It's not just this blog that is distracting me from work lately, it's all the links from my blog to the other sites of the wonderful WWW that I love to visit. (Many of them daily or more frequently, particularly if I comment on some other blog and then want to follow the responses.)
Really, I love the internet. This blog continues its useful function for me as a record of the things I find interesting, but as for its other purpose of having my take on the world noticed, well that seems to have found its natural, very low, level. A good day here is about 50 hits, but perhaps half a dozen (or more) of those will be me using the links as my bookmarks.
Anyhow, this is all preamble to saying I need a week's break to concentrate on work, and this I mean it! I actually want to give up looking at the internet completely for a week, but I don't know if I can avoid visiting the news sites. Especially if that long wished for video of Kevin R and Julia G turns up.
You watch, something spectacular that I long to comment on will probably happen this week. But I want someone to promise to come and break my typing fingers if I breach this self imposed absence.
Remember to come back. Fifty visits a day is pretty pathetic, but coming back and finding its now stuck on a twenty or so for the week after I start posting; that's just depressing.
And could someone apart from Caz, TimT and Geoff add a comment that might give me general encouragement? I seem to have some regular visitors who never say "boo", and it would just be nice to know who at least one or two of them are.
5 comments:
Nice Blog :)
Hey look, you have a new friend already!
Hi Teri!
Tim Blair gets - how many? - 25,000 hits a day? - probably more by now, but of that readership, I'd take a guess that maybe 200 or so comment with any regularity, and Blair is the most hit-upon blog in the country.
For the lowly blogs, that is, not run by a journalist, with a built-in following, comments run at about that same ratio, at least by my reckoning. So, if someone gets 200 hits a week, they might end up with two comments a week.
Not 100% why blogs work that way, but I don't think it's too difficult to figure out: lots of people might enjoy reading a variety of blogs, but they don't have time or inclination to comment. Reading someone's book, or even an article in the paper, doesn't mean you want to enter into a dialogue with the author, so it pretty much makes sense that few blog readers are also blog commenters.
Just browsing through a dozen favorite blogs uses up time, and is a significant opportunity cost; participating by way of comment is a much bigger commitment again. That's the other core reason for the ratio of readers to commenters being so our of whack.
Fifty hits a day isn't too bad for a small blog. I think most blogs find a "level" and that's where they stay. Can't figure that out though. Not sure what would be entailed in "growing" one's audience to dizzy heights.
So many blogs, so little time, and so many blogs are interchangeable - seen one political blog, seen 'em all; ditto cat blogs; knitting blogs; my-single-life-blogs, etc.
At least you have a variety of interests, which is why I like to drop by.
It will do you no harm at all to step away from the keyboard for a week!
BTW - if a video of Rudd & Gillard is uncovered, you could be sure their approval rating would increase. Everyone would think they were, you know, more "human".
Oh, and most important, and my only reason for commenting really: blog for your own enjoyment, otherwise don't. Guess it all depends if you want to "achieve" something with blogging? Better to be a blogger if one has no aspirations around it, other than an end in itself.
Hi steve
I'm one of the serial offenders that lurk around your site nearly every day, I don't have a particular reason not to leave a comment on your pieces,apart from not wanting to leave a "yeh i agree" remark.
That said i will endeavour to add a comment when i can bring something of use to your well written,interesting and best of all, unbiased blog.
I tend to agree with what caz wrote
and just to say that this is the first time i have commented on any blog anywhere but hopefully not the last
See you when you get back
Peter
Yeah I agree.
Thank you all.
I am still curious as to who is my African repeat visitor too.
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