I used to worry about being addicted to books. I buy them compulsively, put them on my shelves and never read them. Seven months' of backpacking in New Zealand taught me the inpracticability of actually buying books. I learned to speed read them in the shop and make a note of the titles (to buy them later, which I rarely did). Twenty-odd house removals, lugging books up and down staircases in various European cities, have also curbed my book buying - well, to some extent.
Enter the World Wide Web. This doesn't fill up your bookshelves, doesn't weigh anything, doesn't take up any space. It's fascinating. And then add google. Type in a name, a term, a question and start zapping from site to site. It's compulsive. Impossible to imagine having lived so long without it. Type in someone's e-mail address and discover he's got on an online diary. Read it avidly every day for a month, unable to stop yourself, feeling like an online prowler. Realise that this isn't healthy and you'd better wean yourself off it. Come to your senses momentarily and decide that it's far better to have your own online diary. Via google, you bump into blogger.com and in three easy steps it's all history; you're online with your own journal. I'm hooked. Then you discover you can dip into other people's journals. And before you know where you are, you're addicted to that too.
And then, you suddenly stumble across something called blogpatrol, offering to track the visitors coming to your site. Well, there have only been two and one of them was me but if I follow the site IP, will I find out who the other one is? And this healthy, to be snooping on my visitors like this? Which would you, dear reader (s) prefer, to have me crawling silently through your online diary or to have me track you down via the blog patrol in stealth mode? And who else is out there watching me indulge in this bloggaddiction?
I'm sure there must be a 12-step programme to deal with all this. But I don't want to know about it yet!
3 comments:
I don't know how to do the IP address thing. I found you by, when you commented on my blog, it said, "JJ says...". I clicked on the JJ and it took me to your blog profile, and from there I could click into your blog.
Totally agree with the overall point. Of the eight blogs I read every day, four are friends, and four are people I have never met, but am beginning to feel I know.
Here's something weird. I have another blog which I got to devote to theatre. However, I've never written a theatre word in it, so I started using it as a dumping ground for pictures. Anything I needed to clean up for my regular blog, went there first. And stayed.
Well, I seem to have about 25 regular readers to my blog. Or, should I say, maybe 8 regulars and 17 randoms a day. The weird thing is -- that other blog, which I never advertised and never checked -- ALSO has about 25 visitors a day. How bizarre. The random artwork blog is easily keeping pace with my carefully thought-out one.
Doh!
:)
Blogpatrol shows you the IP numbers, mostly not very interesting but it can tell you where someone works if they happen to blog from the office... Can be bad publicity if they've just called the Prime Minister a miser. I find your blog quite addictive, by the way. Very inspirational. You've definitely got several good books in you just waiting to come out. (Let me know when they're published and I'll buy them!)
I'd love to talk more about that. Send me your email address. I'm realrachel@aol.com (or theatredirector@hotmail if that bounces).
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