That's great, it seems like a bunch of happy "accidents" happened in connection to your activities as a blogger.
Was it a technical blog? What pushed you to start a blog in the first place?
The blog was just my personal blog. Being a technical person it had a technical edge but wasn't focused on that. I started a blog of sorts in 1999 (something called an "e/n" site which were the rage at the time - the infamous "StileProject" site came out of this era and genre) simply to share stupid photos, jokes, insights, and interact with people I knew online. Then I blogged constantly from then until Twitter took off (which somehow killed my personal blogging entirely :-().
I think I should start personal blogging again though exactly because of the happy accidents. You just don't get them as much through Twitter or Facebook because the content there is so ephemeral and not likely to come up in a Google search in a few years.