There Are No Readers, Any More

I try to make my titles allusive, but so gently allusive as to be merely nagging. For example, "Golden Years" was meant to stick David Bowie's 1975 song of that name in your head, if it could be stuck. And...scanning May, June, July and August, no other real examples.

At any rate, the above title gently alludes to Edna St. Vincent Millay's 1940 poem, "There Are No Islands, Any More: Lines Written in Passion and in Deep Concern for England, France and My Own Country." Vigorous Internet searches (vigorous considering that I am ever-so-slightly hung over) seem to demonstrate that Millay coined this oft-used and rarely-attributed phrase. I own this poem, printed and bound by itself, in what I have just discovered is a stated first edition.

But, as Arlo Guthrie says, that's not what I came here to talk about. I'm here to talk about blog readership. I read an actual statistic about this once, but I have no idea where or what it was, so I'm going to make something up. Warning: statistics not actually to scale. Statistics are fanciful representations. To wit: in 2002 there were 5,000 blogs, of which perhaps 50 were mommy blogs with a side of culture. In 2007 there are 37 bazillion blogs, of which 3 bazillion are mommy blogs with a side of culture. I started mine in 2005. If I had started just a little earlier, people would have had a vastly greater mathematical chance of happening upon my blog. Once they happened upon, they might have looked around. They might have bookmarked me, even though I am not as funny as Dooce or Finslippy. They might have gotten in the habit of reading my blog.

Now, even on the best traffic days of my life--the sideways refrigerator picture, last November courtesy of the Nablopomo randomizer, the day that Dawn actually dropped by to see my list of junk--I get ten or fifteen sets of eyeballs, and none of them ever comes back. I don't think it's because I'm so boring (although this post has clearly gone on way too long); I think it's because they already have enough blogs to read. I certainly do.

This week, Sitemeter informs me, I had an average of four readers a day, and I can tell you exactly who they were: Ergo, MissWG, my husband, and someone who found me by searching for such things as:

"What kind of hat does Holly Golightly wear?"
"First Communion Trunk Show Miami""Gotta Run For Shelter"
"Anna Karenina Watering Place"

and my favorite,

"How to find Aspergum."