Our rise up the charts of blogosphere popularity was very short-lived. It still boggles my mind that 28% of the total visitors who have dropped by TRT in 6 1/2 years showed up on one day!! But since that meteoric spike, each day the visitor logs have grown more sparse and, in another day or two, things will return to normal.
Because I love statistics, it was a bit of a heady experience. It was really neat to have two different days in which we received more visitors each day than our best previous month. Even when our visitor totals fell back into the hundreds (from the thousands), it still was kinda cool.
Yet, there is another part of the equation that bugs the hell out of me. The post that caught the public's fancy was a side issue (the death of Storm Chaser's Matt Hughes). While it certainly came from my heart, it wasn't a post about this blog's chief topic -- philosophical Taoism. The massive influx of traffic only underscores for me our society's unhealthy love affair with celebrity.
Imagine if all this insane interest was about Lao Lzu, the Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, Taoism or simply philosophy. Imagine if people got this excited about global warming, ending poverty, protesting war or being more humane to their fellow humans and all other beings. Unfortunately, those kinds of topics aren't glamorous and so they don't seem to tickle the public's imagination.
One aspect of Taoist thought is learning to accept life as it is. And so, Scott and I will continue to plug away, writing posts about the unpopular questions of life and existence itself. Maybe, someday, more folks will show an interest in such matters. Even if they don't, it matters to us as well as to you, our loyal readers.
We will continue to write on Taoist themes and people can come or not come as each sees fit.
Because I love statistics, it was a bit of a heady experience. It was really neat to have two different days in which we received more visitors each day than our best previous month. Even when our visitor totals fell back into the hundreds (from the thousands), it still was kinda cool.
Yet, there is another part of the equation that bugs the hell out of me. The post that caught the public's fancy was a side issue (the death of Storm Chaser's Matt Hughes). While it certainly came from my heart, it wasn't a post about this blog's chief topic -- philosophical Taoism. The massive influx of traffic only underscores for me our society's unhealthy love affair with celebrity.
Imagine if all this insane interest was about Lao Lzu, the Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, Taoism or simply philosophy. Imagine if people got this excited about global warming, ending poverty, protesting war or being more humane to their fellow humans and all other beings. Unfortunately, those kinds of topics aren't glamorous and so they don't seem to tickle the public's imagination.
One aspect of Taoist thought is learning to accept life as it is. And so, Scott and I will continue to plug away, writing posts about the unpopular questions of life and existence itself. Maybe, someday, more folks will show an interest in such matters. Even if they don't, it matters to us as well as to you, our loyal readers.
We will continue to write on Taoist themes and people can come or not come as each sees fit.
I'm glad you will keep on doing just what you have been doing because it is the philosophical taoism that brought me to your site in the first place and has kept me here in the second and I found your heartfelt comments on suicide quite in keeping with the way I see your site and the fact that the posts were generated by what happened to a celebrity was, to me at least, not the most important aspect of your discussion. Just my take on things, but I like what you (and Scott) are doing. Thanks for doing it!
ReplyDeleteI used to post on AOL message boards a lot bout ten years ago. I ended up really liking a couple of music boards, just for the people. We never ever talked about the real topic (one board was "misheard lyrics"). Once in a while AOL would feature one or another of those boards on their welcome page, which popped up when you logged on.
ReplyDeleteFor the next several days, there's be a FLOOD of posts about this or that song someone had heard wrong; it was actually kind of sad, since it was just people posting their misheard lyric, to which no one would respond because of the sheer volume and the fact that everyone was there to talk about their OWN lyric.
After a few days, we regulars would finally resurrect our own threads and get back to our conversations, like survivors of a bombed out town venturing back out amid the wreckage to find their surviving townsmen.
So, don't let the sudden rush get you down, because they're not coming by for the Taoism. Like the teeny-boppers on my beloved message boards, they aren't the kind of people you really want reading your stuff anyways.
Or, well, maybe they are, because wisdom is good for all, but, when they're ready, they will find their way to their own enlightenment. All that's left for us is to have compassion.
Also, keep in mind, that in my above example, I was one of those people who swung by those message boards for their intended topic, and ended up sticking around for the unintended one. In your case it's the other way around, but you'll probably pick up a couple readers anyways.
ReplyDeletewell generally the conceptual topics are less popular than the shallow ones
ReplyDeleteCurious when you peaks were as Daily Cup of Tao had two recent peaks all out of the blue with a 400% rise in readers on 22nd Oct and 29 Oct. It also had two other smaller peaks of 200% rise on 15 Oct and 11 Oct.
ReplyDeletePS I put these peaks down to a naughty Spider Bot who did not (as supposed to) not register itself as a hit.
ReplyDelete