Posted by It’s that time of year when I ask usability style: Where are am? Where have I been? Where am I going? as I analyse my year in blogposts to check the story in the stats.
Drumroll, please…
The Top 10 blogs of 2024, this year’s most read blogposts, on ruthstalkerfirth.com are:
- Three years of Bikram yoga, March 20, 2019
- Fighting, typing, and computing, September 18, 2024
- Maslow’s hierarchy for women?, March 30, 2020
- Storytelling: Narrative, Databases, and Big Data, April 14, 2016
- Eat, Pray, Artificial Love: The world of digital anthropology, November 4, 2024
- Mindfulness: The love within your love, July 21, 2013
- Katie Hopkins’s #fatstory one year on, January 18, 2016
- Human-computer interaction, cyberpsychology and core disciplines, February 12, 2018
- Semiotics: Finding meaning in storytelling, November 14, 2016
- Liking, loving and interpersonal sensitivity: The social animal on social media (8), June 10, 2016
Settle in and read on for a very long analysis and backstory of blogging, or skip to the numbers in bold 1), 2) .. 10), for some speculative statistical interpretation.
Blogging, Bond villains and Mastermind cats
Blogging is a solitary habit. I blog by myself with a cup of tea, either lying on my bed or by twizzling on what I call my Mastermind chair which I got in a second-hand furniture auction room for a tenner and doesn’t quite fit under my desk, which is actually a sewing table, so if one of the cats jumps up, it’s easy to hug them, swizzle round, and declare to the other cat:
So, we meet at last…
Ruth pretending to be Bond villain.
My blogging doesn’t have any deadlines or word limits or goals so it can often take a while to write and to read, which is deeply unfashionable, I know. According to SEO experts my blogs are supposed to be feeding the machine, little (300 words) and often.
And now, LLM app designers are recommending it’s best if you keep your requests brief, as the longer the request, the more difficult it is for the LLM to respond in a meaningful way. In other words when chatting to ChatGPT, behave like a computer as it loses the plot if the middle of your story is too long and baggy. We live in sound bite land.
I believe that my longest blog is Free Guy: Our favourite AI (2021) which weighs in at a hefty 2,859 words. What can I say? Or rather what else don’t I need to say? I want to write the best blog I can every time and I want to enjoy the whole experience. I’m not writing for the machine which shreds and decontextualises it anyway. In the past, I have questioned: Why do I blog? and What’s my why?
I do it because love it. It helps me figure out my why. And, I do it for the experience, all the way. I love the buzzing in my ears that I get when I am writing something that feels really, really good.
A picture speaks a 1,000 words shorter than this blog
Each blogpost begins with the search for an image, which helps me define what I might want to say about the topic. Then, I read around the subject. Sometimes I reread my own blogs, other times I fall down a delightful YouTube rabbit hole. After that, I think some more about it all until I am ready to write it up.
This year, I only had time to write 12 blogs and that is only if we count this one which was supposed to be a quick summary but has turned into a big all-day holiday brood complete with a lovely ChatGPT generated image at the top of me roller skating through my web stats. I did ask ChatGPT to analyse the list, but it said bonkers things I couldn’t use, apart from one fantastic phrase: Databases with drama. Brilliant but not at all what that blog is about, still, I love the spin!
From the day I set up this website in January 2007, writing a blog was and is a whole lovely journey in and of itself. When I look back at a list of blogs, at the end of each year – a tradition I began in 2015 – I do so with great fondness. It is wonderful to ruminate on whatever shows up and what I have written.
Occasionally, I pronounce that I have nothing left to say or, that I will update/rewrite/redesign my website, which occasionally does happen. Last year, I was all for deleting WordPress but I changed my mind, as if I did that each blog would take twice a long to write, format and link. Imagine! Mostly though I look at this website, my very own archive of all my thoughts and opinions and I am amazed and delighted. ChatGPT finds them fascinating too, but honestly, what does it know?
That said, my youngest claims that I only ever think about three things:
Teenage observations about Ruth Stalker-Firth
1) My latest blog or talk. 2) HCI. And, 3) What is for dinner?
And even though I have set up a rota so everyone takes a turn cooking dinner, she is so right.
