Disc

At the Blondon Loggers meetup last night there were a couple of speakers talking about how to encourage comments and search engine optimisation, interesting stuff. I've had a mixed experience of blogging myself and I ought to scrawl something about it here.

I've had several blogs in the past few years, I can vaguely remember drinking in the Crnrvn in Glasgow and Idles explaining this blogging thing. I'll try to list the blogs in chronological order...

• manc_ill_kid
• Glasgow Indie Eyespy
• Glasgow Indie Eyespy blog
• Hot chicks from obscure indie bands
• National Novel Writing Day
• Last Night From Glasgow
• Ivan Lendil Music
• Last Night From Glasgow Indie Eyespy
• In Lieu of Bowlie
• Naked Chicks on Post-it Notes
• Ill Theatre
• Londonly
• Naked Pigeons on Post-it Notes

Its a a small minded bag of titles using a combination of noun, adjective, location, that's my signature.

Of all of those blogs, the naked chicks site is the most popular, well, I mean it gets the most hits, as opposed to people saying, hey that's really nice, in which case Last Night From Glasgow is the most popular, it had videos of bands playing gigs in my bedroom. Great idea, not very successful.

For each of the sites, its very specific about what it is, personal blog, music video blog, gig review blog, etc, and in terms of traffic they all follow the same trend. It starts off as s ecret, no hits for the first few days, then bumpy spikes, and after three months its reached a plateau, with occasional spikes of a hundred times as many hits as usual, before dropping back to a fractionally higher plateau.

For traffic, its a mixed bag

• personal blogs, they get around 500 hits a month if I've been particularly evil,
• music blogs, they get 1000 hits a month, no one really gives a crap about crap bands unless I make up lies about them,
• naked chicks blog, it gets around 60,000 hits a month

The other week there was this petition promoted by the UK centre-right political blogs, about ten sites posted about it for a couple of days, and after a week the petition had mustered 25,000 signatures according to the 10Downingstreet website. I tracked it and did a wee graph showing how interest waned. If you read this blog often, you'll know that about a week later BoingBoing covered one of my videos. BoingBoing is the fifth most popular blog online according to technorati. My video got about 25,000 hits from them.

If you want to promote something, coverage on BoingBoing is equal to the massed ranks of the UK centreright political blogs. By way of contrast and scale, a video on my naked chicks site is worth 300 hits.

Woo, 25,000 hits for a video, impressive? No, not really. Last year I did an animated video that got about 250,000 hits in a day and 500,000 hits in a week. Thats halfway along the third row of the chessboard. The thing is, it didn't count. 500,000 of those hits don't compare to the 25,000 political signatures in the UK, cos that half a million was half a million of porn hits from all over the world.

Quality and relevance counts, and I don't mean in terms of search engine optimisation. That always seems like selling out, smacks of desperation that dilute the signal to noise ratio, like cheating. What kind of traffic do you want on your site. The folk who find my personal blog find it from searching for my name, not because they were searching for something I was writing about*, people who find my music review sites find it cos they are looking for those bands, not because there are other sites writing about those bands, but because there's only me, no one else at the gig is writing about it, SEO is irrelevant if there's no competition.

So what about naked chicks on post-it notes. Whilst I've lost count of how many naked women on draw post-it notes sites there are out there**, mine is the most dedicated to its specific niche. Over the months I've pleaded, begged, bribed and bullied my way to integrity and links. It is an unstoppable mission to get as much traffic as possible, just to demonstrate I can, by my own means.

Remember the other year there was a book called "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" and it kicked off this whole genre of grammar books and people moaning about wee niggly things. That was a women who just decided to write a book and it caught the zeitgeist and got its own section of Waterstones. Likewise, the whole MisLit genre of books, some moany former child abuse victim wrote his book, months later it had taken off and now its a section of Waterstones. How much disbelief do you need to suspend for me to have my own naked image on post-it note section? Just next to the check outs, but before the novelty book section.

So what now? I think I've reached the edges of what's possible online. The next step is getting offline, and thats a variety of possibilities including, but not limited to, freesheet coverage, Sunday supplement coverage, quirky website slot on BBC radio, exhibition in Shoreditch. And all the time me staring wide eyed at the screen thinking "oh dear god, she's going to see this and kill me, or worse, never speak to me again. Oh dear god, what have I done".

There's this bit in one of the first Terry Pratchett books where they do a change the world spell, which grows and grows and alters the world in a small way to make the narative work. Whilst magic isn't real, or if it is that it's merely technology folk don't understand. What I need to do is make the media more accepting of pictures of naked women. Thats not difficult, it just takes a couple of prods. Is naked chicks on post it notes so different to covering The London Naked Bike Ride, or Dr Sketchy's, or the naughty page on ShinyShiny?

*Lie!! if you search for Facebook IQ test, you get it
**You doubt me? Here, here, here, here, here, here