Audience of One?
Cloudy Thinking is a hobby, pure and simple. I do it for fun, and it costs me money and personal time.
At least blogging is a cheap hobby. I think that’s why my wife doesn’t mind (too much). She figures time spent here is time not spent plotting how and when to buy the URal motorcycle I keep mumbling about. She’s already said that if I buy one, she will refuse to ride in the sidecar, since she thinks that would not be “cool.”
Back to my hobby blog. I keep an eye on the stats, in particular the number of unique individuals (well, actually unique IP addresses). That metric is growing at a decent rate, reaching almost 1,600 in September 2005.
Those 1,600 non-spider visitors came from 52 countries. Cloudy Thinking is big in Brazil. Go figure. And September saw visits to my little hobby blog from Guyana, Slovak Republic and Ghana. But I am not getting a big head, since there are 193 sovereign nations, including East Timor.
My blog visitors from the .mil domain are increasing. Maybe they’re interested in my ideas about Peace in Iraq. Or maybe it is because I said good things about General Honore, who knows? (Has anybody formed a “Gen. Honore For President” campaign? If so, let me know, I’ll send you money!
I’m suspicious President Bush’s speechwriting staff is cribbing from my work. Did you hear that “feel good” speech he gave not long after my “Today is a New Day” squib?
OK, enough about stats, and back to my puzzle. Actually, this is our puzzle, because we are in this together.
Cloudy Puzzle: almost nobody “subscribes” using RSS or via email. Given the number of unique visitors (assuming they’re not all one-hit wonders from search engines), what accounts for the low rate of RSS and email subscribers?
On the site in the upper right, there’s a simple “Subscribe me” box. You enter your email, push a button, and thenceforth you get one email a day when there’s new stuff here. Or, you can subscribe using RSS. Now I admit, that capability is buried way down at the very bottom of the blog “front page.” But so many people use Bloglines, which auto detects the feed, that I should have more RSS subscribers than I do.
Until you help me solve my “lack of subscribers” puzzle I’ll assume this is REALLY a hobby blog. Maybe I am writing for an audience of one. Me.