YesBut do it because you want to.

OK you’ve followed advice given to you, done everything you can think of doing, but yet you cannot increase the number of visitors to your blog. There appears to be an invisible barrier or door that slams shut as soon as you have twenty visitors a day. What can you do?

You’ve tried everything. Tweaked the appearance of the blog: changed the template, even adjusted the size of the fonts to the extent the words appear to be shouting out of the screen. Changed the font style, but all in vain.

What can you do next? A lot of bloggers just give up. In May 2006 Technorati reported 13,720,748 blogs it tracked were updated in the proceeding 90 days. That was 36% of all blogs tracked by Technorati. By March 2007 the number of active blogs had increased to 15, 534,430 but this only represented 21% of all tracked blogs. So in the year the number of tracked blogs had nearly doubled from 38 million to 74 million, but the number of active blogs had only increased by just under 2 million.

Bloggers need primarily DEDICATION. At the beginning it’s exciting; you’ve got all those ideas in your head. Then you get a few visitors, great “I’m on the way”. The initial enthusiasm projects you forward. But people who initially visited your blog no longer leave comments, the visitor counter keeps ticking over but a large percentage is you visiting your blog to see if anybody has left a comment. On top of that, thinking of things to write about is getting more difficult. It gets tougher to sit in front of the computer, especially when its sunny outside and the kids want to go out to play, or there’s that task you’ve been putting off which really needs to be done now.

You need to ask yourself one question: “Why did I start blogging?”. If it was to satisfy the need to express yourself and be creative then, remove the “vistor counter”. It doesn’t matter if you have 0, 10 or a 100 visitors a day. It’s nice when people leave comments and you can start conversations; but it doesn’t matter if no one leaves a comment. If the kids want you to play with them, then play with them; don’t feel pressured to write something for your blog.

Blog for PLEASURE without pressure. Don’t let the blog take over your life. When you feel creative then blog, when you don’t then don’t. You only live once, enjoy life, and when you feel the need to share, blog.

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YesBut who?

Typical, as soon as I reveal my method of identifying the day’s blog subject, it fails (see "Tag that" 11th May). Well that’s not quite accurate; it did come up with a subject, but totally inappropriate - “To shave or not to shave?”.

I know how it came about. When I was looking at Technorati’s Top Tag list I saw a photo of Paris Hilton getting out of a car and revealing, perhaps more, of herself than she intended.

Apart from sounding like an hotel in the French capital, who is this woman? Now that question might be why Paris Hilton appears in the list of Top Searches. As far as I can determine, apart from being a rich self publicist, her only other claim to fame is being famous for being famous.

The non-celebrity celebrity is a Twenty-first century phenomena generated by the proliferation of reality TV shows such as “Big Brother” and “I’m a Celebrity get me out of here”. They annually spew out another batch of talent-less nonentities who have their 15 minutes of fame.

I still don’t know very much about Paris Hilton, except she has a shaved crotch. Too much information!!!

Click her to see a combination of manmade and natures beauty.

Tag that

To aid falling asleep some people count sheep. For many years I’ve used the practice of:

“Fall asleep thinking of a question,
wake up knowing the answer”

It works. I lie in bed thinking “what will be the topic of tomorrows blog?”, and invariably I wake at 4 o’clock not only knowing the subject but quite often with a draft of the blog in my head. This morning the idea rattling around in my brain was “write about the subject most blogged about”. The next step was obvious - identify the top blogged about subject.

Problem - not as easy as I thought it would be. Entered “most blogged about subject” into Google and got no definitive answer. Under such circumstances there is only one solution - drink a cup of Chai and ruminate.

Lateral thinking - if there is no direct answer, look for clues. Obviously, blog tags would give an indication of the subject. Looked up Technorati’s Top Tags list, the top twelve tags were: baby, blogroll, bush, computer, gaming, me, mobile, money, opinion, tags, tecnologia and usa. So the challenge is now to write a sagacious blog incorporating those twelve tags.

I know bogroll is toilet paper, but I had no idea of the meaning of “blogroll” until I Googled it. Years ago people would look in a dictionary to find the meaning of a word, but in the “computer” orientated world information and language is evolving so quickly Google seems to have become the fountain of all knowledge, the place you turn to first for information. So blogroll is a list on a blog of other blogs. As you can see I haven’t got one!! Perhaps you can help me out; if you think your blog should be the first on my bloglist let me know.

“Tecnologia” yet another word I have never heard of! Entered it into Google and got referred to “Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre“. There was only one thing I could do - Babel Fish it. French - English no, Italian - English no, Spanish - English no, Portuguese - English = technology. Now that I find very interesting. Not that tecnologia is technology in Portuguese, but rather a Portuguese word is 11th in the Top Tag list. I would guess the majority of blogs are written in English - next French, Chinese, Spanish? Anyone out there know how many blogs are written in each language? What ever answer you give will be wrong! With the number of blogs doubling every five months, your answer will be out-of-date before you finish typing it.

Technorati indicates there are 15,248,367 blogs about blogs and 20,300 blog posts containing the word tecnologia. I’ve just checked its gone up to 20,304.

Just a thought, do more people use their computer for blogging than “gaming”? I guess it’s the latter with children ensconced in their bedrooms. When young kids ask where they come from, they are often told they were found under a “bush”, for the parents sake I hope it was a “money” tree. When a mother gets a “baby” she can now expect to have to buy as soon as the child is out of nappies, a computer, game counsel and the ubiquitous “mobile”.

The list did say “bush” not Bush. But on rechecking some of the blogs with bush “tags” it should have been Bush. George W that is President of the “USA”. I really would appreciate it if someone could tell “me” how a country like the USA could elect such shulunk as its leader. That’s just my “opinion”, obviously the majority of Americans thought he was the best thing since sliced bread.

I made reference earlier to how things are changing so quickly, this is particularly true of the London skyline. As I look out of my window I can see 29 tower cranes, they are busy demolishing buildings built in the 1960s and replacing them with click here to see an example.