It’s because I like blogging (most of the time, at least) that I do it. I just don’t feel comfortable monetizing this place; that would make it a job to me, and I can’t do enough rant…er, high-quality posts to keep more than my core of about 10 dozen readers.

I’ll definitely try to be in Vegas again this year. Last year was simply a blast, even if I jet-lagged real bad because I ended up taking a red-eye in.

S. Weasel said on March 13th, 2008 at 10:23:

I wonder if most people really do keep up via feed readers. I’d love to see some numbers on that.

I tried a couple of feed readers way back, but I prefer visiting my favorites manually.

Let’s see if I can throw up some numbers and make them stick. Not including me, I’ve got 76 subscribers to my feed as of yesterday (that’s solid; I force everybody through FeedBurner thanks to the FeedBurner replacement plugin).

I normally don’t do anything beyond the total number of unique visitors, but StatCounter usually reports about 200 “unique visitors” (more when I get a spike, less on weekends). Some of them do check in from various feed readers, some of them show up for (now-erased) pictures, some due to AOL’s cacheing are reported as a “unique visitor” every time they load a fresh page, and some who don’t enable cookies get reported as “unique visitors” every time they load a fresh page. Throwing out all that duplication, and throwing in the FeedBurner crowd, I probably have 120 or so readers.

Those stats also confirm there are those, like you, that surf in and out. I’ve got a funny story about that. Back when this thing was on Blogspot, I “stickied” a post regarding an attempt to stick an ethanol mandate at the top, with a note at the top of the post to check below for fresh posts. The Cheddarsphere’s blogfather, Charlie Sykes (yes, THAT Charlie Sykes, radio talk show host and author), chose that time frame to redo his blogroll, and because he thought I hadn’t been writing new stuff, he dropped me. Needless to say, I’m about the only person who survived wearing the Sykes Cement Overshoes because he showed up here to apologize, put me back on post-haste, and has kept me on since.

I tried a couple of feed readers way back, but I prefer visiting my favorites manually.

Either way your over all point as was Mark’s is that you have to blog because you love it. It’s kind of like playing music. If you love doing it, it really doesn’t matter if you make any money at all. If you don’t love it then its just another job no matter how much money you make.

Hope you can join us again this year.

Blog on!
Rick Calvert
CEO & Co-founder
BlogWorld & New Media Expo