You know, the operator of a website has a great deal of information about the people that visit his site. How long they hang around, how they get there, what operating system they use, what city they are visiting from – what they are looking for when they land on his site. It’s nifty really – and sometimes disheartening. This little blog of mine only gets about 20 visitors a day, not too bad – certainly not enough to feed myself on (thank goodness that was never its intention). What’s a bit disappointing is this website’s “bounce rate” – the number of visitors that visit just long enough to click their browsers’ back buttons. The bounce rate here is high, really high.
So, I took a look at a few other personal blogs for comparison. I’ve certainly found a few differences. My posts are relatively long, my content rarely (if ever) mentions pop-culture, and it is almost completely text.
I’ve decided to make a few decisions based on my findings, and I’m basically noting them here so that I remember them.
- No more ads. No sense is bothering the twenty-one of us that look at this website every day.
- I’m going to make an effort to include a bit more media. Pictures, short videos, online books – they are sometimes helpful for illustrating an idea or sharing a view of the world.
- I completely and utterly refuse to include any more pop culture than I already do.
Aside from these things… I’ve received plenty of complaints about the lack of personal information on this (personal) blog. Looking for Andrew D. Anderson, how can you be sure you’ve got the right one – I’ve no picture! Want to know more about my family background or socio-economic history – there’s not much information here. Where do I travel, and how often? What do I do with my free time, and how much do I have? Yeah, I know, I don’t really talk about it. And, yes, sometimes this leads to false assumptions or misreadings.
However, I don’t really intend on addressing that “issue” – mainly because it’s not really an issue for me at all. It’s by design. I try to think outside these personal limitations… and truly believe that ideas are the only interesting things we humans have to share. I don’t really care about your trip to visit your Aunt Ethel – outside of your motivations and interpretations of the event, your physical experience is unimportant to me. As a result, I strive to distill my own experiences into bundles of thoughts, and spare you the boredom of particulars. If you like to get all wrapped up in trivialities… well, this isn’t ever going to be the blog to read. If you think that ideas are actually the boring part of life… well… in a different context, I agree. Believe me, I’m not a fan of idle theory… but we can not actually experience things for our fellow humans. No sense in trying. I do what I can.
That’s the end of the administrative memos. I think.