The Rontgen Award site has been live for three days and has had 129 visits. That’s not going to impress Mark Zuckerberg, but I’m ecstatic: it’s already about ten times what most other sites in this project get every month, without any more effort on my part than usual.

It’s hard to know why or whether it will continue, but I can hazard a guess: my wife Michelle and Lauren Beukes. These two dynamos know more people than Santa Claus, and their sharing and tweeting the site is a lucky break. (They’re what Malcom Gladwell calls connectors in The Tipping Point.) But it’s not all luck: my network of friends are mostly literary folk, and here’s a site I’ve made that fits with that network’s interests.

As I try to bank little entrepreneurial lessons from the 52sites project, I reckon one might be this: as you get going, your friends are going to be the most important promotional tool you have. Love them well.