Blog About Blogs

Blogs are funny things.  I never kept a blog before because I couldn't bother to read other people's blogs, so why should I write one that no one would read.  But then I realized that if I kept a blog as it was originally meant (as a weB LOG that I could enter information to use for my own sake), then it might prove useful.

But then something strange happened.  I found out that other people were reading my blog.  I didn't mean to keep it a secret, (after all, it is googleable).  When I found out other people were reading my blog, it changed the way I wrote my blog because I wasn't just writing it for me, I was writing it for an audience.  I briefly had delusions of grandeur until I asked for my audience to write me a reply to let me know who they were and how they found my blog, anything.  I got a grand total of 2 responses (and I already knew that both of those people had seen my blog).  Though that was humbling, I still kept in the back of my mind that I had an audience.  A silent, unresponsive audience, but an audience all the same.

And then a couple of months later, I was looking at the control settings for this blog called the dashboard, and for the first time, I saw a tab called, "stats."  I clicked on it and came to realize that hundreds of people had viewed my blog!  I was freaked out.  It was a little ticklish when I found out that a handful of people has viewed my blog, but when I found out that hundreds from around the world were checking out what I had to say,  I suddenly felt like I had to say something.  So if you notice a change in the style or content, it is probably due to my weird discovery.

But another discovery changed all of that.  I saw that my audience in Russia was starting to rise.  I thought that was really great that people in a different culture with a different language were curious about what little ol' me was going on about.  I was curious though, about how they came to find my blog.  Within the stats tab, I found another section called "Traffic Sources."  It shows the referring webpages that presumably people clicked on to get to my blog, and the types of Google searches that people performed to get to my blog.  When I backtracked the Russian ones, I found out that some of the words in my blog must translate into something to do with tractor parts.  Those savvy Russians weren't looking for me at all!  They were looking for ways to fix their machinery and got me instead.  Sorry comrades.

So now whenever, I see audience hits from non-English speaking countries I try not to be so deluded.  However, even the English speaking ones are not necessarily looking for tips from me.  In fact, a lot of the referring pages were from auto-trolling webscanners looking for dead and dying pages to retread pages or solicit money making scams.  Vultures.

Sigh.  So I guess I'm back to writing for myself.  And my two other sometimes viewers (neither of which is my mom, thank you very much).