It's been an odd time on diamond geezer of late. At the start of the month I went for a protracted ramble up the East London line. Then I left you blogless during an unprecedented week-long hiatus (I'd previously posted every day for the last three years - Christmas excepted). And most recently I've provided you with yet another week of travelogue, this time telling you all about where I was when I wasn't here. You could call it concentrated psychogeography, you could call it excessive introspection or you could just call it boring, whatever.
If instead I treat June (so far) as an experiment in how to lose readers, here's how I'm doing: • In my nine days writing about the East London line I shed 20% of my visitors. Perhaps that's not surprising. The area's off the beaten track for most of you, and nine consecutive days of similar-ish content can get a bit much, can't it? • In my post-less week away I shed another 25% of my visitors. That sounds fairly dramatic, but at least some people kept coming back even when they'd been told there was nothing new to see. Creatures of habit, you are. • I got less visitors last Saturday than on any day since Christmas. How quickly we fade away. • After I came back from the Hebrides, visitor numbers stayed lower. Last Tuesday, for example, less people turned up to read something than had read nothing the Tuesday before. • You were only half as interested in my Hebridean photographs as you had been in my shots of Shoreditch. Perhaps you pay more attention to somewhere you've actually been than to somewhere you'll probably never visit. • I've had roughly the same number of comments this week, when I've posted tons, as I did last week, when I posted nothing. Makes you wonder. • I've had roughly the same number of visitors this week, when I've posted tons, as I did last week, when I posted nothing. Maybe I should take a break more often...
And yes, I know not all my readers are like this (bless you, some of you would come back every day even if all I posted were photos of kittens). But this short-term decline is the pattern across the board for my readership in general. Focus repeatedly on something they find dull, or stop writing anything at all, and off they go in search of pastures new. It's a fickle world, blogging - stars rise, stars fall and stars fade away into a black hole never to return. Thankfully most blogs, mine included, are resilient enough to survive a few weeks of atypical behaviour.
So now there's just one week of June left. Maybe I should take the hint and go back to writing a more eclectic mix of stuff, not all of it location-based, just to keep my audience happy. Except, as you've probably noticed, I write my blog for me, not for you. diamond geezer is a record of what I've done, where I've been and what I've been thinking, as well as a chance to practice writing about things I'd not otherwise get out of my system. And if you enjoy reading all this stuff too then that's just a bonus, for which thank you. Hell, I'd still be blogging even if I only had ten visitors a day... (hmmm, do you think a whole month off sometime would see to that?)
