Why retired officer starts to keep blog, why does he not just keep things to himself?
Originally the blog for “Thoughts about C4I systems” was established as workspace in writing C4ISR systems and development issues with many friends that remained in the Finnish Defence Forces after my retirement in the end of 2012.The idea was to create and deliver understanding of complex system of systems that we call C4ISR or CIS or ICT – as one prefers. Thus the theme picture is presenting real world snapshot of layered structure of many different generations of information management and communications. This picture is taken from presenter’s desk in The Shop of Signal School, Riihimaki.
There is a sedimented structure of different decades and means of computing and communications gathered on the same pile. This is the reality in military C4ISR also – several generations of information management policies, methods and tools are used at same time.
First text in 15. January 2013 was a joint venture with my previous colleague Harri. We were drafting articles about the maintenance of programmable electronics (ohjelmoitava elektroniikka) in Defence Forces to be published in Military Magazine of Finland (Sotilasaikakauslehti). That was in Finnish but all after that were translated or written in English. This was the second idea – practicing the writing in English.
The third idea was to build knowledge base to all interested in this boring subject. The fourth idea was to do the writing for my PhD thesis on these pages. The fifth idea was to share my experience to all younger officers and engineers in the Defence Forces of Finland so they would be wiser in their decisions and missions.
I have been wasting my time in writing 44 articles
There are 44 writings all together between 15. January 2013 until 31.October 2015 that earned all 10 000 views. If one categorises them, the following graph is depicting the distribution of the writings:As it happens sometime only 11 writings are somewhat following the theme of this blog and others are covering other interests of the editor.
From these categories viewers have appreciated most Information assurance and cyber (1111 views), Information operations (827 views) and IT Governance (305 views). The rest are somewhat less interesting.
The top ten list of individual writings show the same tendency – IT-security from May 2014 and Information Operations from November 2013 are hype items. Rest appreciated are shown in the Figure below.
Who are these people that do not have any better to do than browsing this blog?
Most of the top ten views has been originated from Finland (40%) and USA (27%) as shown in following Figure:
Ukraine appears among the top viewers with 324 views with understandable reasons but surprisingly Poland and Switzerland appear also high in views together with 250 views. Quick outcome of this is that people in Poland and Switzerland are exceptionally interested in these kind of writings. France is explained with my current French colleague’s exceptional interest on these subjects. Similar situation is with 375 viewings from United Arab Emirates.
The statistics of Google blog naturally are not able to see the real origins of these views but only the primary public IP-address. Minority might be those people that are not using any Virtual Private Network or TOR anonymity in their browsing.
Almost third of views has been done using Chrome (32%) followed by Explorer (27%) and Firefox (26%). Safari remains quite rare with 9% of views. Rest remain under 1 %. Windows is the most common operating system (68%) with Linux (11%) and MAC (10%) following. Google and LinkedIn have been the most used means to find this blog and its writings.
It seems that there is quite continuous flow of 200 – 300 views per month independent of actual publications which means that key words and common interests are leading to these pages. Followers remain as minority.
