Message In A Bottle
Over dinner last week with a fellow blogger, the conversation came around, naturally enough, to blog stuff, notably stats and comments. I have nowhere near the traffic nor the exposure that Petite has, so I still have the luxury of being able to look at who comes to this website - not so much in terms of numbers (although it is always satisfying to know that people are reading this stuff) but in terms of geography.
When I began this blog back in 2003, I did so because I spent a lot of time writing about baseball in a very private medium (e-mail) and it semed to make sense to throw some of the stuff out there into cyberspace to see if it might find a wider audience. At the same time, the subject matter gave me a kind of built-in inferiority complex: the English guy trying his hand at writing about the quintessential American game. However, sowly but surely people started coming here, reading the posts and even leaving comments, and every comment I got from American baseball fans was a kind of validation for me - people who know about baseball thinking that my random musings are worth reading.
But beyond the validation inherent in the comments, there are also social and geographical aspects. The comments people have left or the e-mails they have sent have allowed me to meet - figuratively and in some cases literally - people from all over the world that I would otherwise have never had any contact with, and it's always interesting to see who comes here, how they got here and where they're from. The US, Canada, Brazil, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, the UK - this little corner of the interweb is a regular United Nations. But despite the global reach of the Baseball Desert, I have to admit to being intrigued over the past few weeks by one very local visitor - local in this case being a couple of miles from my home town - who has been stopping by the blog regularly and reading it, lots of it.
So, if the Mystery Blog Reader from Rochdale who uses Zen as their ISP is reading this, would you please make yourself known, either in the comments or via e-mail? I'm curious to know how somebody from just down the road arrives at the Baseball Desert, and whether they like what they see.
When I began this blog back in 2003, I did so because I spent a lot of time writing about baseball in a very private medium (e-mail) and it semed to make sense to throw some of the stuff out there into cyberspace to see if it might find a wider audience. At the same time, the subject matter gave me a kind of built-in inferiority complex: the English guy trying his hand at writing about the quintessential American game. However, sowly but surely people started coming here, reading the posts and even leaving comments, and every comment I got from American baseball fans was a kind of validation for me - people who know about baseball thinking that my random musings are worth reading.
But beyond the validation inherent in the comments, there are also social and geographical aspects. The comments people have left or the e-mails they have sent have allowed me to meet - figuratively and in some cases literally - people from all over the world that I would otherwise have never had any contact with, and it's always interesting to see who comes here, how they got here and where they're from. The US, Canada, Brazil, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, the UK - this little corner of the interweb is a regular United Nations. But despite the global reach of the Baseball Desert, I have to admit to being intrigued over the past few weeks by one very local visitor - local in this case being a couple of miles from my home town - who has been stopping by the blog regularly and reading it, lots of it.
So, if the Mystery Blog Reader from Rochdale who uses Zen as their ISP is reading this, would you please make yourself known, either in the comments or via e-mail? I'm curious to know how somebody from just down the road arrives at the Baseball Desert, and whether they like what they see.
posted by Iain at
16:28
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