Friday, March 13, 2015

Success




I complain about, nudge, satirize, and attempt to mutilate my lack of fame as a blogger as much as I can while still remaining insightful and entertaining. And when I say insightful and entertaining, I mean to me. Your mileage will vary. For instance, you might not be enjoying this at all right now even though I am. This at first seems inexplicable until we determine that it is only because you are reading this wrong.

Don't feel bad, you'll get the hang of it. I believe in you!

Anyway, I tend to take it that my 34 regular readers, oops, 33 regular readers (I startled one and they bolted! Blogger pro tip: try not to look directly into your readers' eyes), signal a certain lack of success in my blogging ambitions.

Well, maybe yes, maybe no. You see, I have begun to study the blog. I am growing a new sense for just how popular blogs, true blogs, really are.

For our illustration today I would like us to take a look at my favorite movie with a blog in it: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. In The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel Judi Dench's character Evelyn writes a blog about her experiences relocating to India. She informs us about this blog in the movie when she tells her worried son about it as she's leaving. "Read my blog." She says in what appears to be the entirety of her blog marketing plan. 

Interestingly this threadbare marketing plan is actually bigger than average for blogs in movies.

It goes well. We get to hear passages from her blog occasionally in voiceover during the movie. It is a nicely written, interesting blog.

The blog is a small part of the movie and not much is made of it. It's a nice little detail, establishing Evelyn's vim, her blossoming chutzpah, and it's a device, letting us hear some of her seniory perspective in a modern context.

I don't know what the average non blogger thought of this. Probably nothing. If some small part of their brain gave detail to this fictional India travel blog, maybe it would say something like this: "The blog had a small audience of a few hundred modestly interested people." But any actual blogger, of which, as far as I can tell from the available statistics, there are somewhere between 23 and half a billion, can tell you exactly how many regular readers there were to Judi Dench's blog.

Zero.

Yes, her son and a couple relatives and friends skimmed it occasionally until they forgot its name or lost the link to it. If we insist on including them then we can say she had four readers.

But trust me, we're being way too generous. I like zero.

And you know what? In the scheme of things, I'm pretty sure zero is pretty good, at least about average.

But that's easy for me to say, sitting here in the catbird seat with my 33 readers. Oops, 32 readers.

Top of the mountain.






4 comments:

  1. I don't recall your having referenced the movie Being Julia. That blogger SUFFERED for her work and made lots of good food in the process.
    Just saying...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ARE YOU SAYING THAT I HAVEN'T SUFFERED FOR MY WORK! I SUFFER! I SUFFER MORE THAN...

      Oh, sorry. I don't know what came over me. I believe you mean the movie Julie and Julia, for those keeping score at home, as Being Julia takes place in the twenties (I think) and involves poetry instead of blogging, though I guess that's all sort of the same.

      Anyway, in the many early drafts of this post Julie and Julia came up a lot, but it all got emotional, so I removed those references. Nevertheless I will now take this opportunity to note a few things.

      1. Julie, the blogger, in the movie, had a marketing plan that appeared to consist entirely of posting her blog to the Internet. THAT'S IT!

      2. How do we know she made good food? It always seemed to be getting burned or dropping on the floor.

      3. As I refine my highly restrictive definitions for what a blog is I am still on the fence as to whether a "stunt blog" (i.e. one year to cook all the Julia Child recipes) counts. I'll admit that it probably does.

      4. Did you know that someone did a blog where they watched the movie Julie and Julia everyday for a year and blogged about it? True story. I actually found that that blog was easier to find on the Internet than Julie's original blog, which is probably simple enough to locate even though I still haven't managed it.

      5. The Julia Child parts are way better than the Julie parts. Just saying...

      6. Julie, a blogger, became famous, which I consider totally unrealistic.

      7. Being Julia, starring Annette Bening, actually sounds like a pretty good movie.

      8. Thank you for your comment. We sure are fascinated by comments around here, and are not above handing out bespoke blog posts in response!

      9. Nevertheless, if you want to improve your comments, which is entirely optional, they should be 15% more flattering. Totally optional.

      Delete
  2. I like anyone named Judi with an i.

    My ex husband's third wife had a blog about her being a slave married to a master Dom. I used to read it because, as the mother of 2 minor children who were court ordered to visit with him, I worried about their safety. I outed myself when I commented about some negative thing that she wrote about me...That blog was somewhat pornographic and it was necessary to belong to a Dom/sub lifestyle online community to see it. I was, as was to be expected, I suppose, booted out and blocked from returning when my SUBterfuge (pun indented) was revealed. Apparently pretending to be submissive in order to protect one's children from premature exposure to sexual situations is a No-no in that world.

    I have a blog on tumblr called "Write". I ironically don't write in it very often.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I am having a challenging time coming up with an appropriate response to this comment. The first sentence seems very on topic. I'm not sure why you like anyone named Judi with an i, but I have what I believe to be an excellent guess. To the second part I will say I'm sorry. That sounds unfortunate. And finally, re your blog called "write" I am wondering if you think it will be a movie anytime soon?

      Delete

If you were wondering, yes, you should comment. Not only does it remind me that I must write in intelligible English because someone is actually reading what I write, but it is also a pleasure for me since I am interested in anything you have to say.

I respond to pretty much every comment. It's like a free personalized blog post!

One last detail: If you are commenting on a post more than two weeks old I have to go in and approve it. It's sort of a spam protection device. Also, rarely, a comment will go to spam on its own. Give either of those a day or two and your comment will show up on the blog.