Imagine if we judged women based on metrics like the # of glances she attracts on the sidewalk or the # of requests she receives to divulge her digits. That would hardly tell us who we’d like to shack up with, right? More likely it would reveal to us the type of female who seems to proudly and cheerfully have issues with keeping her boobs in her blouse. Which is fine, I suppose, if what you’re looking for is a thrill on the cheap, but not so much if what you’re looking for is someone you wouldn’t mind chatting with the next morning.
And isn’t that kind of what we do when we judge blogs? Aren’t visits, pageviews, backlinks, subscribers, comments and other such silly metrics just the digital equivalent of cleavage glances?
Such metrics tell you something, sure, but I can hardly believe that they tell us much about the sorts of things we actually care about.
This frustrates me because, as a blogger, I want to know how I’m doing. I’m interested in whether individual posts land with people, and I get some indication of that (albeit it a frustratingly low-signal one) through responses from friends and through blog comments. But what I really want to know and what I have almost no sense of is how I’m doing overall. I want to know how this blog fits into people’s lives. E.g., for those who read it, is this blog a diversion? A mild antidote to boredom? Or is it an important part of their mental life? And if it is, how does it compare to other sources? Is it relatively dispensable or relatively indispensable?
And cleavage glances aren’t going to tell me that.
I have a thought for a better metric-type-thing to get at these questions, but before I divulge I wanted to toss this to the abyss and see if you have any thoughts on better ways to measure a blog.
Fellow bloggers, are you, too, frustrated with the lack of meaningful “feedback”?
Bankruptcy tourism
1 hour ago
