No, not this one.
I'm cranky today about the number of visitors this blog receives. Those who visit are terrific - especially terrific commenters. And I'm extremely pleased for this.
But Phronesisaical can't seem to get more than 100 visitors per day on average. Anything over that tends to be because my blogpals with much heavier readership, The Wege or Neddie or Lindsay, link to us. Then it settles back to around 100. Peter Daou has linked a couple of times and brought us to nearly 700 once! Lance Mannion and Sisyphus Shrugged and Max Sawicky have also helped at times. And there are many others of you who, like us, have much lower readership.
This isn't a new story. The vast majority of blogs, some of them really really good ones, languish in the 100-200 visitors range. The big blogs ignore us. And there have been a few times where an email sent to them with a new story or line or interpretation gets used but not attributed (and they're all a-huff about the press ripping them off!).
So, I've wondered what would make for the Most Irresistibly Linkable Blog Post in the World. This might have to do with the content of the post, but I'm not so sure about that. I've seen lots of heavily-linked but ridiculous posts from big blogs. Is it a method we're missing? After all, the MILBPW might have already been posted somewhere in the blogosphere but overlooked due to a lack of method of getting the word out about its irresistibility. Is it both content and method? Is it something else entirely?
What would be included in the MILBPW? Nudity? Social Security? Twins?
Your suggestions are needed and welcome. Let's work together towards the Most Irresistibly Linkable Blog Post in the World!
UPDATE (April 10th, 6:45pm):
See also The Corpuscle on the blog readership issue.
UPDATE (April 10th):
Jebeebus! PZ is doing well. Thanks for the link, my godless comrade.
And for those gazillions of you from Pharyngula now stopping by our humble home, please feel free to take a look at our other fine products. Some samples are on the sidebar under "Phronesisaicality." We take requests too, and can tapdance.
There's a post on squid ice cream from Venezuela somewhere in the archives [here], if you're here as a squid fetishist like PZ.
41 comments:
I get your drift. (Incidentally, I get about the same amount of traffic, perhaps a little less.) But what would be your ideal number of visitors? And who or why?
There obviously are some thresholds hard to cross for those seeking traffic. And there are probably good reasons for that.
But who would want to be, say, a Scoble or a Boing Boing?
I do wonder about the desire for traffic, sometimes for the sake of it.
Because there are going to be very few bloggers who make a living out of blogging, or even more than a few bucks here and there.
And if your market is political punditry, well, it's a crowded field.
Don't take this as a criticism: more some thinking aloud. I asked similar questions at 3QD a few weeks ago, and got some rather sharp responses, which wasn't my aim.
But these are, I think, genuine questions for all of us blogging at this mid level.
In my experience, fart jokes are always well received. Just a thought.
Dude, chill! [joke]
It's a good question. I suppose the desire for more traffic is an ego thing in many ways. But it also goes into a context that's outside of the blogworld - such as amount of other work to be done (in my case, teaching, writing, research).
No, I'd go nuts with the traffic of Boing Boing or Andrew Sullivan. But with an average of 100, that also means there are days in the 50s. Sometimes those days are ones where I try to put some heart and soul into a piece. I look at the visitors and find that the majority have googled their way here and then moved along. That's disappointing.
In the context, then, I end up balancing the tradeoff with other non-blog stuff to do. It becomes difficult to justify blogging at all.
I suppose there's also a critique here that I haven't quite made explicit. If I didn't think this was a decent blog, I wouldn't continue it. I see plenty of other great blogs that don't get the recognition they deserve. I also see blogs that cornered the market long ago and don't necessarily do any better quality work than any of these largely unrecognized blogs. It's often poorer quality.
Then I see claims made by big bloggers about how revolutionary blogging is, how it's the great democratic solution to consolidation and monopolization in the traditional media.
I then want to vomit.
So, two things - 1. the ugly: ego and resentment; 2. the more noble sentiment: that if blogging means to be the great democratic revolution in politics that many say it is, then it somehow needs an overhaul since it has managed to mirror precisely the same dynamic of consolidation and monopolization that happens in the mainstream media.
But, Roxtar, I've already discussed farting! (the "Political Fear" post on the sidebar).
But, of course, farts would be included in the MILBPW.
I have no idea what the answer is, my friend. I hover at the same readership levels as you all.
I guess you just have to do it because you really want to do it. And try to do it well and hope others will hear about it and find you...
I use my blog as a creative outlet. And I really like the group of people I've met since I started blogging a year ago.
