My site traffic has been up significantly* this month, despite anemic posting.

Most of it I owe to the hit-and-run gossip juiceheads coming from a particular celebrity board (note to all you looky-loos: yes, I really did kiss him—on the lips—and yes, there really were zero fireworks on either side). I can’t really count that because, like the geeks Merlin sent over back in October when I did a rare (but spicy) riff about my unbridled nerdlust, you don’t gain new readers from your random meanderings, and pretty much all I do on communicatrix is randomly meander. What can I say? Sometimes I like to talk about Sartre; sometimes I like to talk about my twat. Hey—who’s paying for bandwidth here?

Anyway, occasionally someone funny and smart and literate will stumble upon my messy playpen and dig it and tell a few people and maybe even grow my actual reader base, and that’s fantastico, dude. To ease the burden of clicking through the 80 billion links you’ll have to by the time communicatrix is a household word, Michael Blowhard is the most likely patient zero for this here website, sending the far more quality-consistent and popular Neil, who sent the equally far more quality-consistent and popular Brandon, who has already sent more readers my way than I can ever hope to repay him for in tequila or sexual favors. (See? Booze! Sex! Tortuous, English-major-gone-mad sentences full of mismatched words, references and phrases! No wonder I am shunned like sushi at the Sizzler: I’m so incongruous, I can only mean trouble down the road!**)

Regardless of my lack of stickiness***, I still thrill to see those quality leads show up in my stats. You would, too, if your schizo blog cast such a wide, useless net. No one of substance reads me, but by gum, I am at the top of the Google rankings when anyone is looking for the 411 on NSA or the human organ that Georgia O’Keeffe based all those flower paintings on. Still, some things completely confound me.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Samantha Burns.

Somehow, I wound up on Miss Burns’ ‘random bloglog’, which, as she states in her highly comprehensive FAQ, “used to be part of a private blogroll for exploring new parts of the blogsphere, but several readers asked for it to be made public, and voila, it’s now public.”

Firstly, I cannot fathom having “several” readers ask me for anything. I’m lucky if one or two of you post about your fantastic poker site. Secondly, I can’t imagine myself in the RSS reader next to:

1. Britpoppa, who closed up his gossip shop in May of this year
2. Marc, whose ‘Messages’ bear the tagline “trying to keep up with God’s worldwide wonders”
3. Tony, who moved his After Grog Blog to a new URL in May of 2003 (what is it about May, I wonder?)
4. Taranne, who moved her whole Rue to a new URL a year ago (I think…it’s in French)

But thirdly—and most importantly—I couldn’t figure out where Samantha Burns came from. She’s been around since July and already she’s a Large Mammal in the TLB food chain, linked out the ass on Technorati and a finalist for Best Canadian Blog in the Weblog Awards. And while she is quite adorable (see photo, above), it’s not like she sits around pissing off liberals or yakking about her twat.

I think I will just have to get down with the fact that, if anything, I’m the tortoise in this blog race****. Perhaps it is due to my horrible coding skills: I don’t know how to make those fancy Javascript links that have my imprimatur in them even as they direct people elsewhere. Also, I have this little focus problem. As in, I can’t focus on this blog enough to come up with a cohesive theme, much less a marketing strategy.

Or maybe it’s really true that I’m just here for the beer—the blogging equivalent of ‘beer’ being ‘freedom to write whatever the hell I feel like’.

That’s bullshit, of course. I want my micro-brand-Oprah empire just like everyone else in this Oklahoma land rush we call the blogosphere. But after 10 years of writing ad copy and 3 more writing fascist sketch comedy, formats give me hives and self-promotion feels too much like a busman’s holiday.

I pay the price, of course: my little ditties may draw raves and earn me trips to Montreal, but my soapbox sketches still clear the theater.

Ah, well. You two are still here with me, right? Right?

Shit.

“Hello…Samantha?…”

xxx
c

*These things are relative, Chuckles. I’m wagering my former writing partner, Rick Crowley, will be able to eat me twice over in TTLB by the end of the year.

**I had really hoped to squeeze in a sneeze bar reference, but that paragraph was getting ridiculous even by my decidedly loopy standards.

***Yes, I’m reading The Tipping Point. As well as Blink, that Suze Orman book, Found, Getting Things Done (again) and the pertinent content from the New Yorker dating back to J-U-L-Y of 2004. Don’t ever let anyone tell you my eyes aren’t bigger than my stomach.

****Although recent reconfigurings in the TLB knocked me down from a brief
high of Flappy Bird to a shameful low of crunchy crustaceonness.

NOTE: This post originally uploaded on December 13th at 9:15am, but had to be back-dated since, as usual these days, TypePad status is SNAFU.

TOPICS: bloggers, blogging, communicatrix, popularity, Samantha Burns, TTLB.

This entry was posted by the communicatrix on Monday, December 12th, 2005 at and is filed under The Quotidian Ones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.