A Picture Paints a Thousand Words…

This has been an awesome month – OK, I know I am probably too long in the tooth to be using words like “awesome” but some little “tokens” just carry the right “meaning”!

Well, for starters, March saw my one year anniversary as a “blogger”. A few people noted that they were surprised by this – hey, I have always been a pretty natural “BS artist” –  it’s all about the medium, the medium, the medium! And, it helps if you you love (and I do) your “business”.

I’ve always said that I treat LEARNing as my hobby – and how many guys (or gals) get to do their hobby at “work”.

I am blessed! OK, that’s another “token” I hate hearing on American Idol – or my new fave singing show The Voice – but, again, it carries the right “meaning”!

Also, the blog…and I missed this as I was travelling this week…reached 150,000 visitors. This means that we are now getting around 30,000 “hits” a month…not too shabby for an educational blog that is not as “targetted” as many others are (people keep writing to me saying I cover too “much ground” and should “specialise” – Mmmmmm – sounds like they are pushing a 4+4+4 model on me)!

So, what to do for a weekend post?

Well, I thought it might be fun to look at the graphics / images that seem to be very popular (in terms of the number of “downloads” from allthingslearning). I discovered a few weeks back that a lot of our allthingslearning jpegs and pngs have become very popular with those “pinners” – you know, the guys currently hooked on Pinterest!

The number #1, #2 and #3 downloaded images are these:

…now, I feel kinda weird about this as I do not know where I found these images (and I have asked after them a couple of times on the blog itself) – and, I use them all the bloody time in some of my presentations.

If you know, tell me so I can give the necessary credit (that new Google tag “report this image” is worrying me)!

Then we have a few others:

This one is from Margaret Mead (forgot to add that when I did it).

A-round-a-bout September or October of 2011 (look at the stats again), my “visual literacy” suddenly peaked (no, I did not start using LSD – just my daughter’s recommended texts at univ) – and, these images started to shine in my stats:

Now, you see why I started to get worried about copyright (I did a few posts on this – and Wiley’s laywers backed off)! But then…

I also began to find that “quotes” worked really well – when attached to a nice “piccie”:

…even when the quote was a “mis-quote” or contained a pretty “dumb idea”!

Ne se, a few other favourite started to show my love of allthingsStarWars:

Now, I’m not sure if the guys who downloaded these images totally shared my love of allthingseducation – but, it takes all sorts and we have to remember that “different strokes” are a part of who we are.

Our blog readers did also seem to love the more educational stuff:

A few of the more recent “faves” are:

Probably a copyright issue here withthis one, too…but I just loved this image!

I also did a few that got me in even more “trouble” – but our co-bloggers just seemed to luv ’em:

Now, it occured to me – WTH am I doing this?

Well, it seems (as Google “image” searches are more popular today than “regular” searches) more and more of us might need to think about the images and graphics we use on our blogs!

I’m not sure if there is a “recipe” – but more and more people seem to prefer “the picture” over the “1K words”…sad really!

Hey, that’s for you to pick up and run with!