The Internet is full of nuts and perverts. They just keep searching and searching and searching for stuff. And that brings all sorts of freaks and scaly individuals to my blog thinking they’ll find something to scratch their itch. So the top most visited posts are not my favorites. In fact sometimes I just write a post because I know people will be searching for that topic. I’m weird. But it works. Take Obama the Antichrist. I cooked the books on that one and got all sorts of traffic. I feel powerful when I do that like Alan Greenspan.
The top 10 posts on my blog for 2008 are a hodgepodge of throwaway posts and nonsense. I guess I should slap some Google Ads on these and sit back and watch the money rolling in:
- Where is Jesus’ tattoo? (12,101)
- Sing The Greek Alphabet Song (7,773)
- Funeral for Maria Sue Chapman (4,700)
- Steven Curtis Chapman’s daughter is our (3,183)
- Funny Stuff in the Bible (2,500)
- Dinthi Day 23 (1,690)
- Window on the World: Africa in Amos (1,680)
- Why American Christians look so stupid a (1,597)
- Proof that Jesus is a ghost (1,584)
- What is a horn of salvation? (1,557)
The moral of this story is that blog stats are meaningless.
Now, technorati on the other hand used to be the golden number. Break 100 and you were not obscure. Break 1000 and you were a star.
But those days are gone. Technorati is all screwed up. It misses links that it should catch. And links that it should ignore it records over and over again. Secher Nbiw and Biblia Hebraica and Jesus community are all nice blogs. But they’re not linking to me everyday. I’m just on their blogroll or something and that confuses Technorati.
[Maybe I’m just mad because when I switched my domain to lingamish.com my technorati rank dropped below 100 and has never recovered…]
Which brings us to our resolution. Retire into obscurity. Sit on your mountaintop and scribble your heart out but don’t sweat the stats. You are a beat poet on open mic night in a hip cafe not a rock star screaming nonsense to a crowd of thousands.
Blogging is not about the multitudes. Instead it’s discovering that somewhere out there exists a select group of people who you find interesting. Write for them. You are not Oprah. You are Emily Dickinson You are not Bono. You are Pierre Fermat. Phooey on the great mass of men being led through life by the ads on their widescreen TV. Instead, I’m writing for people like Jane Stranz and Michael Kruse and HASH because they are way smarter than I am. But if I keep reading their stuff and writing for them it might just rub off.
David – I love reading your blog – it is so extraordinarily creative and technically whizzy (sorry now I sound like something out of Biggles) and I really like that it’s so opiniated – especially as some of the opinions are not at all ones I share. I admire the feistiness of the backwards and forwards in your comments – I’m far too institutionally bound to even begin to do that. Although you and I are both English mother tongue I also like that quite alot of your blog is so “foreign” to me – a bit like you and the REB – you are educating me in ways I didn’t even know I needed to be educated. (I have never been to North America – Martinique doesn’t count I suppose …)
Blogging has kept me sane over the past year and it’s also helping me imagine the future and appreciate all the crumbs of life, faith and experience and sweep them up in some way, leave some trace in the sand before the tide comes and cleans the beach again. Once work starts up again blogging will have to give way to work again – very sad!
Anyway keep dancing over those keyboards – I’ll try to keep up with reading but am often a bit behind!
happy new year!
Thanks, Jane. I try to write in my thickest Pacific Northwest dialect.
My Liverpuddlian husband describes me as being horribly RP (received pronunciation) though these days he says my English intonation has been too influenced by French and I tend to go up rather than down at the end of sentences… ah well must try doing some podcast thingies this year we’ll see!