I struggle with the idea that blogging is a waste of time, but when I sit down and write something that I end up being pretty proud of and I get a couple of nice comments (or a poem from Jeddie Ningo) -- well, that gives me the oomph to keep doing it.
Oh! Writing about nudity totally works. And adding some pictures in the post doesn't seem hurt at all.
I can't comment on commenting, as that would be conflict of interest, but regarding hits, do RSS readers show up as hits? The l33t folk use readers. Also, just Google out the "most searched" words and sprinkle a dozen in any post. Warning: I don't think "fruit" is high among them.
There's also this approach.
OK, so the fruit isn't working. Man! I thought I had something going there. Like driving a hot dog cart for a living.
Sorry if I sound like a curmudgeon, blue girl. It's one of those days. You're right - I've met a lot of good folks doing this, and I forget to count that when I get started on the "hits" fetish that affects bloggers.
OK. The fart joke thing wasn't a serious suggestion. Well, it was serious, but it's not all I've got.
Fact is, you're aiming at the skinny little sliver at the far right-hand end of the bell curve. It's not exactly what they call a target-rich environment.
A personal account, if I may. I discovered this blog by clicking on a link from By Neddie Jingo. The particular post which led me to believe that Neddie's was a blogroll worth perusing involved a little verbal stunt-pilotry resulting in a pun on the name of an early-20th Century Swiss semiotician. Not quite as effective as a guy dressed up as a hot-dog handing out fliers, but it got me through the door.
So I clicked through, and was duly impressed. But I don't shop here because you're next to Wal-Mart, if you know what I mean. You'd get traffic up the wazoo if you were, but you're not.
I just hope you'll continue to do it because it's fulfilling, not because it's popular. Just like I keep listening to my old Wishbone Ash albums instead of Britney Spears.
I think I remember the Saussure bit. And, if I recall, I said something pedantic about Peirce in the comments.
Just being a whiny ass today....
Helmut, I'm also pretty sceptical of the change of the media landscape etc. On the other hand, I have today been a small part in a chain that successfully took on Rupert Murdoch's News International, and their lawyers. And that was all sparked by a blog with smaller readership than yours or mine: See here for an analysis from the first link in the chain, and here for my little bit.
Meanwhile, yes, I can see why the comparisons with some of the big traffic sites may be odious. But as roxtar says, in some ways, who cares? As an academic, you might want to compare equally with the circulation of just about any journal you can mention in your field, or the average print run of an academic monograph.
Blogs like yours are obviously pitched somewhere between the close circles of academia and the open spaces of passing traffic on the Internet. There are obviously losses as well as compensations for going too far in either direction.
For me, as long as I have an interesting set of interlocutors who are located to the margin of the institution, then I'm happy. I am, however, sure that there are more such people out there: in that sense, I would like more traffic. Moreover, though there are quite a number of people who come to my blog looking for political theory, my stuff on art, literature, culture and the like is much more by the wayside. It might be nice to get a dialogue going there. I think it's happening, slowly. But I don't think it'll be anything but incremental. And I'm happy enough about that.
And I don't want to be posting photos of dodgy sheikhs all the time, even though that gave me quite a spike in traffic this morning. It was fun, but in general that's not the kind of blog I'm aiming for.
Still, I do think it's worth kicking around these questions.
Oh, and I love decorabilia's approach. It's hilarious, yet somehow insightful: almost conceptual art...
Jon, congratulations. That's cool. Some effect outside of blogland.
Oh, I'm mostly of the attitude "who cares?" Yet, the dynamics of blogging are seductive. You appear to have a level-headed approach. I swing wildly between wanting more traffic - lots more! fame! punditry! Helmutism! - and, on the other hand, who-the-fuck-cares-dom.
Thanks also for the decorabilia reference. I didn't know the blog. It'll go into the roll.
I suppose I'm simply kicking around the meta-blog question once again. Some find this tedious. I don't. I'm trained as a philosopher, and end up seeing it as blog blogging about itself. I'd like to understand further just what it is we think we're doing, especially with all the revolutionary claims flying around. One of my colleagues, Peter Levine, has an excellent blog in which he does serious policy work but has extremely low readership. He does it anyway. That's commendable, but I honestly can't say I would continue it. This sentiment forces one, in moments of honesty, to confront the ego part of blogging.
Or maybe it's just my mcphd speaking. (And that is the coolest word verification code I've ever had).
I'm so beyond meta [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ]
I read through them all, MT, Mr. Smart Guy. I like the idea of Web as Heaven. That's what we ought to be working on, but just for shits. What would it look like?
