Another year of blogging has come to a close, and while there have been days where I wonder why I still do this, I’m not going anywhere any time soon.

Pageviews dipped again this year, but only by 5.4%, a far better loss than last years crushing 31.74%.  Looking over the numbers, though, it’s amazing how some posts continue to hold on and get visited on a daily basis.  (as I have no desire for one particular post to get pushed down in Google rankings, I’m not saying what it is, but it boggles my mind how this one post is now over three-years-old and still going strong.)

One trend that did change this year is at least some of my top 10 posts this year were published in 2011 as opposed to last year not a one of them was posted in 2010.  It’s only taken me nearly seven years to figure out what everyone wants to read here!  Huzzah!

I want to thank those of you who are regular readers of this site that come back on whatever frequency of visits it is you choose to continually read my ramblings.  I know most of what I write these days is about the entertainment industry, but after a full day of writing about technology, I like to get away into something completely unrelated.  I’m approaching my seventh anniversary of daily blogging, and it’s all of you who keep me going.

Here’s to a wonderful new year, and lets just hope it’s slightly less (personally) eventful than the last.

Welcome if you’ve come here from hearing my advertisement on the Kevin Smith Smodcast Internet Radio (S.I.R.)! And if you aren’t visiting the site from the ad … welcome anyway!

Yes, it’s true, I took the opportunity to spend some dollars on an advertisement to do nothing but promote my site and podcast, and I feel it was money well spent on a “radio” network that I truly believe in.  Feel free to call me a shameless self-promoter, I’ll wait.

… Got that out of your system?  Good.

For those of you who are here for the first time, here are some helpful things for you to look around:

• You can learn more about me
• See what social networks you can find me on
• Follow me on Twitter, @seanpaune
• I’m the Editor-in-Chief of TechnoBuffalo, make sure to check us out for all of your technology news needs
• Check out my weekly podcast Scattercast here on the site, or subscribe through iTunes
• If you like what you see around here, make sure to subscribe to the RSS feed

You can also have a look around the site and see all of the various things I write about, while the subject matter may seem random at times, the one thing you can always count on a least one post a day as I have maintained this record since March 12th, 2005.

If you have a moment, please leave a comment on this post or send me a Tweet to let me know if you came here due to the ad, and enjoy the rest of SMorning Show block!

Today was actually supposed to be a fun day here on the site as it marks the sixth anniversary of me starting my non-stop blogging run.  Yes, for six years now I have blogged on this site every single day, but the events in Japan have sucked anything close to happy thoughts out of my head.

As very long time readers of this site know, or as anyone who knows me more than passingly can attest, I have a deep love for the country of Japan and its people.  I have visited the country three times, and I have been obsessed with the culture since the second grade.  What has happened there has made me feel like my heart has been torn from my chest.  I see what’s happening there and the first thing I want to do is leap in and assist in any way possible for all that country has given me over the years.

The good news is that I have heard in one way or another from everyone I know there, and all are safe and accounted for.  I have offered assistance in any way I can to those people, though I truly have no idea what I could do from here, but all they need to do is ask.

In the meantime, I beseech you, if you are in the United States, please text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10 that will be charged to your monthly cellular bill.  I did it this morning, you quickly get a reply asking you to confirm, you reply with “YES” and you get a final text confirming your donation.  Japan is going to need more supplies than I can even begin to comprehend.  I ask you from a personal level, if you are a long time reader of this blog, if you know me at all, I respectfully ask that you donate to the fund.  If you would like to donate in some other way, please consult CNN’s donation page for a list of reliable places to make your donations.

Oddly enough, there is a blogger named Luis from BlogD that inspired me launch this marathon run of blogging, and he just happens to be an American living & working in Japan.  He’s updated his blog, so I know he’s fine, but it just seems funny that it seems everything about this post somehow comes back to Japan.

This past year saw me scrambling harder than ever to post to this site simply because I was so busy elsewhere.  I haven’t lost any of my love or passion for this site, it is simply a matter of not enough hours in the day.  With that being said, how did the site perform this past year.

After several years of growth I saw pageviews dip by 31.74%, but technically I would say it held even.  How can it be both?  Simple.  The traffic drop is almost exactly the same as I saw on the Mother Lover post this year.  Yes, it generated that insane amount of traffic in 2009.  That one post accounted for nearly a fifth of my traffic in 2009, never let it be said that videos about sex with your best friend’s mother aren’t a wonderful thing.

