The last time we celebrated something related to the blog was on 16th Aug 2006, reaching a technorati ranking under 10,000. In the last few days we had two wonderful events that call for a small celebration and big thanks.
Both events have to do with the number 1,000. Ain’t that interesting.
The first milestone is perhaps the most special milestone, bar none. We got the one thousandth comment on the blog just a couple of hours ago.
I am thrilled beyond belief. I had never ever imagined that I would get even a hundred comments, much less a thousand comments in less than nine months of blogging.
100% credit for this goes to all of you wonderful people who have chosen to engage in a conversation with me and all the other readers. My heart felt thanks to you.
When people ask me how I have time to blog (I don’t) my answer is that it is the conversation with you that motivates me (an average of 12 comments per post). Notice also in the above image that you have contributed just as many words on the blog as I have!
The very first comment I received was not on this blog, it was on a test blog where I was practicing blogging. I have no idea how Adrien found that test blog but here is his comment:
May 12th, 2006 at 17:15
Hello Avinash !
Thank you for everything, i’m so excited that i found your blog !
I should be the only one who listen your voodoo podcast 20 times ! (I live in Paris, eMetrics is sooooo far away)
Congratulations for everything. :)
Thank you again for this blog,
Adrien from Paris, France
The first comment on this blog was by Jeremiah Owyang:
May 15th, 2006 at 12:02
Welcome to the blogosphere Avinash, although you are amongst the 39 million, you’ve tipped the blogosphere in our favor. We’re very honored to have your opinions, expertise and knowledge shared among the collective
Welcome –and enjoy your blogging journey
Jeremiah Owyang
Jeremiah was right, it has been a fantastic and immensely enjoyable journey thus far.
The one thousandth comment was from my peer blogger and friend Justin Cutroni:
February 13th, 2007 at 19:42
Hi Avinash,
Regarding Item # 5:
Use cookies intelligently (they are delicious)
One last thing on cookies, please be aware that IE 6 limits the number of cookies to 20 per domain.
I believe this is a browser issue, not just an IE issue. So the 20 cookie limit also applies to Firefox and, I would assume, Safari.
Justin
(Justin: I think that might not be right. Firefox does not have the 20 cookie per domain limitation, not sure about Safari.)
The second 1,000 milestone is equally surprising, to me atleast.
On Feb 7th Occam’s Razor feed subscription hit the 1,000 number.
I am not sure why I am surprised at this. It might be that I never imagined that of the population using RSS that there would be that many so interested in web analytics that they would subscribe to some random blog (out of fifty million out there, there is certainly lots good content out there).
Since I am a analytics guy (ok ok, nerd) I have to post the image with the trend that shows the growth in subscribers (i.e. you all) :
That spike you see at the start is the “digg effect”, the result of of one of the posts being on the the home page of digg.com. So digg is good for a day or two but after that it is back to normal and earning subscribers is a long hard slog, one subscriber at a time.
If you are not yet into RSS it is very cool, I highly recommend atleast trying it. I highly recommend FeedReader. Download it and grab the feed of this blog by clicking here.
In closing I want thank all of you for your support and encouragement. Both of these “one thousand” metrics are a result of your engagement and I am deeply appreciative. Gracias!!
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Via 
i'll be comment #1001, congrats! :)
Congratulations, Avinash! You are an inspiration to us all!
Ah! I posted wrong information for the 1,000 comment! How embarrassing…
Congratulations.
Justin
Not surprised in the least bit. I thoroughly enjoy reading your blog. Thank you Avinash.
Keep on doing what you are doing, and thanks for calling on me to get off my rear and post more.
Important things first – great photo of the boy! :-)
Congrats on the milestones. It's that sort of milestone that makes the hard slog worth it IMHO.
What I find fascinating with your feedburner graph is the sudden and quite dramatic increase in Mon-Fri peaks in July(?). Other than that it's seems quite a steady 24×7 rate.
Implies, to my mind :-) , somehow you've got onto some corporate machines. Like immediately – it's not a gradual organic growth. Machines which get logged out of every weekend, possibly overnight. Giving that M-F peak to trough. It's a bit hard to make out due to the slopes, but they don't appear to be growing at the same rate as the base? Growing, but far slower. The dip over the Christmas period would seem to bear this hypothesis out too.
Ahh. Too much of a nerd myself. :-)
Tho if I was being really nerdish, I'd wander back through your archives of posting and try and cross check which story(s) may have caused that. :-)
Or, one could stretch (a lot…) and imply that Intuit have an internal RSS reader corporate rolled out tool. I'd be inclined to put odds on that one.
– Steve
I'm NOT surprised Avinash, to be honest I'm surprised you're figures aren't higher. This is my first comment, I've been reading for a while but I'm normally too gobsmacked by your insight to write anything coherent and intelligible :)
Congratulations Avinash, well deserved. So as the premier web analytics practitioner in the blogosphere, how about sharing your trackable blogging goals for the next 9 months? ;-)
Knowing you however, I'm sure you are too humble to project anything but continuing your posts and keeping your existing audience happy. Which is all we can ask of you. Thanks for all you have done so far.
Brett: Thanks for the kind words.
You are right, my overall goal is to keep up the conversation with the readers of the blog and have it be of very high quality (in both directions). I am not going for traffic or page views, I care little about that.
But these two are quality metrics and since you asked so nicely I am up for going out on a limb and getting embarrassed publicly. :)
Here are my goals in nine months:
1,601 Subscribers
1,324 Comments
Now all of us can track and see if this little blog can meet those goals!
Thanks again,
Avinash.
I'm an ex management consultant who left her job to start a web business. I just found your blog today. I've been frustrated for so long because of some of the issues you write about here: data quality, being overwhelmed by the amount of data available, etc. Your blog is so reassuring for someone who used to believe in data and whose faith has been sorely measured by the web. After reading three of your posts, I took a huge sigh of relief. Thanks for being there. You deserve these milestones.
Congrats Avinash.
You bring a true perspective to Web Analytics, and you should be proud of your viewership. This type of success is not luck, it is based on your insight, honesty, and perspective.
Keep up the great work.
Darin
Congratulations, Avinash. I'm in awe that you've managed to achieve such success in just 9 months, but then the quality of your posts speak for themselves. Now must get back to the long hard slog of getting a few more people to read my blog (without having to resort to leaking more details about Gatineau…).
Cheers,
Ian
Here's a analytics life lesson: Can't really trust any data you get! Here's the story:
On Feb 14th, Wednesday, I had posted that this blog had 1,000 Feed Subscribers.
On the same day Brett asked for my goal for next nine months for Subscribers. I did some quick computations and said 1,601.
On Feb 16th, Friday, I look at my feedburner stats and notice that my blog subscriber number magically was 1,685!
Nine month goal accomplished in a 24 hour time period. :)
My first thought was it was corrupted data from feedburner but when I got a moment to check yesterday it turned out that thus far the Google Reader was not reporting feed reader stats to feedburner. As of last friday they are doing that (thankfully).
So life lesson: You can make decisions and move forward with insights even if sometimes the underlying data is not perfect. We get stuck in trying to get the cleanest data far too many times. (Here's a related post: Data Quality Sucks, Let’s Just Get Over It.)
And just for posterity here are the actual feed subscriber number for this blog as of Feb 19 (notice the bump on Friday, everyone using feedburner should have noticed a similar bump):
-Avinash.
Congratulations, Avinash! Keep up the great work!