Blogging has been such a crazy and unexpected experience over the short couple of years I’ve been dabbling in it…Minutes before I wrote this I was looking at the web statistics for this blog and really just trying to wrap my head around what I was seeing. The numbers truly blow my mind when I put them into context with what they really represent.

The reality of the numbers can be really intimidating and scary when I think about it. For example: Over the past 3 months there have been more than 380,000 “sessions” recorded on this website’s “urchin” statistics program for the blog. Its easy to look at millions of hits or pageviews and think abstractly as just numbers on a page…but 380,000 sessions means that more than 125,000 times a month people are going to this blog. Sure thats not that big of a number compared to “professional blogs” out there but for me that means something far different.

What it means is…as I write this I’m essentially sitting right smack in the middle of a football stadium with 50,000+ people watching what I type into my little computer and publish next. So right now inside my hyperactive mind I can freak out at the fact that potentially 50,000 people are wondering if I’m insane for thinking about this topic in this particular way and writing a blog post about it when I should be talking about some badass new dry carbon hood or something more typical. Hmm…so maybe I just pissed off 50,000 people with this paragraph and post.

That is the power of blogging. The ability to piss off 50,000 people from my laptop by streaming my mind’s internal “freaking out” moments when numbers are given virtual representation and meaning.

I think most people who start blogs never expect much in the beginning. I sure didn’t. I was quite honestly shocked and super excited when I got my first comment here years ago. Hell, I still get super excited to get comments and I check them often. That was why I started the blog, to have something interactive. This was a transition from my writing for magazines which filled up a couple of years prior. Sure, writing for Modified Mag every month was really fun and creatively rewarding. Yet, the true reward is the conversation, not simply speaking to a wall that doesn’t speak back. Between multi-month lead times which made producing fresh content that much more challenging, and the fact that there was no feedback and nobody potentially real on the other side of the communication, writing for a magazine is nowhere near as awesome as blogging has been for me.

This is still not the perfect medium to discuss, our community here is strong but I would love to find ways to improve it more and to improve the conversations we’re having further. My most basic and essential foundation to this blog is to bring new ideas and new talking points to the table with my posts…from there, it is really about the community and the readers who take it and run with it. Just saying things for the sake of saying them really sucks and isn’t any fun at all, but sharing ideas and having interesting conversations with like-minded people…that is the reward.

I’m very lucky to have readers like yourself who share similar interests. I’ve learned a ton from readers of this blog, I even work with some of them daily! This blog has enriched my life in ways that I never expected and in ways that I don’t think writing for a magazine ever could have. Its all about the two way dialogue for me. My businesses have always targeted the rare 1% who “get it” when it comes to the things that I find cool and worth promoting. There is nothing mainstream about anything that we do and it is actually for that specialized reason that I named the collective, Bespoke Ventures. This blog acts as an extension of that and I’m really shocked to continue to find so many readers here who also “get it” when it comes to understanding why the hell I’d care about some of the crazy things I/we all care about.

Community is a wonderful thing to begin with and it is even more special in cases like this where we all share something so unique and rare. What I mean is, we have hundreds of thousands of people who have visited this blog, but if you went around the street all day and asked everyone if they knew of Powerhouse Amuse or ASI or Top Secret you almost never would find a single person. It is amazing what we have here and what blogging can do from such humble beginnings.

I’m so grateful for you all to share in this blog. Thank you all for your comments, support and readership. You’re the only reason why I do this and will continue to. As always feel free to reach out to me at ben@bulletproofautomotive.com or comment here, I’ll be listening.

Sincerely,

Ben