Be Careful What You Wish For

Moved on! Check TheCairoCalls

Here is a resolution I won’t keep: I will not look again at traffic statistics for this blog.
Every blogger seems to be concerned about this; how many hits he/she is getting/day, the numbers of visitors, the frequency of the comments, and so on. Which is fine, but the problem is that sometime this diverts you from the real purpose of blogging, which is essentially to vent off; in one way or another. The problem, in my opinion, is that we approach blogging in the same way we approach any other project that we hope to succeed in. Most of us are trained to measure success using a quantitative measure (sales figures, school grades, etc…), which translates in web lingo to (page views, hits, and unique visitors). After a while we become obsessed with those measures, even if those quantitative measures has nothing to do with the goal of the project (again, to let off steam)
Actually, blogging success according to quantitative measures can have a lot of diverse effects. Aside from the fact that my dad is now reading my blog (which might at one day hold me back from, you know, doing my thing), the mere thought there are hundreds of people out there who will check and scrutinize your every word puts a lot of pressure on the writer. Instead of just venting off, you’re now venting off to an audience. And while it is fun to watch somebody let it go on stage, it gets somehow boring after a while. Plus, even if you managed to be lunatic-funny for a while, there is the possibility, even if you’re Egyptian, that you won’t have anything to bitch about. And without having anything to bitch about, the whole blogging world comes crumbling down. You wouldn’t want to read about how somebody is happy with his life; that would be annoying, wouldn’t it?
Also, there is the whole problem of identity. Whether a blogger should be anonymous or whether he should operate in the dark (that makes it sound sexy). For me this is not a very important issue. The reason I started blogging anonymously was that I didn’t want my views, expressed here in this blog, to be understood within the context of people’s view of me (the people I know). So if you think that I am as funny as an armchair, that shouldn’t stop you from enjoying all the incredible jokes in this blog.
Plus, now that a lot of my friends, who are most of my readers (hi, nini), know that I write this blog, I get into all sorts of strange situation. One of my friends came over and told me this “hey listen: you haven’t been blogging for a while. Why don’t you write about so and so…I’d really like to read something about that”
!!
If that is not “on-demand blogging”, I don’t know what is it!
P.S. I already copyrighted the term, so take your hand off, you #%@%$

Tags: blogging, blog, bitching