I have good memories of San Antonio, host city of the ISIR 2012 conference. We visited the Alamo, and where throngs of tourists looked respectfully at an ancient wall of the building which was being restored with lime mortar. It was regarded as a restoration of national importance, and the wall was cordoned off, with detailed explanations. At that same time in England the local stone mason was restoring our similarly aged West facing cottage walls, putting in lime mortar, so it seemed a natural process, though accorded a profound reverence in this case. If only stones could speak, and so on. History is when things turn, not just when they happen. Impact matters, so a distant siege can become an icon of national affirmation. All respect to those citizens who saved the monument from encroaching development.

It was that visit in December 2012 which really got me blogging. It seemed a waste of an airfare to attend a conference and then not tell anyone about it. I listed the papers and made some comments, aware that I was casting my words into empty space. My actual conference report got 20 views. As I blogged more about intelligence research the numbers built up slowly. In the subsequent year I got 71,701 pageviews.

Next week I am off to the ISIR 2019 conference in Minneapolis. I will do my best to post up the papers presented, and to tweet comments and links. On the other hand, I tend to just listen to papers, so might well blog less for a while.

This morning I find that I have reached a million page views. Thanks for reading.