Blogoticking Revisited
We bloggers like our traffic. I do, which is strange because I don’t get much. At SayUncle, I’ve gotten just over 20K hits since August of 2002. 8K of those were in two days from an Instalanche. Of course, it’s mostly my own fault as I suck at blogoticking. I don’t pay for ads. I don’t troll (if I post a link in someone’s comments section it is because I feel it adds to the discussion). I’ve only emailed a few bloggers with links to my site and that was because I thought they’d be interested in what I sent them. Of course, a gratuitous link in response would be nice but I didn’t expect it.
You should notice that the title of my page is Remember, I do this to entertain me . . . Not you.
My lack of traffic is my own fault as I’ve not put forth much effort into actually drawing traffic. Even when I ordered all of you to link to my site, only some folks did. Enough of my crying!
Apparently, there comes a time when you get so much traffic that you don’t care about offending people. Or (more likely) you’re offending people in an effort to draw more traffic to your site. I guess it’s reverse blogoticking. Mac-a-ro-nies has a good summary of same anger in the Blogosphere. Is it genuine anger or attempts to draw traffic? Her nice little summary consists of:
Someone just generally being insulting to other bloggers – why link to someone whom you’re just going to insult? If you’re going to disprove a contention that’s one thing, but just calling someone a name isn’t productive.
Very angry commenters
A blogger threatening to quit blogging because he doesn’t like where blogging is going (it requires marketing)
And someone spending $376 a month in ads to get you to their site
Most seems to be an effort to get traffic.
In the exact opposite vein, banning your commenters is popular too. Hey, then why do you have comments? I can understand if someone is being genuinely offensive but banning folks for criticizing your writing style and making bad jokes about Florida seems kind of silly. I haven’t had to ban anyone (and I don’t think I would unless it was just offensive) but that’s because my traffic level doesn’t warrant it. I have a few loyal readers but not droves that come here en masse. Naturally, I am jealous because I want enough traffic where I could ban commenters and not care that I may lose some of my audience. If you’re going to have such stringent guidelines, why have comments? The really big blogs don’t even have comments because of the massive trolling that would occur.
Of course, whoring yourself is always acceptable too.
And in the same vein of my previous post on blogotics, I order you to link back or else. And by else I mean nothing, really.
