Getting Ideas Stick To Make Them Grow

I consider the "economics" of my blogging on the Millennium Development Goals sound. Economics is in quotes because I am not talking about making money. Using the Lionel Robbins quote from the the Wikipedia article on "Economics" "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.", it is based on putting in minimal investment, relatively speaking in influencing somebody else's behavior, for a maximum return, making the world a better place. Even if I only effect one or two people, there is the potential that with an aggregate number of people like me that at some point in time it could reach a tipping point.

Truth is that I am only going to reach a limited number of people. It is also true that I don't understand what makes the World Wide Web tick. I may know a few tricks of the trade, but why at one point people are clicking, then they are not and then they are again is beyond my understanding.

Still some insight might come from comparing this blog, ...New Paradigms, and my other blog Milestones For A New Millennium. This blog has been in existence for almost a year, ...New Millennium has been in existence since August 23rd of this year. Right now this blog has more subscribers than New Millennium, 10 compared to 8. Over the last month New Paradigms had 8 subscribers while New Millennium had 7 subscribers, so that fluctuates. For the life of the blog, New Paradigms had an average of 9 reaching a high of around 20. New Millennium has too short a life to worry about. So far New Paradigms is arguably has good of a blog as New Millennium.

It is harder to measure click rate since both blogs are on Blogger, and New Paradigms gets credited with most of the click on items counted by Feedburner. New Paradigms got 547 clicks in a month on 54 items with 0 views. New Millennium only got 6 clicks on 2 items with 64 views on 42 items in the same time period. The "business" of delivering global health services was the last New Millennium post to be click (4 times). The best for New Paradigms is still “WHO | What are the key health dangers for children at 129 times.

In regards to site visitors, New Paradigms has had 7 on average in the last month from all over the world Most stayed for a very short time, not really sure how that works. New Millennium only had 3 visitors on average.

According to Lijit, New Pathways had 385 pages views within a month, many coming from Indio, CA. 118 of those views were a result of re-searches with the most common term being "Creative-Destrucion". The average number of page views per day 12.85. New Millennium had 412 page views within a month with only 12 being for researches, a good number of them coming again from Indio, Ca. The average number of page views per day 13.3. I thought that maybe Lijit was located in Indio, but it's in Boulder, Colorado.

Be The Best For Your Self

Skellie at skelliewag.org recently wrote about how to Be the Best, Be Discovered.

The significance of this experience for me–and hopefully it seems significant to you as well–is that my motivation for working on the site was completely internal.

My goal was only to please myself by creating the best site I could and my rewards came in being proud of what I’d done. Visitor feedback was nice, but it only served to tell me that ’some’ people were enjoying the site. I didn’t really care so much about the volume, only that at least a few other people thought the site was as cool as I did. But if I had only ever received a handful of emails each week to say I was doing a good job, I probably would have been happy, and I probably would have maintained the site for a long time.

But I didn’t. Once stats came into the picture, my motivation was externalized. I wanted more visitors, and I started to only enjoy adding to the site when I felt it would see my stat counter climb. Whenever my visitor count dropped I felt deflated.

I did not start off on this venture with the intention of creating a blog to speak to the world. It was created as a means of discovering and organizing new sources of knowledge and experimenting with some of the tools of Web 2.0, all of which were new a year ago. The blog itself became the focus of the experiments and I discovered that somebody was reading what I wrote or saved. The surprising thing for me was that it doesn't really matter whether its 10 or 10,000, it still has an impact. I also tried chasing statistics, though I was only trying to get to double digits. Then everything deflated for a while.

So I decided to stop worrying about it and focus on what I liked best about doing this. I like having people click on items that I placed at del.icio.us and other places. It makes me believe that they possibly found something useful. While I do not have a large number of contacts, the contacts I do have are more like collaborators working for common . I appreciate the quality more than I yearn for the quantity. I am more impressed with the fact that somebody in Africa might read one of my posts than I am getting a thousand posts in Akron, Ohio (OK, I am lying, I would love to get a 1,000 posts in Akron, but if I don't still OK).

Now I have two active blogs and for whatever reason, because it still seems like tea leaves to me, this blog is doing better. Not next Facebook better, but better enough to make it enjoyable again. I enjoy doing this. Now, with this blog, I am no longer worrying as much about where I stand in blogosphere, but simply participating in World Wide discussions. I am still watching the stats at my other blog, but since it reflects my own views and opinions there won't be any chasing numbers there either.