The Social Poets: Popular Posts 2009 and Thank You: The Social Poets

From Denny: It's been quite a wild ride this past year! Thanks for coming along and keeping me company while I journeyed through the blogosphere.

I really had no clue as to where I was going with this blog and the spin-off blogs but I jumped in feet first anyway, never much worrying about what others thought. How else are you going to learn about something unless you are willing to go on the journey of discovery and sometimes look lame hanging out on a limb?

When the world economy took a turn for the worst I threw out my original scenario for this blog to include teachings on writing and poetry as I discovered there were already plenty of sites doing that. When I witnessed on the news, and first hand, just how much so many people were suffering, I chose to respond with adding a lot more humor to all my blogs, even developing two other humor blogs. I've always found humor as a great stress reliever and, sometimes, you actually learn something new in the process - like those addicting cheeky quotes.

Looking back upon the year I remember when I was thrilled to get 25 people visiting my blogs in a month! :) Now? At this point, once I figured out the only way people would find me is to place all my significant blog posts into various search engines and on a few social sites. Now there are over 4,000 or more a week visiting and growing! I had no idea the internet was such a fun playground...

There are a lot of international readers besides my fellow Americans. There are our Canadian and Mexican cousins next door and British cousins in the UK across, what the Atlantic Ocean is affectionately known as, The Pond. Hello out there to everyone visiting from Serbia and Montenegro, the Ukraine, Indonesia, Romania, Turkey, Pakistan, Greece, India, New Zealand, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, China, Japan, South Africa, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Portugal, Italy, France and Spain! Thanks for visiting!

At best I had hoped for 10 popular posts you enjoyed through the year. To my amazement there's a huge list of favorites you threw up on social sites like facebook, digg, stumbleupon and emailed to your friends and family. The stats sites I use to help me determine how well a post does, also does not give me the "who," so let me say thank you to those of you (though you are anonymous) who have supported this blog and me in this way: huge THANK YOOOOU!!!! Maybe I should take up yodelling? :)

This year has been a lot of fun as I've tried to figure out what you enjoy reading and find amusing for a chuckle. If there is something you would like to see featured more often on The Social Poets, shoot me an email! Denny Lyon: warriorspearl@gmail.com. Always glad to hear from you!

I'll keep adding links to this post through the rest of the year and link this post on the sidebar so you can easily reference it. Now the blog should load faster too without so many links on the sidebar, a win-win! :)

One more thing: all these fun holiday animations and clip art are FREE to download for use on your blog. I'll go hunt down that bookmark to let you know exactly where I found these...