My top blogs of 2018

I have long been in the business of finding patterns: in data, in people’s words, in their choices, and in their behaviour which often contradicts what they have said. It is a fascinating job and never gets boring.

Currently, I am talking through my words to find out my own patterns. I hung on my every word, though like everyone else, I am not without contradiction.

So, here we are at the end of another year of blogging. I have studied the stats and made a list of the top 10 most popular blogs of 2018. Can I divine a pattern? Let’s take a look:

1. Yoga Lessons: Bikram one year on
2. Katie Hopkins’s #myfatstory is a story of vulnerability
3. Game theory in social media (1): Fate and power
4. Designing story (3): Archetypes and aesthetics
5. Storytelling: Narrative, Databases, andBig Data
6. Moments in modern technology
7. Maslow’s hierarchy of chakras
8. Prejudice: The social animal on social media (7)
9. Game theory in social media marketing (2): Customers and competitors
10. User motivation: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

I love that at the top of the list (1) is a blog about Bikram, one of my favourite things to do and to think about, and where I learn lessons about life – not just yoga. There are four about social media (3, 6, 8, 9) , which is a phenomena that, as a HCI person, I began researching and writing about because I wanted to understand it better and make sense of how we are connecting online. Connection is key to us humans, as is understanding peoples’ behaviour which is reflected by blogs 2, 8 and 10, and happens before we communicate our understanding to others and ourselves (4 and 5). Two of my personal favourites about the way we feel in our bodies (7) and online (6) made it onto the list this year too, which pleases me no end.

The other two most popular hits which I didn’t put on here were the About and Now pages as they are not blogs, they are just static pages about me and what I am doing right now. They got more hits than Katie Hopkins but fewer than Bikram and their position reflects what happens when people turn up here. They read a blog and then think: Mmm, who wrote this? What is their background? This is exactly what I do, when I go elsewhere.

I really enjoy writing about being human , especially the slightly esoteric – chakras, meditation, yoga – and our fears about technology and may well be writing more in that direction in 2019 as I ponder these blogs and the patterns in my life which speak to the patterns in other peoples’s lives.

So with that fabulous conclusion drawn, I am off to enjoy the rest of the year which may or may not include more blogging. In the meantime I wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and thank you for reading this blog.