I’ve been somewhat busy, and haven’t had a chance to see who has actually been reading the blog and commenting on it elsewhere – so a change for some interesting highlights I discovered in a recent search.

Our recent review of the fantastic ‘The Infrastructural City’ caught the attention of the folks at Varnelis.net and resulted in some kind words … “A really insightful and beautifully illustrated review of our book [link]. It’s great when reviewers get what we were after. The blogosphere is coming into its own with a better—and deeper—appreciation and understanding of our books than print periodicals. Things are changing in architectural journalism…and they’re changing very, very fast.”

:: image via The Infrastructural City

We also received a nice email comment from contributing author Barry Lehrman (who wrote the fantastic chapter on Owen’s Lake found in the book as well as taking the eerie pic of the dry lake bed).

Another that I must have missed was a pickup by one of my favorite conceptual aggregators – prss release nabbed one of the L+U posts from November 2008. Materiality and Light led off the issue of prss release #23 with the visual tour of some projects related to building skin that had was perforated to allow for and celebrating light.

:: images via prss release #23

Aside from these features and a good number of readers (many thanks to the 1000+ that register on my counter), there are also some interesting stats I found – in addition to the fact that readership just recently crested over 200,000 visitors and almost a half-million page views in a bit over a year:

:: Google PageRank: 5
:: Google Links: 382
:: Yahoo Links: 5,210
:: MSN Related: 109
:: Technorati Links: 7,743
:: Google indexed pages: 459

What does this mean? I actually have no earthly idea – and probably not much… as I’ve never been a big one for stats, but obviously it means something to someone (perhaps the same people who like memorizing batting averages or somesuch).

Mostly I tend to appreciate the comments (both direct, sometimes very direct and any other) that expand the dialogue about landscape+urbanism. And it’s interesting to find that L+U has appeared linked on a number of sites, on more than one syllabus, a couple of CVs, a few articles, and many posts. Many thanks to all.