Background:
Growing up surrounded mainly by cows, I surveyed the marketing landscape and developed eventually an intuitive feel for “derivative: what’s this?”
My Theoretical model, astonishingly close the those of Newton and Leibnitz, had “Us” as the Prime Movers, followed by the Dairy, which came and emptied the 8000 gallon milk tank for some poorly-understood financial gain, and at the bottom, the Hush-Puppy-ied parasites in New Jersey ‘ranch homes’ who parasitically profited by betting on the ups and downs of the price of milk. I called these human losers ‘second derivative-niks’. Zappa, famous for ‘They can only Edit, they can’t Create’, must have had an even-more derogatory name for them.
Update: the cows themselves, in a policy statement, have now shifted the derivative statuses left-ward; In their pantheon, we farmers were the first-order parasites, they claimed, disingenuously side-stepping the question of what they intended to do with the tons of milk left after feeding 1/100th of it to their stupid calves.
And all this above aside is simply a preface to my ‘derivative’ post here, which is not ‘Content’, but rather ‘Talking about marketing Content’. Could be worse; I could ‘talk about talking about..’ Oops, I already did!
The Post:
I shall now peek briefly through the ‘fourth wall’ here to share my personal thoughts on blogging with Word Press.
For you lucky Readers, this is the equal of having the actor playing Hamlet suddenly ‘break character‘, turn to the gathered rabble, and confess:
“Yeah, man, I say ‘go with…um… ‘Not to Be’, End of story, and I get to go home early and play with my Nintendo!”
I am blessed with a trio of delightful readers/commenters here. One could do far worse: (I recently came upon a lovely site, a fellow from Pakistan, who has posted careful and thoughtful articles for ‘Five Years!’ with only one Comment. ) Needless to say I am, as we speak, working to address that “got to be frustrating” situation.
El, who has saved me from suicide during equally dark times on Xanga, would likely say something true and wall-hanging-ready: “Get used to it,”
Still, I can’t help but wonder where the community of inspired and empathetic ‘content-creators’ hangs out these days?
‘Arse-buch?’ ‘Twatter’? ‘Instagrum’?
‘Yes, Johnny, this is not your Momma’s Xanga-daze’, I tell myself. No more seeing my face daily in the Front Page, and knowing that folks were, at least, aware that I’d had something new to say.
Here I could announce my death and it would be years until someone would suggest at least putting the sun-bleached bones in, like, a box.
So, what motivates a fellow to continue to write?
Three perfectly fine reasons:
1) The joy of seeing one’s creation formatted and preserved for posterity.
2) The feeling of obligation toward anyone enamored of your persona to continue to broadcast ‘vital signs’. Heaven knows we lose contact with so many once-vital cyber-acquaintances here daily; my job is to not be among those ‘RIP?’ statistics.
And 3) “So what else ya gonna do with yer ‘killer’ neologisms, palindromes, ‘hit’ songs? Stuff ’em in a bottle to toss into the polluted Mediterranean?”
And finally (sarcasm alert) Donnie Drumpf, my hero on all things metaphysical, pointed out a few days ago that every issue has two side, each bearing equal blame.
(To paraphase Wm. F. Buckley, who was being equally sarcastic:
‘What’s the big difference between a guy pushing a cripple into the path of an on-coming truck.. and the guy who frantically pulls her out of danger’s path? After all, both of them are “Pushing ladies in wheel-chairs around.”
Trying to go with the flow here, I’ll state on the record that, while all the absent ‘Non-Readers’ are guilty of a real ‘sin of omission’. (SAD!’) I am of course just as culpable for having deviously provided reading material for them not to read.
For that I do apologize. Perhaps my scheduled lobotomy will help to still my verbal demons.
Update: I may even cancel the procedure if I hear from enough appreciative readers.
Wow, what a perverted ‘site-optimization’ strategy I’ve embraced!
jxsolberg 
Dear Mr. Solberg:
It has come to our attention that you are suffering from a plethora of pronouns and other particles of speech (including participles, both present and past) and a paucity of ears (or eyes, in this case) into which to pour them. All alliteration aside, we would like to offer a few observations of our own. After a quick perusal of “what’s hot” in blog reading on the interwebs, it would appear that the most popular of reading material appeals to readers whose level of intellectual inquiry rivals that of desert snakes basking on rocks in the sun, enjoying the warmth and the fact that they don’t need to consider its source. Popular subjects are: hair and skin care; weight loss; how an old man made his equally old wife smile on their 65th wedding anniversary while one of them was in an iron lung; and cute kittens. You are indeed blessed to have three regular commenters who have inquiring minds and enjoy your plays on words (both forwards and backwards), your clever musical offerings and astute political assessments. We suggest, however, that if you really want to reach a wider reading public, you gather your missives into a volume, rigorously edited for spelling, grammar and syntax, and submit it to a publisher. You could rival Uncle John. If you don’t know who that is, we humbly suggest you look him up. You’ll find him in the bathroom reading section of the book store.
With all due respect and consideration,
We remain,
El
I think we live in a world of memes and videos, shared incessantly without thought and effort.
