YEAR-END STATS from three sources confirm something I've know for several years--I'm shedding around 30,000 annual visitors to my blog.
At the current rate of decline, I wonder how strong the long tail of my blog actually is. I know that if I don't post anything for one week, I'll attract an average of 88 visitors per day. If I let the blog idle for more than a month, I doubt more than 20 visitors would stop by every day. I wonder what might boost the annual visitor count back to the 100,000 mark. I've put this blog post up on Google Plus where I expect to read the opinion of some clever commentators.
Continue reading "Losing 30,000 Visitors Annually" »
I REMEMBER BLOGGING ABOUT surgical masks on September 23, 2001 but at the time I didn't think my writing about the masks would start my adventure in blogging.
The masks were part of a kit given to the Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity on the upper east side of Manhattan. Several of the Trinitarian nuns had stood on the top of their convent and watched the twin towers fall. My aunt was one of them. The fire department gave the convent several dozen surgical masks to ward off the ill effects of the dust in the air from the collapse of the World Trade Center. Ten years later, the masks are still in the convent. I've a local copy of that blog post and I'm going to replant it on Inside View because my first post deserves a relook--along with several of the high points of my adventure in blogging.
Continue reading "Ten Years Blogging" »
APPROACHING 10 YEARS as a blogger, I'm asked why I blog. It's a question that Doc Searls (at right) asked me when he visited Dublin in 2004.
Back then, I read Doc religiously because he conversed online. I also bought The Cluetrain Manifesto (TCM) in a dog-eared copy and put it on our creative multimedia curriculum. TCM sets out the case that all markets are conversations. And in the case of my blogging, all my posts are authentic snippets of conversations I've heard online or they are fragment of ideas that I would like to discuss. I use my blogging to think and reflect and I take some heat because I occasionally publish items that are not well thought-out. The result has been telephone calls before 8AM and late night text tirades telling me I'm a loser. But even when that happens, I feel like a winner because the commentary means I've succeeded in stoking a conversation. That by-product alone makes blogging and its permalinked nature well worth my time and energy.
Continue reading "Why I Blog" »
ONE OF THE PRESSURES I get as a blogger is that it faces time pressures from all sides. I get veiled advice from co-workers that I need to cut back on musings I make online and to focus on things that will pay the bills week to week. And while they are right, I'm sticking with making microcontent because (1) I like writing, (2) I know it will pay through its long tail, and (3) it's how I meet people who matter.
Continue reading "Sticking with Making Microcontent" »
TEN YEARS AGO, I saw compelling reasons to have my own place on the internet and so I took a domain name that I bought in 1996 and started writing blog posts on it every day. And even though other distractions (i.e., Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus) have eroded the interactions I have on my blog, I'm still churning away at InsideView because I think everyone needs their own patch on the web. That's also the opinion of Louis Gray. "With so many places to position your identity on the Web these days, from social networks to blogs, personal profiles, custom pages like About.me, resumes and so on, presenting one's central presence with a domain that bears your own name is increasingly valuable."
Continue reading "Everybody Still Needs Their Own Place" »
