OCDQ Blog Bicentennial
Jim HarrisWelcome to the Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality (OCDQ) Blog Bicentennial Celebration!
Well, okay, technically a bicentennial is the 200th anniversary of something, and I haven’t been blogging for two hundred years.
On March 13, 2009, I officially launched this blog. Earlier this year, I published my 100th blog post. Thanks to my prolific pace, facilitated by a copious amount of free time due to a rather slow consulting year, this is officially the 200th OCDQ Blog post!
So I decided to rummage through my statistics and archives, and assemble a retrospective of how this all came to pass. Enjoy!
OCDQ Blog Numerology
The following table breaks down the OCDQ Blog statistics by month (clicking on the month link will take you to its blog archive), with subtotals by year, and overall totals for number of blog posts, unique visitors, and page views. The most popular blog post for each month was determined using a pseudo-scientific quasi-statistical combination of page views, comments, and re-tweets.
* Since this is the third one published in September 2010, it is officially the 200th OCDQ Blog post!
Some of my favorites
In addition to the most popular OCDQ Blog posts listed above by month, the following are some of my personal favorites:
- All I Really Need To Know About Data Quality I Learned In Kindergarten — Inspired by Robert Fulghum’s classic book, this blog post explains how show and tell, the five second rule and other kindergarten lessons are essential to data quality success.
- The Three Musketeers of Data Quality — Although people, process, and technology are all necessary for data quality success, people are the most important of all. So, who exactly are some of the most important people on your data quality project?
- Fantasy League Data Quality — This blog post attempted to explain best practices in action for master data management, data warehousing, business intelligence, and data quality using . . . fantasy league baseball and football.
- Blog-Bout: “Risk” versus “Monopoly” — A “blog-bout” is a good-natured debate between two bloggers. Phil Simon and I debated which board game is the better metaphor for an Information Technology (IT) project: “Risk” or “Monopoly.”
- Collablogaunity — Mashing together the words collaboration, blog, and community, I created the term collablogaunity (which is pronounced “Call a Blog a Unity”) to explain some recommended blogging best practices.
- Do you enjoy writing? — A literally handwritten blog post about the art of painting with letters and words—aka writing.
- MacGyver: Data Governance and Duct Tape — This allegedly Emmy Award nominated blog post explains data stewardship, data quality, data cleansing, defect prevention, and data governance—all with help from both MacGyver and Jill Dyché.
- The Importance of Envelopes — No, this was not a blog post about postal address data quality. Instead, I used envelopes as a metaphor for effective communication, explaining that the way we deliver our message is as important as our message.
- Dilbert, Data Quality, Rabbits, and #FollowFriday — This blog post revealed a truth that all data quality experts know well: All data quality issues are caused by rabbits—either a cartoon rabbit named Roger, or an invisible rabbit named Harvey.
- Finding Data Quality — With lots of help from the movie Finding Nemo, this blog post explains that although it is often discussed only in relation to other enterprise information initiatives, eventually you’ll be finding data quality everywhere.
Find your favorites
Find your favorites by browsing OCDQ Blog content using the following links:
- Best of OCDQ — Periodically updated listings, organized by topic, of the best OCDQ Blog posts of all time
- Popular Content — Adventures in Data Profiling, Identifying Duplicate Customers, Social Karma, and Downloads
- Best OCDQ Blog Posts of 2010 — “Best of 2010” blog posts based on a combination of page views, comments, and re-tweets
- Best OCDQ Blog Posts of 2009 — “Best of 2009” blog posts based on a combination of page views, comments, and re-tweets
- OCDQ Blog Archives by Month — Browse by Month, e.g., July 2009, May 2010, October 2009, January 2010, August 2009
- OCDQ Blog Archives by Category — Browse by Category, e.g., Debates, Videos, Podcasts, Social Media, Random Thoughts
- OCDQ Blog Archives by Tag — Browse by Tag, e.g., Business-IT Collaboration, Wednesday Word, Recently Read, DQ-Song
Thank You
So far, OCDQ Blog has received over 900 comments, which is an average of 50 comments per month, and 5 comments per post.
Although a fair percentage of the total number of comments are my responses, Commendable Comments is my ongoing series (next entry coming later this month) that celebrates the truly commendable comments that I regularly receive from my readers.
Thank you very much to everyone who reads OCDQ Blog. Whether you comment or not, your readership is deeply appreciated.
Reader Comments (12)
Congratulations on the second anniversary of your blog and your 200th post. Your contributions to the Data Quality Tribe have been exceptional in both quality and quantity. Looking forward to see what the third year of your blog brings. :)
Summing the page views makes sense to me, but summing the unique visitors seems strange. Your yearly totals, and overall totals do not seem to take into account visitors who visit each month. I would expect someone who visits each month to be counted in each month's level of aggregation, and yearly total as one, not as one at the month level, and 12 at the year level. Another possible explanation it that I do not know enough about web metrics, it could be that this is a normal practice.
Jim, big congrats for making blog post number 200 – and big envy for getting +100,000 page views :-)
All the best,
Henrik
Congrats, Jim!!
Awesome Jim,
Attracting that volume of traffic is a real testament to the quality of your writing and community engagement.
It's also a lesson to anyone looking to get ahead in their career or business, a blog opens up so many opportunities and provides the most effective means of demonstrating your knowledge and experience, you've set the bar very high indeed.
Good luck for the next centennial!
Congrats on "two hunge", bud.
Congratulations Jim,
Your blog is a source of both great insight on all things data quality, and very entertaining to boot. (No small task)
I used to think being obsessive about something was not a good thing - you've proved me wrong, I hope you enjoy your obsessive compulsive tendencies as much as the rest of us enjoy reading the fantastic blog posts they create!
Looking forward to the next 200.
@Joe — Excellent point about the Unique Visitor statistic.
First, excluded from the stat are any hits from search engines, website crawlers, and off-site RSS reads (e.g., Google Reader). A unique visitor is then tracked based on the number of browser cookies tied to unique IP addresses visiting a website during a period of statistical tracking.
The lowest level of granularity is hourly, which is then automatically summed to provide daily, weekly, and monthly totals. Therefore, the same unique visitor can definitely be counted more than once at all levels of aggregation.
In fact, the same unique visitor can be counted more than once during the same hour - if they cleared their browser cache before returning to the same website.
Although I agree with your perspective, with my website's built-in statistics package, I have no way of refining the aggregation as you recommended. To my knowledge, this is the standard way that all website metrics are tracked.
@Rob — Thanks for your kind words, Rob. My official second anniversary will not be until March 13, 2011. I wonder how many blog posts I will have written by then, perhaps I will have to try to make it a Spartan anniversary and go for 300 :-)
@Henrik — Thanks Henrik for all of your re-tweets and comments, and for allowing my comments on your great blog!
@Ted — Thanks, Ted!!
@Dylan — Thanks for the kind words and continuing support, Dylan.
@Phil — Mark it, Dude. :-)
@James — Thanks for the kind words. And yes, having obsessive-compulsive tendencies can be both a blessing and a curse, but at least I occasionally get to use my OCD powers for good :-)
Congrats, Jim. Keep it up. You're making a difference!
@Steve — Thanks for the encouragement, Steve!
Hi Jim,
Congrats and well done.
Always interesting, often amusing, hugely informative.
Keep up the great work.
Rgds Ken
@Ken — Thanks for the kind words and encouragement, Ken.