Bad Habit - Mixing Medium and Message Posts

One bad habit of this weblog has been discussing whatever particular topic or getting across a particular message that interested me, be it on economics, science or other subject and in the same post discussing the medium by which it was presented, specifically this weblog and the web 2.0 technology that it uses. The result being that one could not tell if I was speaking of fish or fowl.

In my last two posts I wrote about message, this time on microcredit. This post I write about the medium, how this weblog itself has changed over time. This weblog was started with the intention of being a learning tool designed to gather and organize information. It evolved into a diary or journal documenting that effort through the posting of the blogs. It also provided me an opportunity to participate in various forums. It was also intended as an experiment to test out various web 2.0 tools and to see what effect that they had. It was not intended to be a soapbox or a business.

My reason for stating this again, on the chance that any of my average of 12 readers actually looked at every post, is that even if my numbers are minimal there have been relative bumps in which the numbers spiked. It is not getting the high numbers that interested me with this weblog, it is what factors brought about the change. Now it is beyond the scope of this weblog to determine how much benefit anyone actually gets out of it. The closest one can get is number of clicks as measured by FeedBurner. Back in January my click numbers jumped up. There seemed to be a far greater degree of interest in the World Health Organization site on the key health risks to children than in past websites I had linked to or posts. Then the numbers went back down but not zero. Now, on a monthly basis my most popular links or posts will pick up one or two clicks a day giving me a high of 34 clicks per month for highest links or post during the last month or a total for the month of 622 clicks back to the original sites on 55 items. Grand total, since October 27, 2007 there have been 5,559 clicks back to the site on 270 items.

These started off to be to mostly other websites to which this weblog linked, but I have noticed that it now also including the actual posts created for this weblog. Recently this weblog got its first direct Google Reader subscriber (yeah, I checked) and another 17 through AideRSS. (Update 5/21/08 Didn't last) What is also of interest is that what people click has little relation to what I blog about at the time, more on that later. People find there own connections of interest and I encourage that.