I’ve been blogging now since about January 2002, sadly my Greymatter archives for all bar March 2002 were lost between site updates. Technically speaking if you count my misadventures with procmail recipes and perl scripts then I’ve been “blogging” since early 2001. Up until recently I wrote stuff mostly for my own amusement, to keep a record of my ideas, a private diary that I chose to share with the world. However, recently I started signing up to more free services in this Web 2.0 quagmire each of which only makes you think about rankings. Feedburner, Digg, Google Analytics, MyBlogLog, Technorati – all guilty of changing my perspective on blogging.
As I say my blog has been mostly for venting personal thoughts and recording my attitude throughout time – rarely did I ever think about “how do I write a post that people will want to read” or “what will draw people to my blog and back again next week”. Now, however, all that I see are rankings and suddenly my non-existent ego is bruised by not being in the top 100,000 blogs in Technorati, by not having a community of >1000 on MyBlogLog, by not having a Feedburner readership of >500, by never having a blog post ‘digg’ed. Why not me? I want to make $3.5K each month from advertising revenues too! I can make blogging work for me, I know I can. After all that’s why I started, wasn’t it?
So what have I started doing? Well, I’ve started joining communities and making sure that my URL is known, trawling for stray visits. Within the MyBlogLog communities I visit all the sites that I can to ensure that my avatar is seen on their websites in the hope that somebody will curiously click it (perhaps I should change my mountain hike photo to a fraudulent sexy chick image). I’ve been making extra comments whenever possible on other blogs that I rarely if ever visit, providing there’s not a nofollow tag then it’s a link back. I’ve been re-advertising my feed URL with nice enticing buttons to attract people to subscribe on a whim. My hook of fame is well and truly baited with the worm of iniquity.
From the humble beginnings of a curious technologist, wanting to capture my thoughts on a web page, to this; a crumbling mess, a sell-out, chasing links and subscriptions as if they were food, wanting to break into the top XYZ blogs in Technorati, spending more time every day making sure that others know I exist. Even then, will it be enough? Will I crave more? Will I become trapped, unable to undo the fasteners of my own pimping? I ask you, have I become a link whore? I know I feel dirty…