The yogis (which is the fourth thing I think about) say we have 60,000-80,000 thoughts a day and very few of them are new. Indeed, all four things I think about the most, make an appearance in the 2024 Top Blog List. Though, I cheated a bit with that claim and categorised What’s for dinner as part of Maslow’s hierarchy. Food is after all one of our physiological needs on the lowest rung. But, Maslow makes an appearance in the Top Blog List every year be it: Chakras, User Motivation, Social Media or, this year’s Women.
Google, Bikram and, Maslow’s hierarchy for women?
I was surprised to find a couple of blogs that I wrote in 2024 actually make the list. Often, they don’t because they are competing with blogposts that have been shared across social media sites over a number of years such as the number one this year : 1) Three years of Bikram Yoga, (2019).
Bikram yoga is invariably a big hit from its disgraceful inventor to the never ending gifts it gives to anyone who ever rolls out a mat. And, this year there was an online company using my name and some of my Bikram Yoga blogs images and content to drive traffic to their website to sell hot pants and very tight yoga leggings. I couldn’t decide if I was furious or flattered. I asked Google to remove the link from their search engine listings which they did. Though someone else, or perhaps it is the same group, is now selling the image at the top of the Bikram blogs for $30 with my name on it! I can’t see why anyone would want to buy it as it’s really bad quality or why my name would make a difference, but life like the WWW is weird and wonderful.
Then there’s: 3) Maslow’s hierarchy for women?, (2020) which is a blog that someone, somewhere has clicked on everyday this year. I believe this one reflects the desire for society to represent us women, we make up 49% of the population after all. As a 5ft-left-handed woman, I wander through the world not being able to reach the top shelf in supermarkets or put my feet on the floor whilst sitting on any chair, ever, whilst I wish that a corner of the world had been designed with me, and anyone like me, in mind.
Databases with drama and Katie’s story
After that there is: 4) Storytelling: Narrative, Databases, and Big Data, (2016), 9) Semiotics: Finding meaning in storytelling, (2016) and, one that came so close to this year’s Top 10 and normally hits the list every year, is: Designing story (3): Archetypes and aesthetics, (2017) which is shared on many social media platforms and blogging sites that talk about writing fiction.
Archetypes are a tool for communicating along with well-structured stories, web sites, apps, and human-machine interfaces. We need to be managed. I guess this is why 7) Katie Hopkins’s #fatstory one year on, (2016) came in where she did. She continues to make the news and has recently been on tour, saying all the things she feels the need to say. I wrote the blog as a follow up to a first one I had written a year earlier when I needed to manage what I thought about her, the things she says and does, and why people give her a platform. I am not alone. Both Katie blogs get masses of hits daily!
6) Mindfulness: the love within your love, (2013) came in at no. 6. As a society we are getting a bit more switched on to anything that may help us feel a bit less frazzled, which has to be a good thing. It also borrows a line from the wonderful Rumi so I am not surprised that it is in the list.
One beautiful title that didn’t quite make the Top 10 list but was quite high up in the stats is Yoga at the still point of the turning world, (2024) which is borrowed from T. S. Elliot’s 1936 poem Burnt Norton. Someone, I’ve never met was so delighted by the blog, they sent me a pack of yoga cards, which they designed to show people how to plan their own yoga sequences. Lovely.
Another Top 10 near-miss with a borrowed title is: Where’s Wiley? Finding the Fermat fella, (2024) which is a play on the Where’s Wally? / Where’s Waldo? series and has a great picture thanks to ChatGPT. It took me and ChatGPT a few goes to get it how I wanted it to look, but honestly I laughed and laughed writing that blog. An emeritus-professor friend who was on my PhD thesis committee said he spotted himself amongst the white-haired men camouflaging Fermat’s Last Theorem-solver Professor Andrew Wiles.
Love in the time of chatbots, fighting, typing and AI
One of two new ones which made the list is 5) Eat, Pray, (Artificial) Love: The world of Digital Anthropology also has a borrowed title, from Liz Gilbert’s famous book too. Although anything about love or intimacy especially online invariably gets a stack of hits, which explains why no. 9) Liking, loving and interpersonal sensitivity: The social animal on social media (8): from my 2018 series on social media came in. People are interested in what intimacy, privacy and trust mean online, as we are hardwired for connection online and in real life. Sherry Turkle who wrote about robots as companions and which I blogged about: Alone Together, (2015) said in an interview earlier this year 2024, she still gets asked about them. And so, I dived in to explore them further and talk about what I learnt.
