The Productologist enters the “Terrible Twos”

Two years and zero days ago I brought forth, upon this Interwebs, a new blog, conceived in Liberty (or haste), and dedicated to the proposition that all Product Managers are NOT created equal and that we could ALL learn a thing or two to make ourselves and our products better.

My, what a difference a year makes. At this time last year, traffic was minimal (on good days) and amounted to about 950 unique visits per month. The posting schedule was erratic and usually unplanned. The total post count was 39!

Now, there are more than 2900 unique visits per month (for those of you who are mathematically-challenged, that’s a 3x increase). With 58 posts this past year, and a semi-regular posting schedule that IS planned, but still somewhat erratic, The Productologist is cranking out the content and stirring up discussion.

Favorite Posts

As with last year’s anniversary post, I am including my favorite post of the year and yours, too. A note about how this works: I use the Popularity plugin from Alex King which uses a scoring algorithm to determine the popularity of pages and posts. You can see the popularity of any post or page at the bottom of the page. The top two for 2008 were

1. Off-Topic: Shave Gel
2. Follow-up on the Cornell Note-Taking Method

While these are great posts to be sure, they are anomalies and not truly the most popular posts. The first one, I recently discovered, is linked back from an, ahem, adult entertainment page. The second one gets spikes at the beginning of each college semester as a new group of students searches online for information about the Cornell Note-Taking method (probably recommended by their professors). Neither are truly Product Management audiences (well, maybe the first one), so I am discounting them for that reason.

Which leads us to the real favorites for 2008:

• Book Review: The Inmates are Running the Asylum (yours)
• Customer-centric Design: Trek Lime (mine)

Additions Since Last Year

Some of the things that are new on The Productologist:

• Revised UI (again)
• Product Management Reader posts (usually weekly)
• Product Management Question Corner interviews
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Jobs page

Other Notable Happenings

• Inclusion on the Alltop Product Management page
• Guest posts on other Product Management blogs (thanks Jeff and Cranky)
• And my personal fav: Honourable Mention in the Top 5 Product Management blogs

Thanks again to all of my subscribers, readers, commenters and lurkers for reading along,  joining in the conversation, or just sticking with me in 2008 (and hopefully into 2009 and beyond).

Regards,

Ivan