Reflections on 2007 – Neerav Bhatt

2007 has been a big year for me after starting the year at 4:29am 01/01/07 on top of the highest Mountain in Australia, Mount Kosciuszko.

As Dickens said in his famous book A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” a lot of good things happened in 2007 but at times I was completely run off my feet juggling several equally important tasks at the same time

Year round events

• I was a lower house candidate in the NSW state and Federal elections ending up with 4.51% and 3.8% of 1st preference votes respectively

  It was a hell of a lot of work but I was glad to make a difference by contributing to the democratic process

• Business income was generally steady – peaking at over $10,000 in the best month and falling to around $1000 in the worst
• In total my websites had well over 1 million pageviews through the year .
• I received several unexpected benefits from blogging including: New Knowledge, Job Offers, Increased Profile and an Invitation to a Charity Sailing Regatta
• I reached 400+ RSS subscribers several times in the year , hopefully in 2008 I can convince 500+ people to Subscribe to my RSS feed

Chronological events

• I was interviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald on my birthday
• In April my main website disappeared from Google for a few weeks which was very worrying.

  Although it reappeared and normal traffic levels resumed this prompted me to reduce my reliance on Google by selling more advertising directly rather than mostly through Adsense spots and also to start a new blog The Road Less Travelled so the risk of changes in search engine rank were spread over 2 sites.

• The Top 100 Australian Blogs Index (where both my blogs are listed) was launched and prompted me to converse with other Aussie Bloggers (hi there new friends 🙂 )

• In June/July I did a backpacking road trip from Adelaide to Darwin and I got lots of great photos but afterwards when I got home I was really sick from travelling too hard without enough breaks
• In early November I finished my 3rd subject out of 6 at the University of Technology Sydney to get a Graduate Diploma in Information Management . The last project involved volunteering some time at the Australian Museum to create a prototype digital library of Australian Fish Images

Best TV show / DVD series

2007 was a pretty forgettable year for Australian TV, but I did watch 2 series on DVD and a 2 related movies that I really liked:

• Life on Mars – Drama from BBC UK
• Spaced – Comedy from Channel 4 UK
• The movies Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead (also starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost from Spaced)