Blogging Thoughts

One of the things that I am truly amazed at is the fact that more people read this site from other links. Just this week the feed reader blew through the charts with an amazing amount of readers world wide. Over at Stat Counter they have us hovering around 41,000 new readers but as I talk with many other bloggers you can not count on those numbers as accurate. And I have to agree with them for the most part. Their count does not tabulate in the feeds and web sites that this web site is well known on many other sites all around the world. In all respects, I contribute my work here to Bring It On and To the Center which does not count on my site. My work on both of those sites are picked up by many other sources and read there as well. My work is pretty much out there and a simple Google search of Papamoka proves it out.

One of things I noticed recently was that Reuters had almost 2,700 views of my work over the last thirty days, other sites were in the thousands but just a bit below Reuters readership. I did a little research and this little Worcester based blog is picked up by newspapers all across the country including The Wall Street Journal, The Palm Beach Post, Cox Communications and USA Today. The Chicago Sun Times loves Papamoka and is the second largest link in to Papamoka Straight Talk.

I thank them all for linking in and appreciate the links back. I’m big on linking back to linking in sites and they deserve the traffic back from Papamoka. I personally feel bad because I do not find many of the links till weeks or months later and that is to late in my opinion to thank them honestly enough for linking in. My thoughts are open and available to all and many times I put at the end of my posts to feel free to borrow the latest message. That is after all what the internet is all about, people expressing their thoughts and having their voice heard. Some people do it locally in Worcester and I do it nationally but based in Worcester. No difference in my opinion but people come here time and again to read and I’m very thankful that they do.

A while back I used to write for the Gun Toting Liberal and it was honestly a fun experience. The owner of the site reminded me that my work was viewed by over one million readers in the course of time that I was there. We still talk, he is one of my closest friends along with Mike Jones that also wrote for the Gun Toting Liberal. We were the Three Musketeers in the Bush and Republican lead government gone wrong field day. We had our fun, we all parted ways for multiple reasons but we are all still life long friends.

In blogging these past years, I have made many friends that I have never thought possible and these two people are not the only ones. I could go through my favorites starting with Chell, Ron, Suzanne, Claudia, Jeff and go down the list from there. My point is that there is a unique friendship and bond between each and every link that I put up on Papamoka. I know their writing style and they know mine. None of us would step over the boundaries that would ever harm one another. Do we disagree on many issues, Hell YA! Do we appreciate one another’s opinion and thought, Damn Right We Do! I have no problem making an ass out of myself and my friends on the blogosphere have it covered as well. Nobody is perfect and I am sure as hell not claiming that omnipotent soap box. We are American’s just screaming louder than the rest of the people.

If you are starting or thinking about blogging I have to warn you that it can be addictive! Link up with people you like, people you believe in, and just keep writing your posts. The rest of blogging is about you and having fun with it. Where the actual traffic comes from for your web site and receives is still a guessing game by any counter you use to maintain your website. Just be yourself and post away.

One word of caution to anyone writing a new blog, please use a spell checker. Readers love new opinion, they don’t come back for misspelling or abuse and use of commonly used words. Yes, I am guilty of this abuse but I try to limit it as much as I can and any form of spell checker would have saved my posts. For that matter I should write my posts in MS Word with its grammar checker too! I’m horrible at grammar but people are reading Papamoka Straight Talk anyway! I can’t even estimate the readers worldwide in all of the publications picking this site up but I would like to think that we broke the two million viewer mark this month.

Have fun and enjoy the life of a writer…

Papamoka