January’s “blogging carnival” contribution (#BlogArch 3) – plenty of people rallied to Doug’s December call for posts, I expect this month to be no different!

Doug wants to know:

What are your best (or if you want your worst) post(s) and why? Compare and contrast your different bests/worsts.

I leave it up to you to define what best is. We bloggers have all sorts of different stats available to us. You could look at-

• Most viewed -single day?, week? month? year? all time- I leave it up to you
• Most individual views
• Most diverse audience
• Facebook likes
• Most viral (however you define viral)
• Most Tweets
• Went viral on reddit

Or you could go a bit more qualitative-

• Best conversations
• Led to a talk or a paper
• Personal favorites (again however you determine that)
• Most proud of
• Best comment left by your audience e.g. this post changed my life,

These are just some ideas to get people started but please use what ever criteria  you want.

Now I’ve only been blogging since April 2013, and I’m not very prolific – easing myself into it, I tell myself, but really I’m still working out why I’m doing it and what I want to achieve.   It will be really interesting to read the “January” carnival posts of bloggers who have been writing for ages – such as The Heritage Journal.   I’ve only 19 posts to choose from, they have thousands…

At the moment my favourite post is my second (in practical terms, my first, because it’s the post I wrote after briefly laying out my introduction).   My worst – well, various, because they are less satisfactory, more self-indulgent, or just not very good.

I like my post about the cannibal fork that I carved last year for the following, un-prioritised, reasons: it’s short, but tells a story; it’s about an object, with a half-decent photo; it’s also about a museum collection, with relevant links.   However, I am influenced in this choice by the fact that my experience at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, which led to the woodwork and the post, has stayed with me.   There’s more to be done on cannibal forks…

My “best” post is probably the one I wrote earlier this month about EAC14 – this year’s UK Experimental Archaeology Conference, in Oxford.   Blogging about it was an opportunity for me to clarify in my own mind what I got out of the conference and to get some of that down on ‘paper’, as it were.   It made me express succinctly the key things that I took from papers presented over the two days at Merton College and the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art.   So it’s my “best” post because it helped me to summarize the most important things that I learnt, and reinforce them in my own mind.   Otherwise, the paperwork would have been filed and my attendance wouldn’t have been as fruitful.