Two Thirds Done

Thoughts and experiences of an eighty one year old Wild Duck.

Avram Miller by the sea
EN | IT

587 posts since 2006

Category: Blogging

  • Avram Goes Video

    My blog posts are now available as short videos on my new YouTube channel. You can subscribe here. I will also put a link on blog posts for which I have created videos. I hope you enjoy the new format. Here is an example:

    My primary form of communication has been writing blog posts, along with posts on social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Yet I myself consume a lot of video from YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.

    It is a bit strange, because during the majority of my career I often gave speeches, sometimes to audiences of over a thousand people. Most of those were never recorded, although a few were, such as my testimony to Congress regarding the development of HDTV and interviews on news shows.

    Over the last 20 years, I have done a number of video interviews, especially around the time of the publishing of my book, The Flight of a Wild Duck.

    I still give talks, but not often. For instance, I gave a speech at the World Business Forum, which was held in Milan in November 2025.

    I am really comfortable speaking and love having an audience, especially one that can ask me questions. But when I have tried to make videos on my own, they are really awful. I am stilted and have no energy. I need a live audience — but perhaps one of the AIs can simulate this for me.

    However, I have now found an easy way to create videos from my blog posts using NotebookLM’s video generation capability.

    Next, I intend to create a clone of my voice to replace the voice that NotebookLM uses.

    I would be grateful for your comments. Do you think the videos do a good job of capturing what I wrote on my blog? Do you prefer the video or the written blog? Do you think using a clone of my own voice would make this more interesting?

  • A Favor to Ask

    I have been writing this blog since 2007. There are about 570 posts with 430,000 word which is equivalent to about five books.

    I have never worked very hard at getting anyone to read it. Which is a strange thing to admit, because I clearly want people to read it. Otherwise, I would have just kept a diary.

    This week I finally sat down and looked at the numbers properly.

    What I found

    For years I believed I had around fifteen hundred subscribers. I did not. 640 of you receive these posts by email. Another 500 or so follow the blog in a WordPress app and never see an email at all. And 700 more signed up, were sent a confirmation link they never clicked, and have been sitting in limbo ever since, some for years, probably wondering why I stopped writing.

    Several of you have told me exactly this. You subscribed and never heard from me. I am sorry. I did not know, and the dashboard kept telling me everything was fine.

    (more…)

  • Thanks for the views all 50,000 of them

    Screen Shot 2013-08-03 at 8.36.30 AM

    I  now have  50,000 views of my post on TwoThirds Done, the blog that I started eight years ago, when I turned sixty.  Figuring that it might take two minutes a blog post, it would seem that some seventy days were consumed by readers withthese posts.  I have posted 240 times. I probably takes me on average about three hours to write a post. So I have spent about thirty day in composing the posts.  I obviously need to get my readership up.  I also have 440 subscribers.  These people get a notification when I make a new post. A small number of them seem to actually go to my blog to read the post.   My readership has been trending up which is of course a good thing.
    Blogging was actually not really about number of readers.  It was more about learning to express myself in a concise way.    My biggest disappointment is in how few comments I get.  So far, I have only received  461 comments which is about two comments a post.
    Anyway, if you are reading this, I thank you.
    avram

  • To my subscribers

    I started this blog almost eight years ago when I turned sixty years old.  My average number of visits per day has gone from ten to fourty during that time.  The total number of views is now over 45,000.  This does not count those that subscribe to this blog.  Since the way I set up the email subscriptions provides the complete post, there is no need for a subscriber to go to my site.  But this also means, I do not actually know if the blog post was read.  I am about to change that. Now you will only get a summary and will have to go to my blog to read the full post.

    It took my seven years to get about a hundred subscribers. In the last month or so, I have more than doubled the number of subscribers and have no idea why.  Many of you do not seem to be the kind of reader I would expect.  I would love to hear from you as to why you subscribed.  I think that something either changed with WordPress  or perhaps it was my Wikipedia entry that is driving new people to my site where they subscribe.  Frankly, it feels kind of strange.