The farewell

Never the Ranger felt so Lone!

The semester classes have reached its end, and consequently, this blog also. This is going to be a farewell entry with some reflexions about the experience.

To begin with, some numbers:

• Entries: 8 + this for feedback;
• Visits: 112 by October 13^th, most of them from my classmates;
• Followers: 4, 3 of them, again, my classmates;
• Comments: none.

Unsurprisingly, 91 of the visits are from New Zealand; the rest have been from Spain (oh my good friends that read IEM things only for me!), one from Germany, two from the States, and one from Taiwan (!).

Despite the number of comments was zero, there was some feedback, but, again, the scale has been the classmate area. The only comment I received out of my classmates was “Oh, I love Mafalda’s!” which is thankful, but not very related to the contents themselves. I can attribute the lack of visits and comments to several factors:

1: Integrated Environmental Management is not the most common topic in the web. Checking the most popular things in different countries (using Google’s Zeitgeist), sports events and teenager pop so-called stars lead the searches. Environment only appears in the top searches when there is some natural disaster and, honestly, this is not the happiest way to gain some popularity. Besides, even if you specifically look for IEM, the blog won’t be among the first links so it is really hard to find it by chance if you are not particularly looking for it.

2: This blog is new and there is only one editor (me). The most successful blogs I know have a troupe of people to keep making entries and have been running for quite a long time. As well, the comments left in those blogs usually are from common visitors who keep adding their views to their favourite blogs.

3: A topic like IEM is not either the most common to have a blog; as well, the comments expected in a blog with a “formal” matter like this are not like those that I can recall in the most popular blogs. Maybe this is a topic too “serious” for a blog, as they are more a way of fun than to study things in depth. It is true that you can find a blog for almost every single topic in the world, as anybody can make one, or a dozen, but the number of people interested about reading an IEM blog is not yet considerable. There are some, though; proof of this, the mysterious visitors from USA and Taiwan that, somehow, reached the blog.

Nevertheless, this has been all an experience. I had never done a blog in English and with written articles as the main format before, so this has let me learn a couple of things.

First of all, I’ve tried to keep the entries in a medium length; they are, on average, no longer than a page, as I am aware that excessively long entries would imply no readers at all. Consequently, there aren’t that many words in this blog, and there are only eight entries, not taking this last one into account; despite this, it seems it takes far more time to be done that an essay with the same length. Fighting with/against the blog format has remembered me my programming days, when a semicolon out of place was able to spoil an entire program.

In other hand, I tried to include Google advertisement to increase the traffic; nevertheless, it took a while to be approved and was only available around two weeks ago, so finally it was for nothing.

In the positive hand, this is quite a different assignment with some good points:

1: First of all, the blog is an ongoing work which takes a whole semester. It’s possible to see the evolution of your own blog, but also your classmates’. Even if it is an individual work, the main source of comments and feedback are your mates.

2: Secondly, I tried to make an enjoyable blog, so I could include comic cartoons, links, news and videos, which would have been impossible on a standard essay. At the same time, the language used is less strict that in a written essay; I am supposed to be writing for an audience and, therefore, addressing what I write to you, the reader.

3: The need to include contemporary affairs, such as pieces of news and media, helps you to realize about the links between the environment and everything else, trying to imagine how things are related to this IEM approach that, most of the times, is not mentioned but is still there.

Well, this is the final entry, at least for the moment. Cheers and thanks for having a look!