It would look like a browser window. At least that's as far as this particular visionary can see. I tend to need some nucleation before I crystallize a comprehensive Utopian plan. I suppose you might just name a fruit to get me started, but I'm not sure that will do the trick. I tend to leave it to the little people, the applied philosophers and the like, to work out all the details.
There are tens, or maybe even hundreds of thousands of us like you. I have gone through periods of, well, not exactly despair, I guess, but certainly discouragement. But now, not so much. I just write about what I want to write about, try to do it well, try to do it a little better each time, and try to put up one thing every day. I've thought about quitting lots of times, but then I think of the relatively small but extremely loyal Band of Readers who visit me everyday. If I like doing it, and they like coming to see me do it every day, and if every once in a while I hit on all cylinders and get a post linked to by one of the Big Boys or Girls... well, I'd feel really bad not doing it under those circumstances. And that's way more than enough for me, these days.
But that's just me.
One alternative is to concentrate on building a community of readers who come here not always for the consistent brilliance of the blogger's writing, but for the community. Become a welcoming moderator in addition to a brilliant maker of posts. See this post by Teresa Nielsen Hayden on how to run the place well once you get the community going. As for how to get it going...? Well, if I knew that, I'd probably have more of a community at my place instead of a small band of loyal readers who mostly interact with me rather than each other.
I think my blog, and thousands of others like it aren't about the New Media or the New Democracy or anything like that. I think we are just instances of personal expression. We are corpuscles in the bloodstream. That's enough for some people, it isn't enough for others. I don't think it's a crime either way. If a person can't find a reason to get some sort joy out of blogging, then I don't see a problem bailing on it. It's hard work. If all it is is a pain in the ass, then it's not worth doing, especially if the readership never stays consistently above a point that seems, from the other side of the hill, grassy and green enough.
Do it for yourself, if you want to do it. Enjoy the regular readers you have. Some people can make a career of it. I can't. Thousands of others can't. That's just the way of things, I guess.
All of that isn't meant as advice, by the way, even though it sounds like it. It's just me re-chewing my own already much ruminated thoughts on this subject.
Good luck.
So *this* is where all that traffic is coming from.
It helps to have a frequent (quality) commenter like murky thoughts.
(And don't forget to include permalinks to other blogs; it's all about reciprocation.)
I hesitate to post a comment, and here's why:
1. I just recently bookmarked you, so I'm not real familiar with the archived posts.
2. I can't recall exactly which blog caused me to click on your link.
3. I've clicked on the "Contributors" list, so I have a little information on each of you, enough to know that you are philosophy people who are almost certainly smarter than I am, and definitely better educated.
4. Reason #3 doesn't scare me off, since I want to learn things, but it makes me wonder if y'all want me here. Is a curious amateur part of your target audience?
5. I didn't know what "phronesisaical" means, and it took me a while to find a clue. I tried my usual dictionary sites with no luck, and finally ended up at Wikipedia: "Phronesis (Greek: Φρόνησις) in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is the virtue of moral thought, usually translated "practical wisdom", sometimes as "prudence". Am I getting warm? Did I miss a link on your home page that might have 'splained it all for me?
6. I know that you are all about "Politics, Philosophy, International Affairs, and Fruit". I can honestly say that I am in favor of each of those things. But here's what might help me navigate the site, and make me more likely to keep coming back: if I could click on a link to a short articulation of your mission, a little background on the site's inception, and a description of how you hope new visitors will engage with the issues you discuss.
7. For example, right now I am reading a fascinating book by Martha Nussbaum entitled "Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law" (Princeton University Press, 2004). I'm thoroughly engrossed, but it's slow going for me because although I think she writes well, the book is chockful of philosophical terms that I have to look up (no problem; I'm not lazy) and, in general, an academic style that's always kind of foreign to me. Let's say one day someone starts a discussion about this book. Is there room for me in it? In other words, am I going to be out of my league?
8. Lastly: fruit is good. But you might consider participating in Friday cat-blogging (or Thursday dog-blogging).
Sincerely,
Larkspur
My goal now is to become a serious Helmutist!
If you read my last post, you'll see that I am now a Mapleist. So, it may take a little time to switch over. :)
You know, another thing on this subject -- Larkspur sparked this idea. It takes time to not only get to know the blogger, but also to get to know all the commenters. I like the community aspect of blogging. And I think lots of people feel intimidated at first to chime in when they don't really no anyone. (All of life is really still like 8th grade, right?) And some also feel a little intimidated by the subject matter if it's not in their area of expertise. Just a thought.
