Serendipity35

I posted a piece here called "What Is Authentic Learning?" last month. It has been clicked (and read, hopefully) over 600 times. No comments on it because we still have comments turned off on Serendipity35 because of the spamstorms we have weathered in the past.

Earlier this year, LinkedIn sent me an email inviting me to post in my space on their platform. Now, I don't need to do any more blogging. Besides Serendipity35, I have five other blogs that I try to keep going, including a daily poem practice I'm doing for 2014.

Nevertheless, as an experiment, I decided to crosspost some of my posts from here to LinkedIn. That same post about authentic learning on LinkedIn has 2400 views and 140 "likes" so far. But I am more interested in the 41 comments. There were some really interesting comments - especially the negative/critical ones. There was a conversation about the topic.

Not all the reposts have gotten more attention. The next best post, "Your Data Is Big, But Is It Thick?" only has half the reach of the "Authenic Learning" post and others have only a hundred or so views (and are surpassed by Serendipity35's version).

This blog gets a lot of hits every month - for July 2014 it was 2,365,491 - but that's over the long tail of the more than 3000 posts here.

So, what does that surge on the LinkedIn version of a post mean? It's the same content. The only thing that changed is the platform. LinkedIn has "reach," a bigger audience than this blog, and a different audience (more in the business of tech than the teachin of or with tech?). I don't have any way to measure the "who" of this blog. I can look at stats about the "what" (the popular categories), the "how" (what browsers you use, what sites referred to to me), and the "when" about times when folks drop by to read. The live traffic feed in the sidebar here and our stats let me know the "where" of visitors (it's very global). What Tim and I can't see is the "why" and the "who."  Who are you and why did you drop by?

I imagine my readers as being educators who are interested in using technology - versions of myself. But I don't know if that's true. Tim will tell you that you are not clickers of ads. Tim gets the results of any clicks on the Google ads in the sidebar. He is still waiting for that to generate an actual payment for clicks and has promised me a McGoo burger and beer at McGoverns.