Over the past few months, I noticed certain trends on this blog. I notice certain 'people' visiting regularly and it gave me a reassuring sense that some of you were real. Of course, I never heard from many of those 'regulars'. I'd just look at my stats and think 'oh, that person from Eastern Europe is visiting again' or 'it's the reader in Paris' or 'the Ukraine'.
I decided to move to a private blog hoping that those regulars would come visit and become new regulars over there. A couple have but not that many. Certainly, not enough to justify the existence of this blog but enough to justify the existence of that other blog, which is written solely for real people to enjoy. I'd rather entertain one person I know that a 1000 people who might be specters of the web, robots, spiders, web scrapers...
What's odd is that despite not blogging here for days, I still see the hits coming from those 'regulars', which makes me wonder if they really ever existed. Might they just be machines, programmed to hit the blog, for reasons unknown? It's like they have a routine which doesn't adapt to my disappearance.
On days when my private blog is quiet, I miss having those regular hits but, the truth is that I don't miss having fake regulars. I don't want to be speaking only to machines. I wanted people who actually thought this blog was worth reading.
I suppose I always wrote this blog out of a sense of despair, even loneliness. I genuinely relish having human contact with intelligent people. I want to share the things I do with real people of a similar mind. Well, sod it. I've issued an invite and anybody who asked, got the password to the new blog. The thing is, you specters of the web: I really am blogging privately. Everything that used to go here for all is now behind a wall. Knock on the door if you're real. Otherwise, I refuse to believe that you even exist.
Dang! You got us bang to rights! Okay, I confess - I am but a figment of your imagination; even this reply is just your subconscious fulfilling your desire for interaction with common humanity (and who could get more common than me?).
ReplyDeleteBeing so insubstantial, I am shy, preferring to mingle in an open pub, than to knock on a closed smokey-drinky, hence my reluctance to indulge in your cabal - if I attempt to knock, my ethereal knuckles might just pass straight through, which will be embarrassing for both of us.
Ah, you should know I didn't mean people whose names I know. I mean the silent readers, the readers who religiously seem to visit each but don't contact me for the new blog. I'm guessing they were never real people.
ReplyDeleteAs for not knocking, I wouldn't be so presumptuous as to send emails to people without their consent otherwise I'd have done so before now. I could give you the password to the new blog here in this comment but it sort of ruins the point of wanting it to be private, invitation only. However, I see an email attached to your comment so expect an invite in the next few minutes. ;)