getting noticed

I came late to bloggin' - in Jan 2013 far more blogs were being abandoned than started. If I was keeping a diary, it would be safely unread in a drawer somewhere: putting meanderings on the internet is expecting someone anyone! else to read it. But I learned, before ever The Blob started, that those someones are much less interested / invested in what I have to say than I am. In  the early days, I used to check a) how many words I had typed up to throw out there b) how many pageviews PVs had resulted. I was jesting about my unlikely readers in Ukraine before Ukraine was on the mental map of pretty much anyone in Ireland.

For the longest time, I was sending out more words each day than there were PVs. But sometime recently, that has switched and teatime yesterday, The Blob 'achieved' 3 million PVs: 

while the Blob's word count is a tad over 2.5 million. Those PV stats have gotta be nonsense; or bots and scrapers, rather than real people with eyeballs and a thoughtful disposition. A few years ago, Metafilter alerted me to the ooh.directory of 'active' blogs created by Phil Gyford whom we've met before curating the Pepys Diary online. Gyford's bots are a bit slow [fair enough given that the internet is Large] but they do find Blobs a few hours after they are posted:

which noticed just before lunch yest at 13:00hrs, and that Blob was posted ~5 hours earlier, not 34 minutes. But still, ooh's sort of attention is going to have a much higher proportion of walking talking humans than 253958 somethings whom Blogger clocked as PVing The Blob in August. ooh is pretty good as a distillation of what's happenin' out there. Since Jan 2013 [birth of Blob] so much content has retreated behind paywalls or died for lack of interest or lack of funding that I'm having to talk to real people for social contact.

Today, for example, I am going on a tour of [some of] the Holy Wells of the county in a charabanc full of Heritage enthusiasts. Costs nothing, includes a free lunch, the rain is going to blow through before 10:00, what could possibly go wrong?