Thoughts on Blogs

I have had a number of blogs through the years. My first was a blog dedicated to the adoption of and parenting of four older Russian children I had adopted. I actually won an award with the one from Yahoo in 2000! That was both unexpected and personally rewarding. However the cost of the hosting grew to exceed my finances.

I moved to MySpace and ended up in a church war, with my account hacked by haters and then deleted by "Tom". Yeah, never take on the pastor of another church and point out the error of his ways!l Yeah, the largest church in the entire area. He could not attack me publicly, so got me killed instead. As for Tom, when he sent me a friend request on FaceBook, I happily clicked the "Nope, you suck" button.

So, I moved to Blogger in 2004 and what followed were several years of the same, I lost the first five blogs and hundreds of posts - probably by the same people behind my MySpace death. But, I got smarter as time passed and Blogger was not exactly a great deal of help through this travail.

I recently consolidated all of my blogs under Blogger and this account. And it is darn interesting to see the statistics!

This blog runs about 497 readers daily. In order of sheer numbers: Russia, USA, India, China, Germany, Switzerland (hi cousins!), Malaysia, Philippines (Rissa!) and Brazil.

Diariuo di un Padre was a hidden site since I created in November of last year. It is only intended for my now estranged daughter, actually as a gift to her so as to remember a brief point in her life - with sadness and joy. But, since she seems bent on killing me in her life, I made it public and gave her mother the address to pass on to her. I am certain she did not pass it on, I should think the daughter I know would contact me, if her mother had. In any event, I was amazed to find that in one month of being public, it continues to hold at 30 +/- readers a day. The stories are meaningless to anyone but her, so I am clueless what people are finding in it to keep them reading.

Same is basically true of Lettere a una Figlia, the follow-on to my diary for my daughter. Although it seems to mostly deal with me dealing with the mess daughter has made of my life, so far. But, this situation has been extremely hard for me to deal with. And, I have been amazed to find that just slightly over one hundred a day are reading this blog! What the heck? Perhaps a heart's anguish is more interesting to people than I would have thought! Yeah, watch a Christian sociopath -soap opera- crater himself over having his heart ripped out and eaten before his dying eyes..... Good reading apparently for Russians and Chinese. Go figure.

As for my father's site, I took it down because I had used it to resolve my angst at his life and death. He was a man of mysteries to me and it took that little blog for me to sort out my feelings. I killed it when I was able to come to grips with life. But, I actually got emails to put it back up! Seems that amongst German's, first person experiences by someone whom had been in on the leading edge of technical creation during the war as well as surrounding the entire issue of the camps, is wanted! Sure surprised me. It still has a strong readership.

Someone recently was arguing to me that the entire "blog" experience was dead, dying and over.

Seems not....