Also, good try on the celebrity post! But, I think you left out the word *porn.* -- Always gotta have that in there.
I'm lucky though. There is blue girl porn in the world. And it's animated porn. Cartoon porn, if you can believe that...so, I get lots of hits from guys looking for cartoon porn. Which just amazes me!
Thanks for the link.
In the course of some three years I've built up to about 400. I hit the 100-200 mark fairly soon, but that may be because I was using Livejournal, and a number of people reciprocated my reading them.
I don't know what it is which pulls people in (my Lj dedicated readership is about 250, so I'm getting your 100-200 numbers, plus a default; sort of).
I've been quoted by some of the biggies (Kevin Drum headlined me once, Making Light got me a bunch of hits when we were all talking about some of the same things in re Katrina, and the covereage thereto.
I think what it takes is passion, and sincerity.
Would I have more readers if I had started when Atrios did? Probably. But started recently, and he's huge, so that's not all of it.
What he, and Making Light, and even Hindenraker have, is passion. Drive, they put something out, each day, every day (well, Making Light, not so much, but the comments there are always live, even when nothing new has been posted, so that dynamic, which is reminiscent of the best of Usenet, is working for them).
Good prose helps, but decent prose will get you by, so long as there is something there, on a regular basis, from the heart.
After that, well snowballs start small.
TK
Crap. The last (horridly corrupt link) is to Steve Gilliard.
Sigh. I got pinched trying to use "target =blank" to open in new windows, and botched the edit. Mea culpa.
TK
A pronouncable name?
Larkspur - everyone's welcome. Don't sweat it. Most of the stuff we post is silly, anyway, rather than high-falutin' philosophical. The name of the blog is an indicator of that. About 3am last June after a party I followed the link to "Create Your Own Blog" out of curiosity about what it takes to make a blog. I found out, as we all have, that's it's really easy. Last thing was to give it a name. I looked around my desk, eyes fell on The Complete Aristotle, and phronesis came to mind. It's a good word - as you discovered, "practical wisdom" or "prudence." It's a term Aristotle used to refer to the space between theorizing and learning from experience and the messiness of practices that don't neatly fit theory. I've always liked the term as representative of what the mission of philosophy ought to be - so, I thought at the moment, why not have a philosophy and politics blog that discusses that messy area? But "phronesis" sounded really pretentious as a blog name. So I attempted to attach the suffix of "maniacal" onto "phronesis." But 3am, post-party, I mispelled the suffix "-aical." Thus was born the name. I kind of liked the ridiculousness of the process and kept the name. But, anon is right, it's unpronouncable - so you can't lip-synch when reading it.
CRojas - I see it in academia too. Another colleague recently published his new book. He's been checking the amazon.com stats every day, flustered by the low sales. Also, once when I was at the Harvard bookstore years ago in the philosophy section, I saw Hilary Putnam walk in, go straight to the "P"s, scan the shelves for his books, then turn and walk out of the store. Maybe it is precisely the academic ego that comes out in blogging. It's true that a journal article probably doesn't get 100 readers. But, at the same time, we really do dream that it makes a larger impact than that, don't we?
Blue girl - I've been lucky to have a few commenters stick around: MT, roxtar, Cheryl of Whirled View, occasionally Neil Shakespeare and Neddie. But it has indeed been a small commenting crew. I seem to have managed the Most Commentable Blog Post for Phronesisaical with this one, however!
Gotta run. more later.
I'm still curious what Whitney Houston has done recently. Not really....
I'll take your advice, Mark, and redo the blogroll. It's getting big anyway.
Q: What would be included in the MILBPW?
A: I dunno but "The most irresistibly linkable blog post in the world" was clever. Maybe next you can do "The blog post the world doesn't want you to see" or "The blog post that cracked the Happy Meal Caper wide open."
In any event, I'm going to check out your "Freedom fries take-back" post because it sounds interesting and I'm hungry.
Good luck finding the most perfect blog post ever. (kinda reminds me of a Hank Williams Jr. tune)
mt
I'm for titles that make bold assertions, at least when posting on a topic that one can and is bound to read about a million other places. i.e. "Global warming caused by discarded toothpaste tubes" v. "Global [yawn] warming." I think academics forget to defer to the "why should I care what you want to tell me" where no voice will reply "because I want an 'A'" Sometimes just a topic is provocation enough for a title: "On time travel." But even there you're relying on your potential readers readiness to believe you're liable to do a good job on this topic (otherwise why bother reading? especially in the absence of a punchy "lead"). e.g. A string theorist visiting the page of an 11 year old in which the posts down screen are all about Ken and Barbie is liable not to pause long on the post entitled "On time travel."
