Just passed 1,000,000 visits to this blog last week.

I started this blog in 2008 as a way to enhance my extension work and better reach out to the strawberry and caneberry production community on the Central Coast. The regular Strawberry Commission Green Sheets were being sharply reduced, and extension newsletters would only come out every one or two months.  Even major industry problems would go unaddressed by any press for weeks and once something was written about them, not everybody could access the information since they were limited to mailing lists.  Beyond that, low possibility of doing the color photos so important for diagnostics and little facilitation for author and reader interaction really didn't help the usefulness of these media.

The industries I work for deserved far better, and by 2008 it was time to jump in and try something new. Seems like it worked.  

After one million visits and 240 posts, let me share a few thoughts on running a UCCE blog dedicated to berries:

Writing a blog is a good way to figure out how you think about a subject: When one writes for a demanding audience like all of you, getting an idea into an intelligible form means profoundly understanding your subject and so you do what it takes to get there.  Some of these posts you read take hours, even days, of time immersed in books, scientific literature and on the phone with knowledgeable people. It's worth it though, because this process has allowed us (yes, us) to answer some pretty difficult questions.

Writing constantly is a good way to become a better writer: Absolutely you become a better writer by spending so much time writing for an audience of your peers.  Thing is too for a blog you have to keep the writing tight and lean.  No one is going to spend an hour reading thoughts that could have been condensed down to something understood in far fewer words and far less time.

By the way, translating some of the more relevant pieces has not only made these available to Spanish speakers on the "Fresas y Moras" site, but I've gained a lot of language skills in the process. To give an example, I am probably at a PhD level in Spanish plant pathology for all the joint articles I've translated with colleague Steve Koike! 

Online publishing is a meritocracy: True that.  Bloggers gain readers by sheer quality of their work – not through family connections, big salaries or fancy titles at important sounding organizations.  Online readers don't give a hoot about any of those things - if you suck no is one is going to read your stuff and you are going to know it.  The days of packing off a report into the mail and not knowing (or caring) whether anybody reads it or not are over.

Curation and content: The job of a blogger isn't just to write articles, but it's also to collect and curate articles relevant to the subject.   You serve as a moderator, looking for quality articles and not letting the site get polluted with politically driven science or questionably researched material.   

In my case, I love to draw from the deep bench of quality scientists we have at the UC and UCCE; case in point is the recent article written by Margaret Lloyd and Tom Gordon from UC Davis on Verticillium and compost – deeply researched and vetted science presented by top scientists in a timely way to address what was perceived to be a major deal here.  

It's been a great experience for me to be writing this blog and the Spanish language one, and it seems from the amount of traffic these sites have been getting, you my readers are thinking along the same lines.  Thanks for all the reading and participation!