No, this post isn’t about Russell Howard, nor his girlfriend. In fact, it’s an observation into the bizarre conclusions that I sometimes come to.
People write blogs for a number of reasons; I write because I enjoy writing, but ultimately, people write to be read. The best writers must obviously be good writers. The best bloggers, however, must know how the Internet works and tailor their posts to be well received by readers, but more importantly, indexed by search engines for as many key words as possible.
This is common knowledge to most people who have a website, and something I check fairly regularly (through two service from Google; analytics and webmaster tools) but after having a chat with Tom Lawrence yesterday, my bizarre conclusion of the day is that no matter how interesting or well crafted a blog post is, very few people will ever read it properly, and even fewer will want to read it.
Ok, this is very pessimistic, and some people will enjoy posts from an unknown writer, but Tom mainly posts about techy things, a few examples being: servers, home servers, home automation and home theatre systems. He also occasionally posts about university and general ‘life stuff’. I’ve not asked him about it, but the technology posts are where he’d want most of his traffic going to, and yet, a post from 2 and a half years ago about how he was going to see Russell Howard live, still draws a high percentage of traffic.
I’d be annoyed that a short ‘life stuff’ update would get more readers than a detailed post on something technologically awesome; however Tom just said he’d put some ads on that one article. Good idea I suppose.
I was going to write a blog post today; perhaps I’ll get around to writing something meaningless later on; maybe not.
I don’t know whether the kind thoughts and condolences of people that have absolutely no idea of the occuring horrors would be appreciated or not, but my thoughts (and the thoughts of most) are with those who have been affected by the earthquake, the tsunami, and all of the resulting complications.
It’s easy to complain about things that just don’t matter in the grand scheme, and I, like many others, often forget how lucky I am to live in a part of the world that is so unaffected by severe weather conditions.
For those that can spare even only a pound or two: http://www.redcross.org.uk/Donate-Now/Make-a-single-donation/Japan-Tsunami-Appeal
