welcome to the party dat never stops

I am very happy to greet a reader in The Republic of Korea.   I hope you enjoyed the site.

now, let us zoom in on your exact location in Asia

As I’ve noted, I tend to look at the “stats” for this blahg a few times a day.  I see how many times my writer friend in Gaj, Poland appears as a dot on the map of Europe, how many of my countrymen have checked in.  The slope of readers is a sliding pond down, tapering toward the zero sum many see life as.

“And if I suddenly had 20,000 readers a day?” I ask myself, “how would that change my life?”  Then I realize, it would be succulent data I could provide to a publisher to show they could sell my writing.  How would that change my life?  A nice thought.  

But as readership clings to single digits I ponder another mystery.  I’ve had a few visits by strangers.  I don’t know how they find their way to the posts, but four have pressed the “like” button and invited me to their sites.  Each of those four was interesting.  But here’s the mystery:

Yesterday I wrote something about false dichotomies, Line and Color.  I hit “publish” sometime around 1:30 pm.  Shortly afterwards I had two emails informing me that two people, with blahgs of their own, liked the piece.  I was gratified, visited their blahgs, was pleased to meet them.  Yet, when I checked my stats later, neither of these Americans showed up.   Three views, all from Gaj and nearby Krakow, Poland, as my writer friend made his rounds with his laptop.

A demographic mystery, I would say.

As part of our instant gratification culture one can sign up for a blahg (merely click the tab at the bottom of this screen), tap a few words, hit “publish” and send your thoughts, or lack of same, out into the world.  A thousand of these posts comprise a hundredth of a drop in the ocean.  Of course, it is a virtual ocean.   Debates rage, issues fester, opinions are bandied, bloggers liked, disliked, friended, unfriended– all in an electronic environment only Philip K. Dick could have imagined fifty years ago.

WordPress has a feature that allows you to view constantly updated statistics on how many are viewing, liking, disliking, commenting on, refraining from commenting on, friending and unfriending your blahg.  By clicking a tab labelled “stats” you can instantly see a bar graph of views for the previous few days and by looking at the world map on the bottom, find the geographic location of these viewers.  Today, for example, as of 2:50 pm, four people in Poland, or one person in Poland four times, had checked the blahg.

International readership, yo.  Talk about your cachet.  

But here’s the cool part, for a man who feels his creative energies at low ebb, dragged on by the need to constantly produce upbeat material for a community project for kids that is, as of now, only him.  Check out the bar graph, which I’ll hopefully be able to do a screen capture of (COM-SHFT-4) and then crop, to give you, gentle reader, the same instant gratification, and odd shiver of perverse self-schadenfreude, it gave me.