Douglas Coupland | Sebastien Provencher

Today, I celebrate my first year of blogging. When I started, I had an objective of writing at least one blog post per business day. Mission accomplished! I now have written close to 300 blog posts on a variety of local search and/or social media topics. I’ve met many new friends and blogging has become a very important part of my professional life. I currently have 416 RSS subscribers and I think I’ve found my blogging “voice”.

To celebrate, I take a look back at my top 5 blog posts that generated the most comments and trackbacks in the last year:

1) “Robert Scoble is Media“, July 14, 2007. By far my most popular blog post. I stumbled upon a major meme with “I am Media”. Lots of people have talked to me about that one and have told me they now understand Facebook because of it. If any book editors are reading, I think this could be a great business book… 🙂

2) “What Micro-Blogging is All About?“, September 13, 2007. Re-reading one of my favorite Douglas Coupland book, I found this excerpt which poetically describes what micro-blogging is potentially all about. Mashing-up Douglas Coupland with Web 2.0 earned me some great reactions.

3) “Google Opens an Office in Montreal“, January 25th, 2007. Major buzz in the Montreal blogosphere as I was the first blogger to discover that announcement in Montreal’s La Presse.

4) “Chronology of a Successful Facebook Group: The “Save Business 2.0″ Example“, July 19, 2007. Chronicling my efforts (with Colin Carmichael) to save Business 2.0 magazine using Facebook. That one was a lot of fun and offered some great learnings. We unfortunately did not save the magazine (I got my last issue today…)

5) “Web 2.0 Startup Praized Media Inc. Secures $1,000,000 in Seed Funding“, September 18, 2007. The announcement of our seed round of financing was welcomed by the local search blogosphere.

I’d like to start my second year of blogging by thanking all my Year 1 readers! Thanks and here’s to another 300 blog posts! 🙂

If you’re not a RSS subscriber, click here to add my feed to your favorite reader.

Many people wonder about the utility of micro-blogging using Twitter, Pownce or the Facebook Status Update. It’s difficult to explain but I’ve found a philosophical answer from Douglas Coupland, famous Canadian writer, in his book Life After God (published in 1994):

“And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection– certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether, one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real– this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small moments which are the true story-making events of our lives.”