Some caution, some advice

Sometimes I blog on my hit count, like I did in the post just below.

You might think that I am obsessed with such meaningless numbers or caught up in some sort of race. That isn't REALLY true.

I watch my numbers occasionally, but I don't think about them every day.

I guess I am just wondering if anything I do will cause my numbers to grow. I don't really have illusions that my blog will become famous or well-known. The odds against that are just so high. (But yes, I still check Newsweek every week, secretly wondering if some technology editor will take pity on me.) The reason I think about it, I guess, is that I habitually read other blogs by people that have been doing it for five or six years and, through some sort of alchemy or extreme networking, found a way to build an audience of critical mass.

So, I wonder how to do that . . .

But then I read stuff like this from one of the BusinessWeek bloggers: "I've put a huge amount of work into my FIVE blogs and gotten next to nothing in return. Sure, I've made a few good contacts, but I was doing that with email and my five web sites before I even started blogging. . . . I won't say that it's been a complete waste of time, but I can confidently say that it has not been a productive use of my time."

Pretty harsh, right?

But still I persevere.

Others on the BusinessWeek blog suggest that I post on Apple, as a way to drive up my hits. So, okay--have you seen the new Apple Mouse? It is completely the coolest mouse ever.

Unfortunately, I have a already very cool trackball mouse for my work computer and the new Apple mouse, no matter how cool it is . . . it isn't cordless, so I'm not gonna use it with my iBook. I guess I'll just have to wait for the cordless, Bluetooth version.

So, there you go . . . I'm linking to successful blogs; I'm writing about Apple. Anybody want to discuss Harry Potter some more?