Speaking of without thought, I’m struggling to grasp a connection to Schrodinger, which reminds me of something I would tell you for which you would have a comment. Knowing what your comment might be, there is no need to tell you.
All around, the question appears to be who is to blame more. or less. Or something.
I tend to always blame myself first… y’ know; get that half of the question out of the way beforehand. Were my posts ‘killer’ enough, I’d be complaining about the volume of traffic on my site.
Schrodinger? He’s the fellow whose equations proved, (though he hadn’t intended it that way) that our cows weren’t ‘real’ until I opened the barn door and saw ’em at 5 AM.
No good: I tried that a couple times. Turns out that if the calves miss a feeding by 4 hours, you can hear ’em bitching from way down at the crick.
My Esteemed El:
Your well-formulated thoughts have been taken deeply into consideration. The management of this site is, as we speak, working toward creating content which is a ‘better fit’ with the general audience whose tastes you so well described. How could we have been so unaware of the ‘TB-porn’ fetish which ‘under my radar’ has quietly become a major driver in readership statistics? And my 13+ cats and kittens have obligingly agreed to ‘hold poses’ for my primitive box camera.
And so, with your assistance, I intend to become a web-force with whom to be reckoned, a goal up with whose strictures I need belatedly to learn to put.
As always…
I feel ya, bro. Actually, having given this subject more thought, as one tends to when it works its way under the skin and festers there, the problem is not the lack of readership, but the quality. Quite frankly, I am delighted to have the handful of dedicated readers I do who, when they choose to comment (which is not often), have interesting and insightful things to say and whom I feel I am addressing as equals. I would be appalled if my blog were suddenly overrun by people who were only interested in oohing and aahing over photos of Suzie who, I remind you, is only visiting. How does one reach a larger sample of the kind of reader you actually want here? I don’t know. But I do know that if you had a Facebook account (Gourd forbid) and “shared” your blog post there every time you updated, you would attract more readers. At least your “friends” would know about it.
I have an optimization job for you… when can you start? 🙂
Hey, dat’s me:’ The Optimizer’. How’s tomorrow sound?
Why write, if the world is not reading? A question, certainly. To answer a question with a question: why vote, if your individual vote makes no difference to the outcome?
Your soft small voice speaks through the earthquake, win, and fire. It’s audible above the babble of the billion baboons.
As usual; new light, or darkness on the subject:
Folks who disdain to vote in elections with millions of like- or opposite-minded fellow citizens are often chastised about their ‘civic duty’. “What, to piss in the ocean to warm it up?” they may counter.
Moral: I blog so that none shall say later that ‘He didn’t even try.’
Thanks for your rating of my simian , at-times symbolic simplistic smirks. At least I have an entry in the Supreme Archive in the sky.
I refer, of course, to the last verse of “Brewing of Soma”
http://www.qhpress.org/quakerpages/qwhp/soma.htm
I take issue only with the challenge, ‘of course’ ha.
Huxley surely had read Whittier, or perhaps the Vedas, before including Soma in his novel,a reference I *do* recall.
But your ‘of course’ in a sense implies my manly duty to maintain an encyclopedic familiarity with every long and convoluted poem since the Iliad. (I did sense, from the flavor, a cultural reference, but for me on a normal hair-day, Wittman, Whittier, Whittacre, they’re all just fuzzy monikers. Call me psych-SOMA-tic.
Any such implication was entirely tongue-in-cheek. I had to google the phrase “small voice of calm” to remind myself where it came from (I recalled a hymn from boyhood). Whittier was news to me.
And my umbrage equally feigned for comic effect.
My dear father, having been ‘volunteered’ to do public-speaking tours , among other roles during the War, carefully hid a well-worn book of the quotes he often needed to back up his points. Too large to fit in his back pocket though, unlike today’s I-phone sages.
An interesting post. I must add, however, that another reason for many blogging it that it enjoyable! Like many bloggers I have a [reasonably 😉 ]well paid ,enjoyable, full time “day job” working in the IT industry but within my day job I have am clearly constraints on what I can and cannot do and must deliver to deadlines.
The beauty of blogging is that you can choose what to write about and when to write it. If you get bored about a particular topic then you can simply move on and write about something else. I have written a popular science blog for the last 3 and half years (www.thesciencegeek.org) and.. yes …there have been times when I have busy at work and haven’t fancied sitting down to research and write a post but these times are few and far between. For me although having readers and followers and engagement via likes and comments is important, my blog is fairly modest in the sense that I have about 1800 folower and real enjoyment it is gives me is fulfilling that creative urge.
The Science Geek
http://www.thesciencegeek.org
Greatly enjoy reading your thoughts here; I hadn’t thought of the very real difference between building roofs which *must* be completed by Monday, and the free joy of posting, on one’s own clock.
Interestingly, and with few hard facts, only clues, I’d imagined you steering the antennae out at Jodrell Bank. Luckily I have equal respect for folk doing the bits and bytes labour in our developed culture.
A pleasant day, and I dearly wish that either/both of us could have watched the impending eclipse in person/ JS