Reflections on One Month of Blogging - For the Bloggers

At the risk of sounding like an American management guru, that is, over-reaching and annoying, if not cloying, I’m a man who tends to get a bit OCD on benchmarking and goal setting. Despite I started this blog at the end of May, while on holiday, I’ve only really been posting content over June, plus I put sitemeter up on June 2^nd so I could make it onto Ken Perrott’s monthly blog rankings at Open Parachute to see where I could get my blog to after just one month. Being new, I’ve posted more this month than I will have time to from now on, given work commitments, however, I did set this month to try and get a readership. I apologise to those I’ve been self-promoting myself on, though note, I’ve always been on topic, you’ve always had the ability to delete any such post of mine (no hard feelings), but I’ve done it because I’m not spending half an hour, or three quarters of an hour, writing a post, for only three people to read it: I’m here to change some minds.

I’m also here because I’m writing a novel. I have some grave doubts about that project at the moment: my first degree was a BA in English lit, that's my passion, but while I can pick up anybody else’s book and tell whether the writing is good or not (ie, professionally edited, or self-published), for some reason, I have absolutely no judgement when it comes to my own writing – none at all. I re-read what I have written and swing from euphoria to reaching for a wine bottle. So, work in progress in the meantime, no promises …

My blog byline pretty much gives the direction of this blog, though note the name itself comes from the fact that the protagonist in my novel runs a blog called ‘Life Behind the Iron Drape’. And yes, that sounds all very self-referential and post-modern, though don’t get carried away with that: the post-modernists are, of course, evil incarnate.

I believe that there is a lot of content here for one month, as measured by ideas: I’ve set the frame-work for what I think is important in the free society, namely, that I think there should be a free society – truly, a revolutionary thought these days - which is not the one we have now. I’ve not had time to post my magnum opus on the problems with democracy, though I’ve covered why our tax legislation is the litmus test of how it’s all gone wrong for the freedom lovers, how privacy is so important to this, and how that has been voted from us, and, of course, the importance of free markets (read every other post). Though the most personal paragraph I have written about myself was:

Unfortunately my advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism - noting the crony capitalism we have is to capitalism what sea horses are to horses - has never been about money; it's only ever been about that wonderful, evolutionary thing that capitalism, and only capitalism, is based on - the voluntary transaction. I'm a freedom freak: peace baby, the true sixties legacy, not those suited communists in the Greens Party whose every policy is the advocacy of force. Only on the voluntary transaction can there be a voluntary, free society. I said unfortunately because this has meant that while I'm comfortable, I'm not rich enough to build a space station. That's what I would do if I had money in real quantity. I'd build a space station and remove myself from the ugly, brute society we've created for ourselves, yet again. As generation text say, 'I'd be outa here'.

I like this paragraph because it is set to dispel that myth whereby the Left and the State Crony Capitalists seem to think they have some sort of moral mandate on compassion: they don’t, in fact, the opposite. I have no truck with either the Left or the Conservative State-Worshipping Right. Over time both groups create the cruellest, most cannibalistic societies possible, and always, of course, police states where you have no privacy, or freedom from the Humphrey Applebys’.

Our societies have become tyrannies all over again by replacing the tyranny of God with the all-knowing state channeling the envy and greed of the tyranny of the majority thinking they can have a free lunch with no risk: we’ve voted in secular theocracies. In previous centuries the simple minded believed they were not capable of running their own lives, God had to, and now enough of us have thought the State must run our lives, sacrificing everyone else to that bloodied altar of the common good, that it is the society we live in. This is why I know, with certainty, I will never be a free man: a nascent classical liberalism has been destroyed, utterly, where it mattered: the judiciary. It will end badly: our societies are morally bankrupt, on a path to increasing civil violence, and our planned economies are failing, as they were always going to. The welfare state was an illusion from the get-go. My favourite self-invented phrase this month was the ‘Keynesian hubris of debt’.

So, to the purpose of this post. Assessing how I'm going after one month. The blog rankings for June will be interesting, I assume I’ll get in on the bottom rung somewhere. By lunch time today I’ll have made 5,000 page views (not counting my own), which is an average of 167 per day – higher, of course, on days I put up fresh content. I’d love some input from fellow bloggers, either in comments or email (top left of screen): think back to when you started, where you are now; how is 167 page views per day for one month? To me, it sounds a bit pathetic. If I can’t get it to approaching 1,000 within six months, I will definitely being reassessing this whole venture, as much as I’ve enjoyed it, unless I’m getting far more comfortable with the novel.

Some interesting stuff and statistics;

I’ve made it onto three blog rolls; Lindsey Mitchell’s, Paul Walker’s at Anti-Dismal, and Richard Goode and Tim at the idiosyncratic Eternal Vigilance. Thank you all three of you – that’s heart felt. I probably get about ten or more daily links from Lindsey’s blog, and about three or four from Paul’s, plus looking through the logs, two or three every couple of days from Eternal Vigilance. All the rest of you, if my oeuvre is in your park, stick me on your blog-roll: I’ll certainly reciprocate on my own if you are missing presently. By the way, I’d love to have Lindsay Periogo’s SOLO on my blog-roll, but can’t seem to figure that out – if anyone has a solution, I’d love to hear it.

Of all my ‘tactical embeds’ to NBR and Interest.co.nz :) , again, always on topic, the latter site brings by far the most links back to this site, although, perhaps that’s unfair on NBR, because many of their embeds are made to paid content, so the audience is much thinner, and probably works during the day, compared to the socialists and statists that read Bernard’s statist offerings. As a one off, my embed in NBR’s Dotcom thread last night has been the single biggest source of links.

My most successful source of links, however, are my tweets, so Twitter certainly has a place, once you can get a body of followers. And the odd retweet from The Cactus, certainly hasn’t hurt – cheers Cactus.

Getting back to my benchmarking, when starting this endeavour, looking at Open Parachute’s monthly blog rankings, I was looking at Whaleoil’s 800,000 odd page views a month, and now realise what an achievement that is, so kudos to the Whale. Mind you, a lesson from it also: if Whale and I had exactly ten permanent readers, then the rankings would still kill me: Whale can put up to twenty posts a day, I’ve been doing one every two days: so with the same ten readers I would show an average of five page views per day, Whale would show twenty – it’s impossible for a hobbyist to beat a full time blogger, so I shall head somewhere for the middle ground, and as a three month target, say 500 views a day, albeit that sounds a bit, well … 500 views a day, okay perhaps in a country where 5,000 book sales are considered a best seller.

And that’s it, work time. Any input would be appreciated. Thank you for reading my blog.

... Hah, I'm just 18 page views off my first 300 page visit day. 

UPDATE:

Over lunch I've been looking at my sitemeter stats, which give quite a different rendering to Blogger's own stats: and nowhere near as good. On sitemeter I'm on, not counting my own, 2592 pages views for 26 days, so that means an average of roughly 100 page views per day. Mmmm.

I wonder why the variance? 

UPDATE 2:

I forgot to add a brickbat for Granny Herald. Trying to get a comment past the fossils who run that site is truly like trying to get an escapee over that other Berlin Wall. The Internet is one big open discussion place in the comments, but not to Granny Herald who ensure no outside link ever makes it through their censorship: in a demonstration of why the business model they still cling to is failing, they insist on running an Internet portal as if the Internet doesn't exist.