The Eat, Pray, (Artificial) Love blog was me originally figuring out what to include in that talk on Digital Anthropology, (2024) which I gave on the Women’s Institute (WI) Learning Hub (WILB) in November 2024. I linked to the blog when advertising the talk, to give a taste of the amazing world of digital anthropology and the question: What does it mean to be human in a digital world?
It entertained me no end to write the blogpost, especially when quoting my tweenagers whose Sims were having babies and (not always) raising their children in The Sims 4 virtual world. With lots more to say afterwards, I followed up the talk with another blog: Ruth Stalker-Fascinating about me hanging out with chatbots and virtual machine-learning versions of myself.
I love giving talks to the WI which all began when I decided that I needed to demystify AI, as we hear more and more about how it will transform our lives. I want to explain what AI can and cannot do in precise, exact terms, to bring a balance to the conversation, which is what I did do with my first talk AI for the WI. I have delivered this talk several times and received some lovely feedback. I will deliver it again to the WILB and another couple of organisations in the New Year and I cannot wait.
Along with the AI and Digital Anthropology talks, I also gave one about When Women were Computers, (2024) which I was delighted to see was an even bigger draw than the AI one, with over 100 women turning up in real-time and more watching it on playback, to hear all about women in computing. I absolutely loved researching it, talking it through and afterwards hearing from the women who worked as computers back in the day, and at that month’s film club: Hidden Figures.
To find a way into the talk I wrote 2) Fighting, typing, and computing, (2024) to reflect on my own journey from council estate kid and would -be typist (chosen only as a route to avoid factory work because my mother said so) to accidental techie and computer scientist, as I thought about the aspirations of women, our position in society, our hopes and dreams as we work the triple shift: Which is when we work a job, take care of a house and family, sandwiched as we are between the generations. At home, at work, and in the majority of difficult situations, we do all of the emotional heavy lifting.
Everyone always says that your mother is the only person who reads your PhD thesis. Mine never did. It wasn’t for her, but she would have enjoyed my talk on women. It was right up her street, full of stories of ordinary women overcoming adversity and celebration, and defining for themselves who they wanted to be, even a rocket scientist. Even thinking about it now makes me feel capable of anything and I’m sure my mother would have felt the same way too. I am thrilled that I will be giving it again during International Women’s month 2025.
Human-computer interaction, of course
And finally! 8) Human-computer interaction: cyberpsychology and core disciplines, (2018). I’ve been updating my HCI course again on Udemy as I’m teaching to people all over the world, all with different backgrounds and expectations of what they are buying. This is great as it makes me think about how I can teach better, explain concepts more clearly and, manage each student’s expectations. I don’t want anyone else buying the course and then feeling furious, as they leave me a bad review, because they were looking for some sexy persuasive marketing user experience (UX), which is and isn’t what HCI is about at all.
Udemy puts HCI under UX which is causing part of the confusion, the rest is because HCI has no core competencies, and pulls on many disciplines and is so much bigger than designing a flashy user interface (UI). It is about the political act of designing something which changes the way people work, which is why I wrote the blog. I want everyone to understand that HCI is so much bigger and much more fundamental than just marketing and UX. As for cyberpsychology, like most of these topics, fascinating though the topic is, it is too early to say for sure without some hard earned wisdom. Speculation isn’t enough. Sherlock Holmes ‘s fictional logic was often faulty.
I am in the middle of creating some new handouts for my HCI course. Currently, I have 929 students and amazingly, this year alone they have spent 42,000 minutes learning. It is like time-travel and I am thrilled that I am a part of the journey and it makes me happy to keep adding new lectures and tweaking the handouts to make it as good as possible for them.
And, so there we are, one year more, one year less, as my auld dad would say, whom along with me mam and all those wonderful people who have wandered through my life, I miss dearly this time of year and remember them with love and gratitude.
I love blogging and I love this website. It is a gift that I can come here whenever I wish to reflect on those people and topics that are felt along my heart. And so, from my heart to yours, I send you love, I send you peace, I wish you laughter and light as 2024 draws to a close.
Happy New Year!
