Goodbye 2009

With 2009 winding down quickly, I’m pleased to present you with that good old blogging tradition–the year-end wrap post.

2009 was an eventful year for us. Mostly noteworthy: we joined the WebCenter development team to work on the internal rollout of WebCenter 11g, validating our work on Connect and Mix and minting us as a bona-fide product team.

W00t!

It’s a bit weird to me that we’ve gone from innovation team to product team in just under three years. A lot has happened since we started on this path, and if you’d like some perspective, check out my wrap posts for 2007 and 2008.

Fun with Numbers
In 2009, this blog had 123,000 pageviews (down from 131,000 in 2008) and about 80,000 visits (also down from 83,000 in 2008). Feedburner subscriptions rose from around 900 in January to about 1,600 in December, but if you discount the addition of FriendFeed to the number, it’s remained pretty static, about 900.

Not much to brag about there. Frankly, I’ve no good ideas on how to raise those numbers, and I’m not willing to promote this blog heavily enough to bump them. I guess the only benefit to raising them is to improve measurements of our reputation.

Anyway, thanks for sticking with us. Tell your friends 🙂

The top 10 posts, measured by pageviews were:

1. The Oracle People iPhone App is Here: 3,680 pageviews, posted February 4, 2009
2. Air Sharing Gives You iPhone File Sharing Goodness: 3,107 pageviews, posted September 16, 2008
3. Batman vs. Superman: 1,908 pageviews, posted March 6, 2009
4. Flickit: A Flickr iPhone App: 1,831 pageviews, posted February 18, 2009
5. Leave a Comment using Facebook Connect: 1,493 pageviews, posted March 9, 2009
6. Pinch Media Releases iPhone App Stats: 1,451 pageviews, posted February 23, 2009
7. “Keep Your Barcode Scanner off My Merchandise”: 1,435 pageviews, posted December 9, 2008
8. Orablog Tag or 8 Things: 1,014 pageviews, posted January 7, 2008
9. “For Your iPhone Only”: 961 pageviews, posted August 22, 2007
10. Best Invention of the Last 20 Years?: 937 pageviews, posted November 18, 2008

Wow, this list is depressing me a little. Not much innovative thinking there.

Just like 2008, 60% of the top 10 were iPhone-related. Three posts have stayed in the top-ten from 2008. The post on Facebook is purely driven by comment spam; I probably get ten or so spam comments on that each week.

And then there’s Batman vs. Superman.

Actually, that post’s traffic is driven almost entirely by a YouTube video that references my post and my irrefutable logic. Although it’s nice to hear my arguments cited as being correct and especially nice to get credit for them, this isn’t the topic I would have picked.

Thanks for the props Ramblin’ Man.

In all seriousness though, I nearly quit blogging the day I figured out why that post was driving so much traffic. It’s been a tough year for content, and the overall metrics agree. I’m running out of stuff to write.

Anyway, let’s hope I have more to say on topic in 2010.

As I did last year, here are the top ten most-commented posts from 2009:

1. The Oracle People iPhone App is Here: 126 comments, posted February 4, 2009
2. Sudoku anyone?: 44 comments, posted October 1, 2009
3. Meet Brizzly, My New Twitter Client: 42 comments, posted November 2, 2009
4. Geek or Nerd?: 42 comments, posted July 28, 2009
5. A Bit More on Our IE6 Stance: 35 comments, posted April 6, 2009
6. Goodbye Summer: 28 comments, posted September 2, 2009
7. Requiem for a Computer Lab: 28 comments, posted March 30, 2009
8. So, What Do You Do?: 26 comments, posted November 20, 2009
9. Why Don’t People Update Software?: 26 comments, posted July 23, 2009

OK, so you only get nine. There were two posts with 24 comments.

An interesting observation here: asking a question in the post title leads to comments. 40% of the top ten are questions, and several of the posts that got more than 20 comments also were.

I’m surprised at the success rate of that subliminal message, but then again, I didn’t compare the metrics of all the posts that have questions as titles. So, it could just be a random sampling or an anomaly.

OK, now for something new this year. Posts I think you should read, or reread.

• Why Gaming is the Future of Everything
• Google Wave: The Killer Enterprise Apps Platform
• What’s the Best Way to Collect Ratings?
• Measuring Influence and Reputation

Newsworthy
I usually devote some ink to highlights from the year, so here goes.

We joined WebCenter.
I already mentioned this. It’s a big deal for us, really, and we’re excited to share our progress, which should begin to percolate sometime in January.

I’ve been trying to push more WebCenter content into the blog. Sorry the WebCenter VM series took over for most of this month. Rich has some WebCenter-ADF code he’ll eventually share with you. Expect more of that in the coming year.

Rich and Anthony continued to rock.
These guys are rockstars. In 2009, they:

• Banged out two major updates to Connect 3.0 in January and 4.0 in May.
• Produced an API for Connect, used by the Oracle People iPhone app and other internal apps.
• Spoke at Google I/O.
• Began learning ADF and WebCenter only recently and have already built some awesome stuff I hope to share very soon.

Connect continued its rise inside the firewall.
Apps are nothing without users, and 2009 was a tipping point for Connect usage. It nearly reached 200,000 pageviews in May, and that momentum carried through all year. Each month posted higher month-over-month numbers vs. 2008.

We were mentioned in two books.
In addition to books, we were contacted and interviewed by about six or so post-graduate students from various universities around the World for case studies on Web 2.0/Social Media in the enterprise.

Rich redesigned the blog.
Kind of a big deal, since we’d had the same look for two years. We also switched hosts (again), and FYI, the old oracleappslab.com domain hasn’t yet been changed to redirect here. You won’t care if you’re already reading here, but still, tell your friends.

So, that’s it for another year. Each year so far, I’ve looked back and been blown away by what we’ve accomplished and amazed that we still exist as a team. We must be doing something right.

We’ll do it again next year, if I have this job and am still blogging.

Happy New Year!