No, I haven’t won the lottery (with a ticket I haven’t got), but Blogcritics, of which I’m now an editor-at-large, is celebrating its 10 millionth hit. More than 8 million of those have been in the past year, the third of its existence, a growth that this post outlines.
If you haven’t seen Blogcritics before, go out and check it out. It now has some 1,000 contributing bloggers. There’s huge music and video sections, and, where you’ll find me, books, culture and politics.
The politics section gets the most heated – sometimes it seems the right is in the ascendent, sometimes the left – but there’s also some excellent news you might not get elsewhere. I was taken today by a post on Canada’s new governor-general, a Haitian-born woman, who’s replacing a woman of Japanese extraction. (Sad to think that in progressive politics Australia and Canada were once neck and neck. What does Australia get now? white male clerics with dubious pasts.)
In books you’ll find a lot of popular light reading, but also plenty of meatier material, from a review of two books on the collapse of a major hedge fund to an explanation for genocide.
Culture is something of a catch-all. You’ll find my theatre reviews there, but also musing on whether you should stay friends with your ex, and similar. And I got quite a bit of interest with a post on a 12th-century Anglo-Norman play, so you don’t have to worry about dealing with what some might see as obscure topics!
If I’ve got one complaint, it’s that women are in a definite minority. So if you’re a blogger – particularly a female blogger – who posts on any of these topics – even if only occasionally – why not think about joining and getting more readers for your gems of wisdom, and more traffic to your blog? More here.