None of my top ten posts for 2010 were written in that time period, and that tells me that I need to get back to picking better things to write about.  It really became a year of randomness around here, and while this site isn’t about turning into some huge, monolithic site, it would still be nice to know that all the work I put in around here is being read by as many people as possible.

As always I would ask you, dear reader, what you would like to see more and less of on this site, but in the past that has never really resulted in any feedback.  I’ll still ask, of course, because I want you all to have a reason to continue to come here, and hopefully to send your friends here as well.  So, please, leave me a comment about what keeps you coming back, or even what makes you sometimes think about stopping your visits.  This site can only continue to improve with your input.

With all of that said, I wish all of you the very best in 2011!

Well, that was a pleasant surprise.

I expected my podcast, Scattercast, to have a good month thanks to the interview with David Montelongo, but in the grand scheme of the month that episode only accounted for about five percent of the total downloads.  It definitely looks like the audience is growing, but yet, I need to call upon you my readers, and those that listen to the show … “you’re my only hope.”

After 106 episodes, the show still has no reviews on iTunes.  If you listen to the show, and you enjoy it, I would greatly appreciate you stopping by the Scattercast listing and giving it a review.

As for the second favor, I’ve asked numerous times on the show, and I know people are listening, but yet no one ever replies: What parts of the show do you enjoy?  The general rants?  Talking about movies?  Talking comic books?  Talking television?  I feel like I’m podcasting a vacuum, and now I have proof of you all actually listening, so come on, speak up!

In other news … I am going to be attempting to launch another audio podcast in Sept. in the tech field, but it will be a once a week show, with yet another co-host, so be looking out for that coming soon.

Below is the chart for the past 12 months of Scattercast, although I removed the actual numbers, you can see things have gotten much, much better.  (You can click it for a larger view)

With only 6 months down, and 6 to go, I already have to take a moment to thank my readers for the amazing success this site is enjoying this year.

Normally I do a round up of how things have gone on this blog at the end of each year, but considering the growth I’ve seen this year, I felt compelled to take a moment out of the day now to say “thank you”.  While I originally started this blog more for myself than anything else, I have been amazed to discover that people actually seem to enjoy reading my ramblings.  Why they do I have no clue, but I must admit I find it gratifying.

Measuring January 1st, 2008 – June 30th, 2008 against January 1st, 2009 – June 30th, 2009 finds that my unique visitors have grown by 1,075.47%, and total page views has grown by 897.83%. Even more stunning is if I compare all of 2008 against the first six months of 2009, unique visitors has already grown by 175.31% and total page views are up 149.51%.  I am stunned by this growth, and I am at a total loss as to what has caused this to happen.  I haven’t changed the stories I cover very much, and it’s still just me sitting here plugging away day in, day out, but obviously something has changed somewhere in the mix, and, well, I’m surely not going to argue with it.

Mind you my numbers are still very much in line with a personal blog, as in I am not getting anywhere near the number of visitors some of the blogs I work for get, but for a blog of my type, the numbers have become very respectable.

So, again, thank you for coming here and reading my extremely random commentaries on the world around us.  I know not every post is going to be for every reader’s taste, but I hope you are willing to wade through the ones that may not seem like a natural fit for you.

Do not adjust your monitors… The Cynical Bastards control the vertical… and the horizontal.

You may notice a few changes around SeanPAune.com, but not to fret, they aren’t major changes.  Starting today, this blog is part of The Cynical Bastards blog network.

Before I get to what this means to you, the reader, a little background on what The CBS is.  Steven Hodson and Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins met some time back, and bonded over their cynicism towards most of the Web 2.0 and social media scene.  While they weren’t critical of every new service to come down the pipeline, they were far more willing to question new services than the majority of bloggers who “oh” and “aww” over every shiny new service.

Later on, when both were working at Mashable, they met me and my own special brand of cynicism.  Due to my work on hundreds of lists for the site, I saw even more services than most people, and most of them I thought were utter garbage.  Mark became the linchpin between the three of us shaking our heads and questioning the status quo of the social media landscape.

