Sunday, April 04, 2004
 

5,000 visits

As the saying goes, "Give the people what they want, and they'll beat a path to your door." Which, perversely, probably explains why it's taken 7 long months for unfutz to reach the 5,000 visit mark.

I'd love to say that it doesn't matter, that I'm just writing for the sake of expressing my thoughts (and cutting down on the amount I scream back at TV news programs), and that it makes no difference to me if people are reading or not. But, as much as I hate to admit it, it does matter, and it's a source of disappointment to me that more people don't come here, and that more of those that I do manage to lure onto the site don't seem to come back again.

Partly, I guess, it's a problem of being in a crowded marketplace: there are a lot of very good liberal/left blogs (which, come to think of it, really is a blessing), so many that I don't have time to keep up with them myself, and therefore I only go regularly to those few that seem to me to be the best of the best, the ones that appeal to me the most. I imagine many people are in the same position as I am, and if a blog doesn't have the right whatever to attract them, they have many other choices avaiable to them where they can try to find it.

That means, looking at it from a standpoint of marketing, that I need to actively position myself in some distinctive way to make unfutz stand out from the crowd, but even though I recognize the truth of that, I still have just enough of the spirit of the 60s in me to say "Screw that, I don't want to engage in an exercise in marketing, I just want to write whatever I feel like writing." And that means that I live with the low rates of visiting, and keep trying to suppress my envy at other sites which do (much) better.

But, that's all very negative, and unfair to those who have been visiting regularly. I used to refer to my two dozen regular readers, but I think I've reached the point where I can number them as at least three dozen, which, when you think about it, is a 50% improvement in the course of just a few months! I thank all of you who do stop by regularly, or semi-regularly, and hope that you'll all continue to do so as I work out, day by day, what it is that I'm about here. My only request is that those who are here on a repeat basis might think about dropping a comment now and then, just so I know that someone's out there.

I'll try not to publicly indulge in this particularly obsession again until we reach 10,000 visits.

Postscript: I'm not blind to the possibility, maybe even the probability, that people aren't flocking here because the contents of the site just isn't good enough, for which there is no one to blame for myself -- but I don't plan on beating myself up because of it. At the very least, I write what I think, and I believe that what I think has value, to myself if no one else.

Ed Fitzgerald | 4/04/2004 11:57:00 PM | | | del.icio.us | GO: TOP OF HOME PAGE







by

Ed Fitzgerald

Clowns to the left of me,
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HOUSE
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Martin van Creveld - The Transformation of War

Jay Feldman - When the Mississippi Ran Backwards

Martin van Creveld - The Rise and Decline of the State

Alfred W. Crosby - America's Forgotten Pandemic (1989)
bush & company are...
absolutist
aggresive
anti-Constitutional
anti-intellectual
arrogant
authoritarian
blame-placers
blameworthy
blinkered
buckpassers
calculating
class warriors
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Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
recently seen
Island in the Sky (1952)

Robot Chicken

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Elliott Abrams
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David Addington
Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson
Roger Ailes (FNC)
John Ashcroft
Bob Bennett
William Bennett
Joe Biden
John Bolton
Alan Bonsell (Dover BofE)
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George W. Bush
Saxby Chambliss
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Dick Cheney
Lynne Cheney
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Trent Lott
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"American Fundamentalists"
by Joel Pelletier
(click on image for more info)


Chris Matthews
Mitch McConnell
Stephen C. Meyer (DI)
Judith Miller (ex-NYT)
Zell Miller
Tom Monaghan
Sun Myung Moon
Roy Moore
Dick Morris
Rupert Murdoch
Ralph Nader
John Negroponte
Grover Norquist
Robert Novak
Ted Olson
Elspeth Reeve (TNR)
Bill O'Reilly
Martin Peretz (TNR)
Richard Perle
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ralph Reed
Pat Robertson
Karl Rove
Tim Russert
Rick Santorum
Richard Mellon Scaife
Antonin Scalia
Joe Scarborough
Susan Schmidt (WaPo)
Bill Schneider
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Margaret Spellings
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guest-blogging
All the fine sites I've
guest-blogged for:




Be sure to visit them all!!
recent listening
Smash Mouth - Summer Girl

Poulenc - Piano Music

Pop Ambient 2007
influences
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Frank Herbert
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Comments
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.

Entertaining, interesting, intelligent, informed and informative comments will always be welcome, even when I disagree with them.

I am the sole judge of which of these qualities pertains.


E-mail
All e-mail received is subject to being published on unfutz without identifying names or addresses.

Corrections
I correct typos and other simple errors of grammar, syntax, style and presentation in my posts after the fact without necessarily posting notification of the change.

Substantive textual changes, especially reversals or major corrections, will be noted in an "Update" or a footnote.

Also, illustrations may be added to entries after their initial publication.
the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
2005 koufax awards

BEST BLOG (NON-PRO)

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r.i.p.
the proud unfutz guarantee
If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.

If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.

(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)

Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.

original content
© 2003-2008
Ed Fitzgerald

=o=

take all you want
but credit all you take.



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