I’ve noticed an evolution of sorts in my blogging.
At first I was like, oh, this is just for fun, just for myself, no one’s ever really going to read it, but it wasn’t long before I was searching through the Blogger Help pages to find ways of increasing my blog’s visibility. They TELL you to do this stuff, I swear, it wasn’t my idea, but somehow I got dragged into the swirling mass of tags and feeds and things I don’t even know what they are.
But then I got Comments! And then more! And while my Commenters are a small handful (three, actually), I love them all. Thank you, Commenters!
And I began to read. Other blogs. I didn’t know there were so many! Does everyone on this planet have a blog? Or several? What’s up with that??? I’m just absorbing what’s out there, I told myself. Take a look at the sidebar and you get an idea of what I read every day. This is the good stuff.
Then I got cocky. If they can do this, it looks so easy, then so can I! Maybe better! I reasoned.
HEY AMALAH, LOOK! I’VE GOT A CAMERA PHONE TOO! LOOK AT MEEEEEE! I KNOW HOW TO PRONOUNCE YOUR NAME TOO, AREN’T WE BEST FRIENDS NOW?
I found myself checking these other sites 10, 20 times a day. Reading their entire archives, their profiles, everything I could get my hands on. Studying, absorbing.
Stalking.
I’m now a bloggerstalker.
But now, I’m reading all this insanely funny or poignant or just, you know, interesting content, and now I’m like, oh god, I can never be that funny, that clever, that creative.
The perils of bloggerstalking.
My sister-in-law, who had her own brush with fame a while back and now says no thank you to all that, writes a very witty blog of her own. She seems content with her voice, her place in the blogosphere. Which is probably a wise place to be.
blogging
dooce
amalah
bloggerstalking
August 3rd, 2006 at 5:02 pm
I just read an excellent article in the local paper. Turns out the French are much more blog-friendly than we are. “60 % of French Internet users visited a blog in May, ahead of Britain with 40 percent and a little more than a third in the United States.” It goes on to read that the French spent more than an hour in June reading their top-rated blog site, compared to Americans’ 12 minutes and Germans’ less than 3. Of course, they quote a Frenchman as saying that the French love to talk about themselves so maybe that’s the cause.