April 13, 2009

58 or 100,000?

In 58 more posts I will have achieved three thousand posts on this blog. What I'm wondering is if my hit counter will go over 100,000 before or after that point. Between 200 to 300 hits a day are pretty normal for this blog -- not bad for a hobby blogger. Right now I'm looking at one or both of those milestones to get met around the first week of May.

But thoughts of 100,000 hits causes one's mind to speculate about orders of magnitude. So, to get a million hits fast, I find advice that I should switch to my own domain, pick a fight with someone and post lots of pictures of sexy female celebrites. The skin pics raise some serious copyright issues in my mind; because there's no way to credibly claim such a thing is fair use of the photographs unless I own or license them and I'm not willing to pay for those rights. I've also no particular desire to pick fights with anyone.

I've looked at WordPress and the migration issues seem difficult; there also seems to be something of a learning curve for the tool but that could probably be overcome. The real issue is in paying money for a host, which again I'm not particularly interested in doing. Yes, I know people put some money into their hobbies but I don't particularly have to in this case so why should I?

I think providing provocative opinions, sometimes engendering a "right on!" and sometimes engendering a "what the hell are you talking about?" from Readers, is the way to go about getting a real audience. My guess is that there isn't a single Reader who comes back here regularly who agrees with me 100% on everything -- not even my wife. If you feel like helping, Readers, you can by making thoughtful, interesting, or at least frequent comments, because a good comments culture is a powerful draw to a blog and creating such a culture is not something a lone blogger can ever do on his own.

Is this a rosy-eyed, optimistic, unrealistic understanding of the blogoverse? Probably. But I don't care because I'm not doing this for money. I'll keep it up as long as I continue to have fun with it. So I'll hope you find my writing of high enough quality and sufficiently interesting to cause you to keep coming back for more.

4 comments:

Daryl said...

Probably not precisely the insightful comment you're looking for, but recent versions of wordpress have a handy dandy blogger importer, and the software itself is pretty swank. If you ever decide to make the leap, I can help you get set up. If you want to preview the software first to see if it's usable, make a test account at wordpress.com and see how you like it.

Burt Likko said...

That's more than insightful enough! One of these weekends when I've some free time I'll look into it and send you an e-mail. Thanks for the offer of help, old friend.

DaveBuck said...

I'm one of the small percent who agree with you on 100% of your blog posts. *swoons*


LOL

Burt Likko said...

Aw, shucks. *blushes*