FoG turned five this week. As been the habit here are the stats over the course of the life of the blog. 

                                           One          Two            Three            Four        Five
Visitors                                2,525     12,792        43,166         46,445        40,745
Posts                                      135          204             178             152             158
Comments                                52          253             685             655             402
Conversational Index                .38         1.24            3.85            4.31            2.54
Technorati Rank                788,400   189,138      180,054        46,798        41,981
Blog Grader Rank                                                                      10,442         56,879

Interesting. Posts are basically flat while visitors and comments are down. I still attribute this to a conscious decision to not write to build traffic. I have moved away from articles that get things all stirred up while not being impactful. 

The most concerning thing to me is the drop in comments. At its core FoG is a an Atlanta startup community blog. One of the few that has remained active over the past five years. If the community is not talking it is concerning. Part of that may be the type of content I am presenting. Part of it may be that FoG needs a bit of a commenting/social facelift (a goal for 2011) as reflected in the Blog Grader rank drop. Part of it may be something that I do not quite grasp just yet. If you have any thoughts on that I am eager to hear them.

Lastly the Technorati rank is interesting. Yes, I am aware that this is a bit of an old metric but perhaps also meaningful. If you take the drop in traffic coupled with the increase in ranking it would lead to a conclusion that less people are reading blogs these days. Not a big surprise to an online ADD world that is being trained to think in 140.

So FoG is five. Happy birthday. And thanks to all of you that make it what it is.