Thursday, February 21, 2008

Now I feel all warm and fuzzy

This was just supposed to be the opening for this week's Freaky Friday. Only it got kind of long, so I decided that it needed to be a post all by itself. I will still try to do the Freaky Friday thing a bit later.

Okay, so my husband is a serious blogger. He is under the delusion that someday this silly stuff is going to make him some real money. That's what he thinks about a lot of things, and he's usually wrong. Anyway, I don't know if he enjoys the blogging anymore, but he's seriously obsessed with it and won't stop doing it even though it upsets me very much. And I was already pretty upset to start with.

One of the things that he does is submit absolutely everything that he has ever written to Digg and Fark and a bunch of other places like that. Not that this takes as much time as actually writing posts, but it does take some time, and it adds up. So he gets a lot of Diggs and some Farks and some other stuff and that one time he made the front page of Fark. For all of this effort he makes about a dollar and a half per day, and once in a while he writes a post for someone and makes about ten dollars. I'm thinking that if he does this during every spare moment of his the day, he might make about half of the money that we spend eating lunch.

Anyway, I don't do any of that. Blogging is supposed to be fun. I think some people make money blogging, but for the most part, that ship has sailed. You have to be in the right place and the right time for that sort of thing to happen, and we weren't. For the most part, if you just sit around trying to think of ways to make money, it just isn't going to work out. Sometimes you think of something that helps you or helps someone you know, and while you helping yourself you might as well see if other people are interested in what you're doing or what you've made, and sometimes this becomes a business opportunity. And sometimes you are very lucky and make enough money that you can quit your job. But even then, when you have a good idea that could help people, it just usually doesn't work out like that.

So I have this blog, which I don't think will ever make any real money, and it is way too much work to get a blog to make even pocket change. So I don't read books on how to increase traffic to my blog and all of that. And I don't submit stuff to Digg and Fark and all of that. And if I ever do submit anything to Digg or Fark or something like that, I'm certainly not going to submit every single thing that I write, unless I cut way back on writing.

Anyway, the thing about Digg and Fark and such isn't necessarily that you wrote something really cool. It's just that you've found something really cool. Maybe the really cool thing is something you wrote, or maybe it's just something you happened to come across while surfing the web. So you can find an amateur movie review from some college guy who got sneak preview passes to some movie you've really been looking forward to, or you really like someone's post on the greatest vacation spot, or whatever. And you think that's just so cool, and you think that other people will think that it's cool, so you submit it to Digg or whatever. Or you can have a whole blog of stuff that you didn't even write. You can just copy or link to something you found, and as long as you give credit and you weren't asked not to do that, it's probably okay. Flattery will get you...well, as least a word of appreciation.

Okay, so I have a link on this site, which I don't think I'd ever heard of before, and I don't think that I know this person. And I'm pretty sure that the post doesn't really fit in with the rest of it. But there it is, and it was submitted to Digg and got five Diggs.

Isn't that sweet?

On the same day I also found out that my post about going to the state fair was copied and translated into German. I'm afraid that I don't get why, and it wasn't that good of a post, but it's still kind of cool.

There was some other stuff I found that were supposed to have links to my blog, but then they either just didn't seem to work or they had been deleted. Maybe someone linked to my posts because of the name, without actually reading them, and then later decided they just didn't fit.

3 comments:

DD said...

I can't imagine being obsessed with blogging, it's just fun, & it's interesting to read what other people get up to.

dmarks said...

It is a lot of fun, and there are a bunch of nice people, too. I used to frequent a tech board, slashdot, where everyone tried to be as nasty to each other as possible. That grew old quickly.

The Absurdist said...

I am totally obsessed with blogging. I am about to get my blog up and running for my corporate site so I can start publishing my customer relationship management stuff.