By The people from the Tango! project (The Tango! Desktop Project) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

It’s depressing to see how much YouTube and BuzzFeed items I repost or reblog get looked at and how little anyone looks at my original material. Currently my highest number of views is 89 and that on a day I posted about an article on LinkedIn “Class of 2013: Four Things You Must Unlearn Immediately | LinkedIn” which was viewed 76 times. If I’m lucky I might get two or three views of one of my original posts. I guess it’s the nature of how search engines find items on the Internet. I am no Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert but it does seem that the tags I choose for an item determines how it shows up in a search. Also, linking/reblogging a popular item serves to drive traffic to my blog which, I guess, is good in that it puts more eyeballs on my content in general  and hopefully also on my original content specifically.

In the end, this really speaks to the purpose of my blog. I want to capture my thoughts, comment on something I’ve read or heard and expand on ideas I have in general. I certainly didn’t intend for this blog to be read by anyone in particular. That being said, I like getting feedback even if it’s people just liking my posts. Constructive criticism of my writing would be great but I’m not sure someone is going to post something like that in the comments of a public blog.

WordPress does make it easy to navel-gaze when it comes to your blog. The Stats Page for your blog has all sorts of interesting data points, like how many people visited your blog and from what country, what links were clicked in your blog and how many times and what search engines were used to find your blog and what terms were used. You can waste spend all day refreshing this page and investigating all the minutiae about visits to your blog.