PLAYING TO AN AUDIENCE OF NONE

I have rather been dwelling upon this lately, and I know that, like a rather impressive Antipodean bent stick which you just can’t seem to get rid of, I do tend to return to this kind of thinking rather too often, but, if it pleases you to do so, bear with me…

Again…

It’s been a funny old couple of weeks here in the gloomier corridors of Lesser Blogfordshire. The old brain has been curling and looping through another of its cycles of self-doubt and worry as, once more, it becomes obvious that the strange non-entertainment of these thoughts and musings seem to be failing to reach out and tickle at the fancies of my loyal few visitors.

I don’t ever really understand the ebbings and flowings of these things. About a month ago, around about the beginning of May, I started putting together a particularly bleak little piece reflecting upon how unlikely it seemed that the numbers of people still choosing to visit the jolly streets of Lesser Blogfordshire seemed unlikely to ever reach the giddy, but hardly vertiginous, heights that they once did.

Each month has various targets to reach to remain on course for a par score or surpass any of its predecessors: October – 393; December – 462; February – 472; April – 535; November – 539;  January 627 and March (with the quirky numeric oddity of the Professor Brian Cox factor) – 1108. The month of May struggled for a while, but eventually sailed up to third place with a very satisfactory 618, so, ultimately the ship still seems to be steering a steady course towards keeping much the same quantity of people at the very least content, if not exactly happy, with what you’re being served up. Getting past that October figure is always the clincher, as that was the last month where the postings were regularly less than “daily” and if things have dropped below that, then I know that I really have finally bored the world into going away. If “being boring” could ever be considered as a potential Olympic sport, maybe then there is still a hope that one day I’ll be polishing a winners’ medal.

But then, every once in a while, the odd day dawns when we, the little wizards of Lesser Blogfordshire, barely trouble the bloggy-tallypeeps, those employed to be the stern gatekeepers and headcounters at the boundaries of this sorry Shire. Perhaps you’re nipping in through a fire exit left craftily ajar by one of your chums, but I think, even if that was the case, I must continue to trust their counting wisdom, even though I am very aware that the mere fact of just plugging my nonsense on Twitworld automatically puts two numbers in the pile, and so I have my doubts at the strength of their eyesight sometimes.

Without their rules to guide us, after all, we would descend into anarchy.

Nevertheless, I remain unsure whether some of those precious numbers are in actuality just machine-intelligences turning their electric-eyes upon me from some faraway server, or actual real human beings. This remains anyone’s guess. Equally, you can also never really tell how many of these visitors are just mistakes, or how many of them are just the result of a search for something else getting an unexpected result that is of no interest whatsoever. How many of those numbers are actually real readers reading every word could be very few indeed, it really is too hard to tell.

Then another morning dawns and I have decided that I can’t be bothered any more, but a spark of thought, or maybe a pang of something that can only really be described as guilt at my potential neglect of my “audience of one” (as Elton John might have once thought when he wrote that song – was his life ever so bleak that he believed what he was writing?) finds me tapping out a few more words and sighing as I commit them out into the webiverse for the ritual daily humiliation of watching those numbers fail to spin.

June isn’t looking all that great so far, though, and I’m pretty sure that (as far as I can tell) few (if any) of these musings are ever “forwarded” or “recommended” by anyone. That’s not your fault, by the way, I should make that clear. After all these months, I think I’m still a bit vague about the settings you’re supposed to set to make such things possible, assuming anyone ever would. I’ve even been assured that more people than I think read this stuff, but unless they’re doing it over each other’s shoulders, on the same machine in a cybercafe in Nether Wallop, I really don’t see how. Maybe the counters are wrong, or perhaps if you read things via the “view” options (you might be aware of these, the sidebar, the flipcard and so forth) maybe they don’t count back at head office, but I doubt it. Those cold, hard and slight numbers is what I get, and, believe me when I say I’m grateful for whatever of them I can muster.

Sometimes I think I try too hard and worry about these things far too much. At the time of writing, and despite a certain amount of pathetic whoring of the item, the “Time Lord Mathematics” idea of which I was so terribly pleased a couple of weekends ago, and the sort of thing I felt that I wanted to share with a wider group of people who I thought might enjoy it, only got fifty pairs of eyes looking at it, exactly the same number who looked at the much less advertised piece of nonsense about creating a “flyer” although that included an unexpected (and still unexplained) flurry of interest one morning from thirty eight people in Denmark, who I ultimately came to suspect felt that they’d been led here under false pretences. However, those two items remained (in terms of the interest shown by the world) head, shoulders and torso above anything else from the last week, a bank holiday week which found my tedious observations upon series TV getting ten viewings for the first part with five returning for the difficult second article.

I fear that cancellation looms.

Meanwhile, a mirthless observation on my own bank holiday experiences soared towards a mighty sixteen of you being stimulated by it, with one of my occasional scattergun Generic Postings getting eight more a couple of days later. The strange tale of a cake called Herman amused another five of you, and some soul-bearing about my experiences in the choppy waters of email regaled a sturdy if underwhelming three. Over in the other places, my experiment with the so-called tabloid fared even worse, with a mighty seven people taking the time to have a gander over the course of an entire week.

I suspect that it may have to go.

The Writers’ Group blog seems to have nearly breathed its last, too, but that is only to be expected as it’s been suffering from terminal neglect for quite some considerable time now. Ever since its earliest days it has flown ever so close to a being troubled-free time of it, but then one or two sparks of interest have kept it away from zero for yet another month, but I fear that will be its ultimate fate quite soon now.

I know that I’ve bombarded you with a lot of pointless numbers today, which, if anything is likely to, is more than likely to make the last of you finally head off towards the horizon slamming the door closed behind you, but I just wanted to let you know two things really.

The first is that your visits here are truly, truly appreciated. The second is that I really don’t know how impressive or unimpressive these numbers are for one of these presentations. What do my blogging colleagues consider to be a “successful” day? Do their musings and thoughts regularly reach thousands of eager readers every day? Am I missing the point and writing things that are really of such a minority interest that there is no real point in me doing them at all? Are my expectations far too high? I am perfectly prepared to just shut up if that’s the most general consensus, or at least move my thoughts into a more mainstream direction. Would just carrying on with more of the same eclectic mix continue to be just as stimulating to you loyal few, or would even that loyalty feel unrewarded and make you feel shunned or cheapened if I set about seeking out a wider audience? If I do have one ambition left for these simple tales that I have been telling, it is a selfish one, that someone from the big grown-up world of real writing, perhaps even someone whose own writing I have admired, might stick their nose around the door one day and tell me that what I’m churning out is okay. I really don’t want anything much more than that, just a curt “not bad” would do, although I accept that it’s unlikely to happen.

Marketing is an absolutely swinish thing, but so is wasting hours creating things that are really of no real interest to anyone, so I’m starting to believe that a rubicon may have to be crossed, a direction chosen, and, horror of horrors, a decision taken. Not that, in the great scheme of things, any of this really matters, but, it seems, it does seem to matter to me. Mind you, I’m an odd sort of a cove at the best of times (whenever they might be), so it’s probably best to just leave me alone and let get on with it. After all, it keeps me happy and doesn’t seem to bother anyone else.