However, we also discovered our general negative outlook on things wasn’t restricted to just the Web, but also to the world around us.  That led Mark and I to have a late night discussion over instant message where one of us made the joke about “we’re just cynical bastards”… I bought the domain name TheCynicalBastards shortly thereafter.

As all three of us left Mashable at different times, we decided we wanted to do something that would allow the three of us to continue to work together, and we finally decided a blog network was the perfect avenue for us.  We grabbed my domain name, Mark spent a weekend putting together an aggregator site for us (with much hair pulling), and, there you have it.

Now, what does being part of the network mean to the content of our sites?  Nothing.  Not one thing will change.  None of us have any say in what the other writes, and we may even disagree on certain subjects, but that will be half the fun of it.  In short, our sites and content will not change one iota from what made people come to read us in the first place.  Heck, I’m not even sure all of us are putting the badge on our sites, but I will be in the sidebar.

This is merely a way for the three of us to stay connected with one another, share resources, help promote one another and so on.  Depending on how things go, we may add other bloggers down the road, but for now it will just be the three of us.  If we do ever decide to bring more people on board it will be via invitation, so, please, don’t contact us asking to join… because we will mock you.

In addition to the aggregating site, we will also be launching a new podcast, CobWebs (Cranky Old Bastards take on the interWEBs).  We will be recording the first episode tonight on TalkShoe at 9 PM EST/8 PM CST, watch our Twitter streams at @StevenHodson, @Rizzn and @SeanPAune for a link to where you can come listen in.  We plan on making this a weekly show, and if you can’t make it to the live record, we’ll be posting it afterwards for download.

I’ll leave you with the quotes from our press release as to what makes each of us cynical.

“Read a couple hundred blog feeds about tech and social media each day, and that will be enough to turn Saint Teresa cynical.” – Steven Hodson

“There’s obviously a lot of hot air that gets passed around the press and the blogosphere in the tech business. We believe in being honest and critical without being constantly negative. We walk that line, and we call it being cynical.” – Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins

“Why are we cynical? Because each of us has been around the block a couple of times and that leads us to believe that if you’re breathing, we pretty much instantly distrust your intentions. That’s why we’re cynical.” – Sean P. Aune

Regular readers will be happy to know that Susan Boyle is done on this blog.

In what has to be labeled as one of my more insane moves, I came to a decision yesterday that if I was going to continue to write about Susan Boyle from Britain’s Got Talent that I was running a risk of annoying my regular readers.  Sure it’s an interesting story, but counting this week’s episode of Scattercast, I had talked about her six times in the past seven days.  That’s a bit much for anyone, and I know it.

So, yesterday afternoon, after writing up the Larry King interview post, I decided it was time to do something about this, and I bought SusanBoyleFandom.com.  I quickly cobbled together a WordPress install, used an off-the-shelf WordPress theme (something I really hate doning nowadays, but it worked in this case), rewrote all the previous entries I had done on Ms. Boyle so as not to incur the wrath of the Google search gods, and launched it.

While this certainly wasn’t in my current plans for my life, I’m still interested in her story, but at the same time didn’t want to drive visitors to SeanPAune.com insane with it, so this seemed the most logical solution… sorta.  As I mentioned on Scattercast this week, I’m working on ideas for three more blogs right now (no, this new site isn’t one of those three), plus I’m working at SitePoint.com and Mobile.BLORGE.com, prepping to start work at FreeAccess.com.au and Total-Image.com.au, finally started writing my long delayed novel, working a day job, working on some secret plans with Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins, and blogging here as well as StarterTech.com… sure!  Let me throw another blog on the pile!

I don’t plan on updating SusanBoyleFandom.com every day like I do my other sites, jsut when there is some new news about her, and we’ll see how long I keep it up, but for now this is the plan to keep my current readers happy while satisfying those interested in Susan Boyle.

Wish me luck… and the ability to keep my sanity!

I have no clue why these random symbols are showing up, but I am aware of them, and I am trying to discover the problem. I upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1 today and all of a sudden hundreds of posts have this weirdness in the posts. I am currently correcting some posts by hand, but I am working on a fix that will hopefully fix all of them at once. Everyone cross your fingers I can get this sorted out, this really is annoying the heck out of me.

