Millions and Almost A Million?

A while back, I semi-proudly noted that this blog had finally passed 500,000 hits. I was pretty impressed with myself, since for the first several years of this blog’s existence it felt like I would never get to 1,000 hits, then 10,000 hits, and so on. Since noting that benchmark and imagining it wouldn’t be long before I got to 1,000,000, the reality of those numbers has been eye-opening. In a good way.

We hear numbers like millions and billions and, even, trillions tossed around by politicians and the media as if they are insignificant. Some of us are old enough to remember when having 64kb of RAM in a computer was a big deal. I remember paying $10,000 of my employer’s money for a 5M hard drive in the mid-80’s, for example. If I hadn’t known how to do it myself, it would have cost another $1,000 to have a Wang tech come to the office to install it! I just paid $9 for a 64GB USB stick, which ups my remote audio recorder’s capability to 600 minutes for six channels of 24 bit/96kHz WAV audio! Ten freakin’ hours of high definition audio for $9? Impossible.

So, while I once had high hopes for hitting 1,000,000 pageviews fairly quickly, mostly I have a new respect for just how much activity it takes to arrive at that kind of numbers.