P.S. don't know the "mt" above. We seem to have multiples.
correction: I was referring to the "why should I care (about what you're telling me)" mental reflex. I think especially on the Web we are window shoppers, but in writing for a magazine there's the same thing to worry about. This feeling of mine may relate to why I bristled at your reference to the "quality" of stuff online. Hearing that as coming from an academic, it meant competency and rigor, which are secondary concerns in recruiting a diverse volunteer audience. c.f. Fox News. Also, were I a venture capitalist in a hurry, I wouldn't sink money into attracting specifically people who are looking for competency and rigor online with a free and psuedonymous blogger account. Given that people and the amount of their free time is finite, that suggests you're weaning eyes away from the Atlantic Monthly and the New York Review of Books. Not easy. Especially since the Web is working against a reputation. As others have said I think what recruits readers to blogs is a person and a narrative and to a lesser extent the possibility for interacting with said person and said narrative.
I thought you were playing tricks on me, MT. Show thyself, mt!
You're right about the "quality" comment. That's so like an academic. I apparently also have mutliple personalities. One is about ten years old. The other is fairly well-educated and responsible and wants to play the pedantic - competent and rigorous - academic grown-up. A pundit who hates pundits but harbors the deep secret of wanting to be one anyway, while attempting to compensate by thus transforming the wannabe punditry from within through ninja pundit maneuvers. That leaves open lots of flexibility for testing out other blog personalities in between.
As for the content and the audience, I kind of like the fact that it still remains a mystery to me. Note the interesting commenters, all. That is rad.
"Show thyself, mt!"
Oops! Sorry about that and apologies to Murky Thoughts. I didn't mean to impersonate him/her.
What a dilemma?
mt or not mt
My site gets 500-1000 visitors per day. I host games--I design or appropriate games and program them (in Java for the internet). You can put politics in games, but it is wildly unpopular, in my experience.
Here are two--they get less than one play per month (ps, they're, uh, not so great in the fun dept.):
Iraqnophobia
and
On Mayoral Art Criticism
The most irresistibly linkable blog post in the world
The juxtaposition of 2 seeming unrelated facts, the more distantly related the better. The tortuous route linking these 2 facts should include humor, politics, and current events if possible. Language and editing must be concise with the liberal use of links.
I get about 50 to 100 visits a day and one or two comments per week. Sometimes I think I really want more, but then I ask myself -- why? I already know a couple of ways to increase traffic: mention popular pin-up models so that Google searches link to my blog. Then later I can get a new wave of visitors by commenting in a new post about the first crowd.
But that gets old pretty fast. Your best bet is to get PZ to notice you. Hey, you did!
Contribut to and host carnivals. Good ones, like Philosophy carnival, Carnival of Liberals, etc, not the general-style like Carnival of the Vanities. A decent percentage of visitors return for more, blogroll you, etc.
Thanks for all the advice, folks. I suppose there's something intentionally lame in my approach to blogging that my whining contradicts: I'm kind of lazy.
What would be included in the MILBPW? Nudity? Social Security? Twins?
Go with two out of three. Nude twins would do it for me.
I'm also here from Pharngula - but don't count on me leaving. I'm hanging around for a bit to see what's going on.
We have the same number of readers? I feel like a great big fraud now. My blog is froth.(Intentionally so - it's stress relief. If I wrote serious stuff I'd be wound up all the time.)
Actually my readership recently did a wee jump, from around 60 or 70/day to 100+. It was the cute animal effect. Cute animals work wonders, even if they're just badly photographed ducks talking nonsense. I recommend kittens (preferably doing something absurd) if you REALLY want the numbers, though.
But another thing I've noticed is that my reader numbers seem to depend on the day of the week. Weekends I have fewer readers, which leads me to suspect that people are reading my blog AT WORK. In other words they only read me if they're paid to do it!
But the real mystery, for me, is that there are ALWAYS spikes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. WHY? Last Thursday I had 165 hits and I didn't even post anything.
I can't bring myself to do kitten photos, and I don't understand how that started. My own version is fruit. But there aren't a lot of people who sit on the couch watching tv with their fruit at their side.
PZ - The Wege linked to the rollinia yesterday with the line "human-fruit sex." That's the most viewing of a fruit that I've had. I'll try some new fruit porn themes, though. The prefix of philosophy, too, is "love," after all.
Nice comment, Q. Not only blog blogging about itself, but comment commenting about itself.
It's your title. Zzzzzzz.
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