UPDATE, 4:30 PM CST: I seem to have killed off the majority of the  symbols around the site, still working on some other issues that may take a day or two.  Such a good time I’m having.

It has been brought to my attention by some of my very astute commenters on this blog that I am a very jealous person.

From the post Dancing With The Stars Band came this comment.

JB

Uh. Where do I start except you obviously have no idea who plays in that band. You can always change the channel. Why waste your time complaining about something your [sic] not good enough to be in?

And then I received this comment on JJ Abrams Unveils The New Enterprise From Star Trek.

Arkanoid

I’ll never understand people’s need to pick apart a series and make it so serious. Honestly, I don’t consider myself a rabid fan, but I have at least seen most of the original ST episodes, and most of the movies through the current gen. stuff. Stop making such an issue out of the dang minutiae and have fun. Sheesh. What does it really matter if the Enterprise is a little too swoopy, or organic, or not retro enough? That’s subjective. Watch movie, have fun, judge movie after seeing. If you could do a better job with this project they’d have hired you to do it anyway. (emphasis mine – Sean)

The post you are reading right now is the 1,694th post since I started this blog. If you follow the logic presented by these two commenters that if you complain about something, you must be jealous in some way, than I must be the most jealous person alive.

I must be jealous of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) as I have written about them 18 times.  I have written 21 times about Scientology, I must be really jealous of their “church”.

I have always labeled myself an “observer” more than a “writer”: I take in the world around me, and I comment on it.  Considering I have done this 1,694 times now, yes, sometimes it is difficult coming up with things to comment on, so I go to the never-ending well that is television and movies.  There is always something there to annoy me.

To answer these particular two instances that were sighted in these comments:

1. I am not angry with the Dancing With The Stars band because I’m not good enough to join them, I simply hate them because I am tired of hearing them screw up something as simple as a 4-4 beat.
2. There is no way I would have wanted the job of rebooting the Star Trek franchise because, well, I think it’s a dumb idea to mess with something people love.

I feel confident in saying these types of comments come from people who just surf through from various sources (and they never leave a real email address for follow up discussion), and if they read even more than one other post on this site, they would see the style of blogger I am… I complain… a LOT!  I own it, I don’t even try to deny it, but I am fascinated by this recent trend of people saying that my complaining about something comes from my being jealous.  Is this something that has happened across the entire Internet that I have somehow missed?

Or, do you think it is possible that I complained about Salad Bar Etiquette due to my jealousy of their mastery of the vegetable plate building arts?

I don’t think in the entire history of this blog I have discussed one my advertisers blatantly.  It hasn’t ever been a hard and fast rule, it just hasn’t been anything that needed addressing.  Suffice it to say that if there is an ad on this site, it is a company I’ve dealt with, or a site that I enjoy.

The reason I bring this up is that as soon as I sort out some graphic layout problems, hopefully within the next few days, I will be adding my absolutely favorite clothing store to the ads on the right.  The company is called Big Dog Sportswear, and I think I can safely say that 95% of the clothing I own is from there.  The picture shown here is just what I have on from them as I type this.  (a polo shirt and a fleece jacket)

I’ve been wearing their clothes for the better part of 10 years now, and I can’t say enough good things about them.  They’re comfortable, wash beautifully, hold up over time, they are just some of the best clothes I’ve ever owned hands down.  I have several polo shirts that lasted multiple trips to Japan, washed there, worn again, and then came back with me for even more everyday wear.  Considering I have always gone to Japan in August when it runs about 95F and 95% humidity, this is saying more than you think.

They carry just about everything you can look for from shorts, house pants, athletic shorts, graphic tee shirts, polo shirts, button down shirts, coats, pants and on and on.  The only draw back to them is that, yes, every item does feature the dog logo in some way.  Some items are more subtle than others, but in general, he’s always somewhere on the clothes.  The added bonus is that not only are the items reasonably priced, but they almost always have some sort of giveaway or sale going on their site: free duffle bags, 75% off this or that, lots of Buy One, Get One free offers and so on.

So, yes, I am shilling one of my advertisers, but if you ever were to walk in to my bedroom closet, you would see why.  I am truly that happy with their product and their brand.  Please go over and take a look at www.bigdogs.com , I think you’ll be glad you did.