One of my earliest posts (2/18/02) was a gush about the 1993 film True Romance. I titled the post: “It Ain’t White Boy Day Is It?” …one of many great lines in the movie.
Of the 3,000+ posts here at smays.com, that one still gets the most comments. But I’m more proud of the fact that this post is the #1 Google search result for “white boy day.”
Out of how many results, you ask? Put quotation marks around the phrase: 5,490. No quotation marks: 9,880,000. This is why we blog.
Some of my other customers will sometimes ask me what they can do to make people come to their web sites.
I will tell them that while, yes, you can do Search Engine Optimization to “game the system” to a certain degree, the more honest approach is to put something online that makes people curious enough to click through and read the page. Not that I follow that advice myself… I’m too busy building others’ web sites.
But it’s interesting how few people actually do follow that advice. Blogging is a great thing, for many reasons– one of which is that it seems to spontaneously create a community of common interest around a person, a place, an idea, a thing, a process… it is, in many ways, unquantifiable until one starts to put whatever it is they have to say up on the page. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, this dialogue is created and begins to feed back into the process.
I wonder if perhaps it only really seems to happen in weblogs because such a phenomenon is incompatible with deliberate for-profit business activities. The difference between a hobby and a profession, so to speak, is that a pro claims to know what the outcome of a piece of work will be before it happens.
This delusion is anathema to letting go and allowing that unknown quantity to emerge and create an audience. We need to find a way to resolve these two philosophies of putting things on the web.
I get a couple hits everyday for a review I wrote about a Pro Form eliptical machine. It wasn’t glowing, to say the least.
They must hate that… but they haven’t called either.