To quote a lyric from Running On Empty by Jackson Browne, “I don’t know about anyone but me.”
I thought of the idea for this post from intertwining thoughts of who actually reads my blog and then the post Sam just made in his blog. I wondered to myself why the Shee reads both my blog and Sam’s blog. What makes him continue to want to read what we write compared to mostly everyone else on this planet? The answer is fairly obvious I think, he knows us and participates in our lives. Most people won’t just read this on a day to day basis because of our content. There has to be a personal attraction to be entertained. Just because my blog get an average of 300 visitors a day doesn’t mean that more than 10 people actually read the content.
That leads me into my second point about Sam’s post. Sam’s post is long, very long. I found myself sort of jumping through his paragraphs, skimming more than reading. This is where the Jackson Brown lyric comes from, I skimmed through his material but how many people out there read every sentence and how many people hardly read any of it. As the writer, and reader at times, I only know what I like. That might not correlate to what you like or how you do things.
Take facebook for instance. I have 384 friends and see updates all the time. I’d say I click on something somebody puts up <1% of the time. I'll breeze through some links or read some of the feed but will never interact with anyone's anything. Now some people I'm sure like the crap out of everything. This person who likes everything will go about the way they do things completely different than me. How can I write things that appeal to people when I have no idea how they think. Which leads us right back to Jackson, I don't know about anyone but me.
When at school Mark will read my blog multiple times a day even though he knows exactly what’s going on my life. He often comments “Well it’s kind of stupid that I read that because I knew what it was going to say.” For whatever reason, being mentioned in a post is exciting and the more involved you are in someones life, the more you’ll appear in their blog posts.
Until lately the Wads was not involved in my life at all really but I think he continued to read because my content and writing style was just that good. But I’m aware my last post was too long and had you written it, I would have skimmed each paragraph as well.
And yes, I’m aware I’m commenting on this from work but I just edited the same mistake on 450 different pages and I don’t even give a qua anymore.