Blog Pongal – Fine Servings of the past 2.5 years – part 1 – Year 2004/2005

Updated Jan 16,2007: Wonderquest home page now features a link to the Non-Human Farmers post mentioned below. Thanks April.

As you all know, i have adopted an analogy to food for the theme of this blog with “Knowledge is Scrumptious” – knowledge as nourishment for the brain. That is also the reason i call my links of the week post – Fine Tastings of the Week or simply FTOTW. Today is Pongal, the tamil harvest festival and I decided to celebrate with my own harvest festival on this blog with a question – why not harvest the best posts that I have made over the past 2.5 years and do this every year on Pongal day? I am calling it Blog Pongal – Fine Servings of The Year, since these posts are dishes i have cooked for your as well as my brain’s pleasure. This blog gets between 50-70 visitors a day depending on what the Google god ordains (over 95% of non-subscription visits are referred by Google for the statistically minded). Given that meager traffic volume, i could not use the no. of visits to a post to pick the best ones. Instead, i decided to pick the best posts based on whether they appear in the first page of Google search results. Using that methodology, here are the finest servings on this blog for the past 2.5 years – part 1: [Note this is in regular chronological order, oldest first] :

1. Probably my earliest interesting posts – Ashta bil Asal – a lebanese sweet . Still generates traffic and is in the Top 5 for Lebanese Sweet and Ashta Recipe on Google.

2. Master of the “S” curve – this one caught the attention of Joe Kissell at ITOTD and led to my posts on ITOTD (see links on right hand column of the blog) including the one on Non-Human Farmers, which I consider to be my best post on Science till date.

3. Longtail business models – This is a top 3 on Google for “longtail business models”. This is not exactly a great post because i did not write any original content, but I included this here because this post marks a turning point in my blogging career – the point at which for me blogging started giving me learnings and true knowledge some of which i could apply back at my work.

4. My series on Microsoft Avalon – top 5 on google for “smart client avalon”.

5. iPod SD – My conceptualization of how Apple could attack the smart phone market. Now Apple is releasing a full-fledged iphone instead of a add-on strategy that i came up with. This post is my best work in the technology area till date and is the most popular post on this blog.

6. How the paleolithic technique Fermentation changed the world? I was inspired by Mark Kurlansky’s Cod and Salt to write this up. No.1 link on Google for “Paleolithic Fermentation”. Did you know that Fermentation was behind the founding of Israel? read the last link on this post for details.

7. Collective blogging wisdom from the unsung blogger series. This post was Desipundited.

8. A Question of Taste – is it 4 or 6? No.1 link on google for “4 tastes”. Another post inspired by Mark Kurlanksy. It was Desipundited.

9. 4 more types of peoples based on communication styles. This post was linked to by Communication Nation, the CEO of meetup.com, Vinnie Mirchandani and others.

10. New York Times linked to Sast Wingees – a proud moment for me.

11. My first moblog (mobile blogging) experience on my Italy trip. The posts from this series are in the Google Top 10 for many keywords. If you reached this far and you celebrate Pongal – Happy Pongal! Continued over to year 2006 in part 2. read on.