Happy New Year!!!

Happy New Year everyone!
I hope it was a great one! This year was a great one for the site.

I said this last year and I will say it again. This site is NOT about me. It's about EVERYTHING SYNTH. It is about what's out there. It's about all of us, it's about what others with similar interests are doing - videos, music, pictures, events, the new and the old, EVERYTHING SYNTH!
I want to THANK ALL OF YOU FOR A WONDERFUL 2008 and I WISH YOU ALL A FANTASTIC 2009!!!

Once a year I like to share a little bit about what the site is about, its history and its readership.
Some stats for the fun of it. World Domination? 12 countries short! If you remember last year, we had 181 countries visiting the site. This year (top map), we are up to 194 countries. Since the inception of the site in 2005 we are at 201 countries (left map)!!! If you click on the map, anything in green means someone out there visited the site from that country. Those in white haven't. The darker the green the larger the number of visits. According to the map, only the following 9 countries out there have not visited the site: Western Sahara, Chad, Central African Republic, DR Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Turkmenistan, and North Korea. Crazy! Someone from every other country out there visited the site. It boggles the mind when you think about it. [Side note: I think I found a bug in Google Analytics: Take a look at the top map followed by the left. The top is this year, the left is all time. If you look closely you will see Tajikistan and Kyrgyztan flip colors. For the all time map both should be green if you think about it.

Numbers:

Total Visits:
2008: 2,010,102
2007: 1,383,340
2006: 513,060
2005: 207,750 (via AdSense)
Total: 4,114,252

Total Page Views:
2008: 3,865,863
2007: 2,519,689
2006: 912,490
2005: 207,750 (via AdSense)
Total: 7,505,792

For reference, Site Meter has:
4,289,986 Total Visits All Time
7,960,740 Total Page Views All Time
The total Page Views for Dec was 433,030, the total visits 197,214.
The average Page Views a day for Dec was 13,969, average visits a day 6362.

Pretty amazing when you think about it.

As for number of posts:
I put up 10,090 posts in 2008
21,962 posts all time
That's an average of 27.64 posts a day for 2008 and nearly double 2005, 2006 and 2007 combined.
What this simply means is that there is more out there.

Some history:
I created the original matrixsynth.com in October of 1997 as a portal for me to track "everything synth." The site consisted of two frames. A simple link list on the left and a viewing frame on the right. If you go to the site you will see what it pretty much looked like since its inception. The problem was that the links on the left were only to the root of the sites. I found that a ton of the interesting information out there was deep within sites, and sometimes the info was not even in an actual website, but on various sound, image and video shares, forums, email lists, and so on. I had a backlog of emails saved and bookmarks in my web browser. In July of 2005, I decided to start the blog to track everything.

What am I trying to do anyway? When people ask I usually just say its a blog that I track stuff with. It is that in essence, and over time, I hope it will become something more, something much more.

What is the bigger picture?
I want the site to be a place people can come back to in time. 50 -100 years from now, I want people to be able to come to the site and look back in time. I want anyone that is curious about the world of synths to be able to see a glimpse of it here. A log in time of what was out there every single day. I know I won't capture everything. There are other blogs and other websites for that. What I do hope to capture is just glimpse of it all. I hope it will be a fun trip back in time for future generations. This is actually why I chose Blogger as my platform. When I first started the blog, I started it on my site matrixsynth.com. I hosted it, but the site eventually went down due to increased traffic exceeding my allocated bandwidth. The event made me remember losing some great synth sites out there like drummachine.com (anyone remember that one?). I ended up choosing Blogger as it is owned by Google and you can host the site on their servers instead of your own. Hopefully this will translate into the site running long after I am gone.

Hopefully this wasn't too long. I just figured I owe some background on the site at least once a year. :)

Again, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! HAVE A GREAT 2009 and THANK YOU!!!