Decline

Fame is a fleeting thing.

You can see from this handy Google graph that since October 19 page views at this blog have fallen by about 25 percent. This sudden shift is presumably due to some action taken by Google, either in the way they count page views or in the way they prioritize search results.

Still, it gets me down. For the first three years my count of readers rose steadily and I sort of imagined it rising on and on until I got modestly famous.  The count took a huge fall in 2011, when Google revamped their image search, but then I built back to to more than 40,000 page views a month in 2012. That was my peak as a blogger, in terms of both my overall count of real readers and the popularity of my individual posts. Of my top ten most viewed posts, nine were written in 2011 or 2012.

Since then, as you can see, my readership has steadily declined, and there have been few new blockbusters. Sigh. These days the main ways internet pages get shared are via Facebook and twitter, and for whatever reason hardly anybody ever shares my posts in those ways.

So I labor on in ever-increasing obscurity, wondering about how the internet works. When the web came along 15 years ago I thought it would solve a lot of human problems, especially how to meet people with similar interests. I thought I would find all these forums or lists where people were talking about the things that interest me and meet lots of people whose thinking is compatible with mine. Nothing doing. I wasted hundreds of hours exploring new sites of various kinds, looking for conversations I wanted to join, finding mainly anger and emptiness. Plus narrowness, places where only conversation on a single limited topic is encouraged. That was how I came to start my own blog, hoping to create the kind of conversation I had been looking for. You all know how this is working out.

It makes me wonder: why doesn't it work better? Is the kind of far ranging conversation I am interested in just not very popular, compared to ax-grinding and professional shop talk? Or are there tens of thousands of people like me out there, looking for intellectual companionship and not finding it? I have a feeling there are, and one of the reasons I keep blogging is the hope of meeting more of them, and welcoming them to our little world.

Not Famous Yet

Last month I noticed that page views at this blog seemed to be on an impressive upward trajectory, from 5,321 in January to 14,495 in May, and I got caught up in a fantasy of continued exponential growth that would soon make me famous throughout the English-speaking world. Then June came, with a 31% decline. Sigh. So much for that castle in the air. It seems that my readership was elevated by links to a couple of my posts on high-traffic sites, but that bubble is fading and nothing I have written in the past few months has gotten anything like the same attention. So I continue to languish in obscurity.

I Deny Everything

No, I was not involved in any incident at the Pentagon last night. So much for anybody ever finding my blog by Googling my name. . . .