So what's your readership?

by Craig Raw

This is my first post in a while. Not because I have been offline or afflicted by some strange digit disease leaving me unable to type. No, I claim that my time for such ramblings has been constrained to reading rather than writing. And that is what this post is about.

Today I am sitting in the garden of small holiday house in a little seaside town, not too far from Cape Town, but far enough for a wifi link to be as likely as troupe of dancing monkeys passing by. So I'm offline, and that, I think, is probably why I'm writing this post - I can't read anyone else's. Let's face it, it's a hell of lot easier clicking on the next unread post than firing up a text editor and typing some crafty piece to compete with the blizzard of words out there.

This may sound defeatist, but as hugh recently noted, keeping up with the blogosphere is becoming a full time job. Heaven help you if you actually have to do anything else, like earning a living in some more traditional medium. With so many thousands of blogs starting up every day, how do you choose? (Personally, I've got about 15 regulars, which change occasionally, and Scott Adams is my current favourite.) I'm sure I'm missing out on millions of life-changing insights and wisdoms, and no doubt many millions more daily diaries of interesting things such as unusual bowel movements and what the cat brought in last night.

There are the so-called "A-list bloggers", the Technorati Top 100 and other respected sources. They achieve such unlikely things as monetising their scribblings, affecting industries and touring the world speaking about it all.  The sobering fact is that there can be only so many of them, only so many "mass-read" blogs. Most of us will have to be satisfied with an audience of near friends, family, search engine robots, and the occasional wandering browser. There is nothing really wrong with this, but its important to realise it before starting a career as a citizen journalist. And yes, you probably have to post more often than once a month to have any readers at all.

2005/11/07 | permalink | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

  Bookmark this on ... BlinkBits BlinkList Blogmarks Buddymarks CiteUlike Connotea del.icio.us Digg it FeedMarker feedmelinks Furl Give a Link Gravee igooi Lilisto Linkagogo Linkroll ma.gnolia Maple.nu Netvouz Onlywire RawSugar reddit Scuttle Shadows Simpy Sphinn Spurl tagtooga TalkDigger Wink Yahoo MyWeb