Saturday, May 17, 2008

If you did not reach this page by accident....

...then accept my apologies. Do not adjust your mindset, we are experiencing technical difficulties. The name changes of late have demonstrated that my hit counter was, as I have suspected, mostly counting Google's scratching when others have an itch to see underwear that hides little. That is then to say, the hit counter lies to me, and measures nothing. This is a technical consequence of the unfortunate name choice. In the near future, the blog title will stabilize at "Pithing Contest".

I have been in a funk lately. Depression is not the problem but I seem able to find dozens of reasons not to lift a blogging finger to the keyboard. Spring rages just outside my window, the earth calls me to poke it with a shovel and make it green. The one thing I can control in my life is how many different boxes I parcel my crap into. "This blog is all about me" is a trap. So, it seems, is "this blog is all about X"...choose the X you like but then try like crazy to bend every post to relate in some way to that X.

Readers are imaginary friends. Not that there is never an overlap of interests but focusing only on why-writers-write with no thought of why-readers-read is a sound formula for wasted web pages. Thinking hard about what people want to read and learning to satisfy that want is a job for professionals. So I have a compromise. Separate blogs cost me nothing while allowing consistency of topic and voice. In a little while, I will be pointing you to the experimental first cut at that compromise.

I have never been face to face with more than two or three people who read what I write here. They have either forgiven me or forgotten me. By examining my own bookmarks and blogrolls, I see that I only browse for an ostensible purpose and a particular kind of content. Only a few bloggers slip into the comfortable category of "interesting AS a person, lets see how she/he is doing"...we mostly go for a particular kind of news, or interpretation. The dozens of tags that cropped up for posts here is idle amusement. I do not believe "post categories" is a useful feature...or at least that many bloggers apply it so well that it actually serves readers

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey,
I like your site! I'll be checking back....
I don't give my posts tags, either. I think that the readers can come up with their own sense of an article. I also don't feel like spending time doing it!

GreenSmile said...

yep. The urge to locate something as slippery as a thought within some scheme of categories says a lot more about the obsessions of this writer than of any useful and generally accepted scheme. ...besides, the attempt presumes any thought is exactly about one topic. The most interesting thinking often involves discovering connections between matters that have an under appreciated relation to each other: is the connection of topic A to topic B going to belong in either or be a new topic A=B? its not worth chasing that.

I look forward to your visits.