I have addictive tendencies. A couple years back when I was excited about the computer game Civilization III, I would get my son Willow to bed around 11 p.m., go into his room and play for just a little bit before I went to sleep. A little bit would often end when I looked out the window and saw the sun rising. My college lover Amanda waited until I graduated to give me my first Dungeons and Dragons module because she suspected that if had I gotten into fantasy role playing games earlier, I likely would not have graduated. I have assiduously avoided coffee, cigarettes and heroin because I could easily see these becoming powerful, disruptive, and expensive habits. More than a few people have suggested I am addicted to romantic relationships; my case against this charge is pretty weak.
sometime the sun comes up before the game is over
My latest addiction is traffic to my blog. I look at how many hits I have gotten on my blog three to five times a day, if I have an average post up. If I have a really good post up, I might look six to nine times. The other day I posted asking if
social networks can stop war and posted it on the Facebook site for Israel loves Iran and I got an impressive 891 hits, just one fewer than my best day of 892 hits on the
August 23rd earthquake, where people from across the country were looking for news about what was happening in Louisa.
This has inspired me to seek out currently hot internet memes (to use the common definition of this term – a repeated internet post – rather than the more robust definition I usually use), try to write something clever about them, and then put it on popular FB pages.
“Why are you trying to get your traffic up? What is the purpose of the blog?” asked
Bonnie during our recent visit to her Jamaica Plain, MA house. It is a great question, really. I mumbled something about it being good for a propagandist to see what their audience is interested in and that I also wanted to sharpen my writing. “So it is about your ego,” she perceptively concluded.
yeah, she is dangerous sexy, but i love her for her mind & local organizing projects.
After talking with Jeremy Bloom in Eugene, who is the editor and principal author of the
Red, Green, and Blue news blog, I was even more inspired to seek places to promote my blog. During the first few months of Occupy he was getting 200,000 hits a month. My current target is 1,000 hits per day, a bit over twice the volume I have on good days now. I am not sure what I’ll do when I reach that target, but it seems like a threshold for a respectable blog.
redgreenandblue.org – great blogs have great graphics
Still, my desire for respectability is not so strong that I am taking the most common “professional blogger” advice, which is to narrow my focus. Perhaps I will create a spin off a blog focusing on intentionally community stuff at some point, but I have a scatter shot life and I like that my blog reflects that.
The good news is it looks like I might have snagged a regular editor, more on her soon.
your passport to complaining 