hard. So what?"
• "Personalization and the long tail"
• "Personalization should not require effort"
• "Social networks vs. personalization"
• "Perfect Search and the clickstream"
• "Personalized search RSS feeds"
• "Recommender systems and toy problems"

A substantial number of posts on this weblog talk about Findory.com, my startup devoted to personalizing information. Some of my favorites are in my ongoing Starting Findory series. That series covers the lessons I have learned as I have been building my first startup.

While the point of this weblog is to talk about personalized information, some posts departed from this theme. In particular, I much enjoyed the Early Amazon series about my first couple years at Amazon.com.

Thanks to everyone who reads this weblog. I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have.