24 hours ago I published a blog post reflecting on the wonderful renewal I’ve been witnessing on my quarterly trips back to my home town, Wollongong.

It seems that the post has really touched a chord.

In that 24 hours, almost 3000 people have read the post. Aside from a few of my own Facebook friends, the readers have been come as a result of people sharing it with their friends. This amazing response – which has seen at times 360 people an hour reading the article – is a testament to how many people are still proud, passionate and optimistic about the future of their city.

Comments have come in from as far afield as Austria, and given a lot of the traffic has come in while folks in Australia would be asleep on a Saturday morning I can only assume there’s a lot of Wollongong ex-pats reading the post – which itself is an awesome thing and sign that people continue to care, deeply, wherever they’re living now. In the time it has taken me to capture that screenshot and publish this, another 200 people have read the post – it is 7am on a Saturday morning in Wollongong.

There’s been hundreds of likes and a bunch of re-shares of my original post on Facebook and Twitter, and ABC want to do an interview on Monday morning (which is thankfully going to be an hour before the Superbowl starts here).

Aside from the obvious sign that people really really care about Wollongong (which is great and very special), the most encouraging thing about all of this is the signal it sends to the City’s current leaders to keep going – keep improving, developing and driving the city forward, and don’t let a minority of whingers and small-minded negative folks with loud voices and too much time on their hands stop the city down from achieving its potential.