Was 2010 The Year Of The Dadblogger?

Don’t ask me to tell you about 2009 and why it was the year in which the universe decided it would be fun to see how much crap it could fling at me before I would break or why I consider it to be about the worst year of my life.

I don’t have much interest in revisiting much of it but I suppose the nature of blogging lends itself to sometimes revisiting the past.

Somewhere during the normal chaos of the weekend I stumbled back onto a post I wrote called If I Was a Professional Blogger and then revisited a guest post I wrote for my friend Ron called The Random Thoughts Of Jack Be Nimble.

And that led me to a post in which I announced I felt like I had failed.

How Much Life Have You Lived?

When I think back on those moments it is with mixed emotions because in many ways it feels like it happened to someone else and I realize that I am not who I was.

That is not necessarily a bad thing.

Life forces us to make choices and to change or be changed. You roll with the punches and figure out how to keep getting back up or you just lie down and take a beating.

I took a beating but I never did give up in large part because I went through a big portion of that with the real world friends and a bunch of dad bloggers.

We did our best to support each other and to encourage us to know our own worth and to fight to get it.

And now almost four years later I look back and mostly smile because that sad and angry man is mostly gone. He was replaced by a man who feels a lot like he has been to hell and back.

That sort of life experience has value because when you look at the scars you not only knew you lived but you gain confidence in your ability to weather other storms.

Was 2010 The Year Of The Dadblogger?

2010 was the year I really pushed hard to change how about I went blogging and made a concerted effort to try to help build a stronger and more cohesive dad blogger community.

I don’t know how effective I was at building a larger community, if at all but I felt like I finished the year with new friends and that was worth a lot to me.

Sometimes I laugh at myself when I think about how serious I was at trying to convince more people that dad bloggers were a force to be reckoned with and that it was a mistake for brands to have such a strong focus on mom bloggers.

Hell, I still think it is. I still think that many of the brands have a very poor understanding of how decision-making in married households work and that they don’t pay enough attention to single and stay-at-home-dads.

I still think that relatively few people understand metrics and that inertia and or laziness keeps them from digging as deep as they should.

It wouldn’t be hard to write more about engagement, reach, pageviews, unique users and a rant about how there is often no uniform metric for measurement but that is not what this post is about.

The Evolution of A Blogger

How To Make More Money and Have Better Sex Through Blogging  makes me smile because I can use it to gauge progress or more accurately I can see how much happier I was when I wrote it.

That is a good thing.

It is one of the things I love about blogging. I love how it can serve as a chronological history of what has happened. Ultimately that is a big part of why I write about my kids here.

I can go back and see snapshots in time that remind me that the kid who is about to have his Bar Mitzvah asked me not to die when he was 3.5 and I can see how I responded.

One day these rug rats of mine are going to appreciate being able to look at these moments.

But in the interim it will be me who enjoys looking back and seeing how a guy who started blogging on a whim used it to reinvent his life and career.