Cloudy Thinking

Andy Warhol said “In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.”

I blog for fun, and to learn. Somewhere along the way I started casually watching my readership stats. If you are considering blogging, listen to me carefully. Do NOT, I repeat D-O N-O-T start watching your stats. It’s more addictive than a “just try it, see what it feels like” injection of heroin.

Here’s what happened to me. Well, it happened BY me, but with YOUR help, I figure you are accessories after the fact, co-conspirators, on the edge of leading astray otherwise reputable, middle class, educated, tax paying, law abiding, white, semi-protestant, patriotic, American bloggers like me so we experiment with dangerous blog-enhancing substances.

In this instance, you read my blog. I wrote my stuff innocently. You searched for it. You read it. You made my stats go up. Then they suddenly flattened out.

Here’s why. (I think).

When I wrote about RIOTS IN FRANCE people read my blog. At first it was innocent. I write about a wide range of stuff. But when I started to comment on the riots in France (and they were riots, not “unrest”) the pace of Cloudy THinking readership picked up.

It took me a bit before I realized, “Hmm. Maybe I’m on to something.” It was insidious. Without deliberately (at first) trying to bump up my blog stats, I was semi-conscious that this was popular.

But that’s past now. The fine people in France are burning fewer than 100 cars most nights, so who cares? I’ve moved on. I even had a paroxysm of guilt and started a separate blog for my occasional “OpEd” pieces that tend to express political views.

I’ve told myself I should go cold turkey, and quit looking at blog stats for 30 days. I’ll do that right after I start my new diet.

If I have an allotment of fifteen minutes of fame, I figure I’ve only used about five minutes so far. Please, don’t bail out on me just because I made one tiny little blog mistake and PANDERED TO MY AUDIENCE.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 29th, 2005 at 9:39 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.