# 1000 blog posts. What’s next?

By Murray Bourne, 12 Sep 2011

Wow - I even surprised myself.

This is the 1000th squareCircleZ article. The very first article was about me, written on 21 November 2004. In that time, readers have left just over 3000 comments.

Blogs were still pretty new in 2004 (there were only about 4 million at the time. Blogs started to gain popularity in the late 1990s and today, there are around 152 million blogs, according to Pingdom.)

According to Technorati, squareCircleZ is the 36,385th most popular blog (out of the 1,193,494 they track) and has "authority" of 101.

Authority is...

"calculated based on a site’s linking behavior, categorization and other associated data over a short, finite period of time. A site’s authority may rapidly rise and fall depending on what the blogosphere is discussing at the moment, and how often a site produces content being referenced by other sites. Authority is on a scale of 0-1000. 1000 is the highest possible authority."

As a point of comparison, the most popular blog at the time of writing has Authority 929 and the 100th most popular blog has an Authority of 716.

When I first started this blog, I just wrote about whatever was interesting to me at the time. But as it progressed, mathematics became the focus and these days, nearly all articles are about this topic.

## Top 10 Posts of all Time

Since mid-2007 when I started using Google Analytics to track the blog, these have been the most popular posts (remember, most of these posts have not been there most of the time!)

1. How to draw y^2 = x – 2? (proving that "how to" articles are often the most popular, and disproving the notion that people will not read an article if it contains an equation - this has plenty!)

2. Is 0 a Natural Number? (the controversy - philosophical included - continues to rage

3. Bilingualism in politics (this post has helped many online students with an essay due on Friday every week)

4. The Twelve Days of Christmas – How Many Presents? (this gets quite a bit of traffic all year. It's a bit of a mystery why!)

5. How to learn math formulas (This is a perennial favorite. I'm glad it has been useful for 10s of thousands of students)

6. New measure of obesity – body adiposity index (BAI) (there's nothing like some "body math" to stir interest)

7. Microsoft Math 3.0 Review (Microsoft's latest version of this is now free)

8. The Gini Coefficient of wealth distribution (this is a crucial topic as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer)

9. Math of the Moors (where my main hope is education can reduce fundamentalism)

10. Archimedes and the area of a parabolic segment (this is neat since the ancient Greeks knew a lot of calculus concepts long before Newton)

One of my favorite posts is my answer to a readers' question: 21st century computer algebra literacies. I was blown away by Maria's excellent question. It was the start of a great friendship.

The IntMath Newsletter continues to grow in popularity, with over 10,000 subscribers. I've really enjoyed the interaction I've had with many math students and teachers from all over the world through the fortnightly Newsletter.

I've met (virtually) many great people - generous people that give a lot of their own time and energy to make the world a better place. I'm much richer for it, and it gives me the motivation to keep going.

## So, what's next?

When subscribers sign up for the Newsletter, I give them an opportunity to request topics for future articles. There have been thousands of requests and I look forward to writing about as many of them as I can!

(I've got around 100 draft posts in various stages of readiness - here's hoping I'll get to finish writing them soon.)

## Thank you

Thank you to all my readers and thanks for all the comments, suggestions and positive feedback about squareCircleZ during the last 1000 articles. I'm glad it's been useful to many of you.

### 2 Comments on “1000 blog posts. What’s next?”

1. Maria Droujkova says:

Thank you for all you are doing for mathematics education, Murray! It makes a difference. I love your newsletter. We often watch your Friday Movies with the math club kids, for example, and they thank you for it. We will watch some today!

2. Murray says:

You're very welcome, Maria. I'm glad you find it useful and it makes me happy to imagine your math club kids enjoying some of the movies!

### Comment Preview

HTML: You can use simple tags like <b>, <a href="...">, etc.

To enter math, you can can either:

1. Use simple calculator-like input in the following format (surround your math in backticks, or qq on tablet or phone):
a^2 = sqrt(b^2 + c^2)
(See more on ASCIIMath syntax); or
2. Use simple LaTeX in the following format. Surround your math with $$ and $$.
$$\int g dx = \sqrt{\frac{a}{b}}$$
(This is standard simple LaTeX.)

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