It has been exactly one year and one day of blogging today! Have I achieved anything? According to the statistics collected by my gandi.net page I get approximately a hundred hits per day - sometimes less, sometimes more - especially if I am writing from some competition. I think for a photo journal made by a non-photo-journalist (or a photo-non-journalist) it is quite a nice achievement! Especially as conducting as a profession is so marginal and concerns so few people.

Search Engine Hits

I would like to reveal some more statistics and draw some conclusions based on them. According to the Google search strings leading to a click on my page the absolute majority of my readers are people interested in conducting competitions. After the general search "conducting competition" the runners-up were "Fitelberg competition", Matacic competition" and "Svetlanov competition". That is no surprise, since my page was the best source of information in the net for those competitions after their own homepages. I will try to keep up the good work in the future!

Most Popular Posts

The most popular posts on my blog did not present a surprise either. Here are the top five:

10 Reasons Why You Should Participate in Conducting Competitions

Conducting the Music School Orchestra - 3 Pros, 4 Cons and 5 Ways to Make the Most of It!

Orchestra conductors and eyesight

Conducting Basics by Yuri Simonov

Playing musical chairs in Finland

The first three are fairly obvious, because of all the posts I wrote they come closest to the "traditional" blog entry in the sense that they were not purely personal but tried to be informative as well as entertaining. The fourth, a collection of "conducting wisdom" by Yuri Simonov is popular because "conducting basics" is the next most popular search coming to my blog after the competition searches. I hope all the seekers also ended up finding something for themselves... The last one became popular because it was quoted in the discussion forum of the main Finnish newspaper.

As a conclusion I hope to be more useful to my readers and whenever there is no concerts or competitions going on I will try to write more "mainstream" entries about music in general and conducting in particular. I of course would love to get feedback from you! If you are pondering a question about conducting ask me - maybe I am able to shed some light into it!