A Time of Magic

Will I ever get an audience is a question that I’m sure a lot of bloggers ask themselves when they’re starting out in blogging.

The problem is that almost all blogs run into the sand within about three months so getting through that barrier is critical. They stop for all kinds of reasons naturally. Some find that blogging just isn’t for them and that explains a whole lot of the abandoned blogs on the various free blogging networks. Others start a very specialised blog and when whatever they’re writing about finishes, so does their blog which obviously explains a lot of abandoned travel blogs and university based blogs. Most confusing are the blogs which seem to be powering ahead and which just stop one day for no apparent reason at all.

One category must be the experimental blogs or at least those which turn into experimental ones. For instance, some years ago I started On a Postcard with the idea that it would be a collection of very short blog entries on the two broad themes of “daily life” and “something to ponder”. To be honest the idea just sprang out of the availability of what seemed like a great domain name and thus wasn’t a great reason to kick off a blog. Well, as you might expect from such a beginning, the blog ran into the sand after a while. However, interestingly one post managed to pick up a lot of traffic because google picked up the image on it as a featured image. Anyway, that set me thinking about it and towards the end of last year I revived the blog as an experiment into attracting hits via images and also of intensifying the hits by way of writing further articles based on the search terms that the blog was attracting.

How’s it doing? Well, it’s only been going properly for a couple of months now but already it’s getting a steady stream of hits relating to relationships for reasons which escape me and for cold weather clothing for seemingly sensible reasons. So, I’ve written a short sequence of posts on each of those areas to see what happens.

If this approach is a success I’ll roll it out to my other blogs in due course but ’tis early days yet.

Most of the time I’m sure that you don’t really think about where a particular blog that you might be reading is actually published.

Why would you? After all, for a general article the main difference that you’d notice would be that a British/Irish/Australian/New Zealand blog would say “colour”, an American/Canadian one “color” and other related differences. Aside from that there would be differences in the sports talked about and the news agencies referred to. However, by and large in a general post you would barely notice where it had been written so long as the author was a native English speaker.

However, there is one major difference that we experienced (“we” being me and Wendy) late last week when we received a call from the police telling us that we were in contempt of court. That particular concept doesn’t exist in the American legal lexicon thanks to the First Amendment but basically means that you’re not allowed to “publish” details of an ongoing court case where there are “reporting restrictions” in effect.

But what does “publish” actually mean? Up to now there’s been something of an ongoing debate about whether or not bloggers could be counted as journalists. Aside from anything else, if they weren’t journalists then legally they couldn’t be publishing anything, could they? Well, apparently we ARE journalists now or at least are being treated by the courts as though we were part of “the media”.

Curious as to the case that triggered this? Well, since this particular blog is published in London I can’t tell you about it…