And so the first year went by. I’d like to thank everyone that reads and contributes to the blog. I learned a lot with you last year (and I hopefully I gave something back).
Now, let’s see what the future brings.
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I am writing Charts for three months now, and I’d like to share with you some stats, some thoughts, some expectations and plans for 2008.
First things first: thank you. Thanks for reading and commenting, thanks for linking, thanks for buying the dashboard. Thanks for sharing your time.
So, basic stats: 30 posts, 150 daily visitors, 200 subscribers. A large majority of visitors comes here because of the Excel dashboard, the populations pyramids and the Xcelsius dashboard series. Around 500 readers downloaded the free version of the Demographic Dashboard and a fraction of you bought the “How-To” version.
Is this what I expected? Realistically, yes. I confess that I overestimated the number of posts I could write. English is not my mother language and it takes me ages to write a single post. Hopefully, by the very nature of the process this will improve over time and I’ll be able to write better and faster.
If people are coming here because they want to know how to create an Excel dashboard, I should (I will) provide more and better content around this topic, not a page and a downloadable file only. I do believe that the “Demographic Dashboard How-To edition” is great value for money and the average Excel user can learn a lot from it, but I must provide more context (by the way, I expect to release a second version during January and the current users will have free access to it).
Finally, sometimes I feel that the blog looks too self-centered. I should link out more, discuss some great products and posts I find on the Web (and some suggested by the authors) and perhaps give more and better feedback. Once again, the process is painfully slow and I have a long list of posts waiting.
What are my expectations and plans for 2008? Quiting my day-time job and changing the world seem to be out of question, so let me see, what’s left? Well, writing my About page would be a good start…
I do have some quantifiable goals for 2008, but writing about them is kind of boring (are consumers interested on the production goals of a manufacturing plant?). But I’ll try to follow some guide lines you may be interested in:
- Write around a few selected topics: dashboards, visualization theory, chart critique and charting tools;
- Target the beginner and release several how-to screencasts;
- Design and start posting my own visualizations.
Let me tell you about my blog monetization strategy:
- No ad links: I want to talk about things I love and make people stay as long as possible, not send them away (God knows where to…);
- Amazon: I am using the Amazon’s widget on the right to recommend books I like or are recommended by someone I usually agree with; they must be relevant to the visualization field;
- Affiliate programs: if there is an affiliate link for a product or service I would recommend anyway I will use it (disclosing the affiliate link).
And there will be a new site.
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I just added to the sidebar an Amazon widget with some recommended reading. These are my personal favorites (regarding information display) and I do recommend them. I’m just starting, so you’ll find my choices pretty obvious.
There is also a new custom search engine. It starts with around 160 sites covering charts, presentation, (business) information visualization and design.
Hope you’ll find them useful.
Is there a book or site that shouldn’t be missing in these “obvious choices”? Please suggest them in the comments.
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Charting, information visualization, business visualization, graphic literacy, dashboards, bad charts, good charts. How to do, why don’t do. Plus Excel and other tools. These are the topics you will find in this blog. That’s a promise.
Although this is the beginning of a new blog, I’ve been writing about these things for the last 10 months in my other blog, BizViz. BizViz is written in Portuguese, so you probably missed it. If you want to read some great posts (really!), mutilated by the automatic translation, feel free to check it.
(This brings about a new subject, English. I am not fluent in English, and I’ll prove it to you several times in each post. But I think I have something to tell that I don’t find anywhere else and I want to share it with a broader audience and, specially, with you… Hopefully you will find the content interesting and useful and you’ll do your best to forgive me for those mistakes. I’ll do my best to minimize them.)
You can expect from this blog a balanced view between the academic that discusses the “why” and the pragmatic that tells you “how-to”. And also the good reader of your comments.
I’ll share with you some projects that I am working on. They can be a great opportunity to grow together.
(Thanks for subscribing for the blog’s feed / email…)
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