After four days in Grid London's non-existent alternate universe, what have we learned?
1) You hate change.
I went on a "Change Management" training course at work once, where I was told the bleeding obvious by a smile in a dress. However, this week I've completely ignored the bleeding obvious and imposed change mysteriously, suddenly and without explanation. One minute there was a normal London-based eclectic blog (in grey), and the next I replaced it with a commercial green and orange nightmare. No wonder so many of you entered the "denial", "protest" and "retribution" stages. Sorry. But don't worry, my defection to the Grid London darkside was only a temporary aberration.
2) You hate green.
What I wrote this week didn't matter at all to some of you, because you couldn't cope with the green. About a quarter of my commenters, on Monday and Tuesday at least, ignored what I'd written and just gibbered about the green. I toneddown the shade slightly on Wednesday, and we heard less about it. But the message is clear - if you want lots of comments (in the short term at least), change your background colour to something upsetting. Message to my RSS audience: Yes, the main blog's been green all this week. You never noticed did you? Actually, in this case that may have been a good thing.
3a) You hate vacuous commercial blogging.
Yeah, me too. That was the point of my Grid London exercise. Meaningless glib posts full of fawning uncritical praise - hate them. Effortless swathes of cut and paste plagiarism - hate them. Blogs littered with references to every press release some PR guru suggests - hate them. And you hate them too, so you begged me to stop. 3b) You hate unfunny attempts at blog satire.
Yeah me too. One day's usually enough to get the point across, so stretching out a parody over a week can get rather tiresome. Oh the agonies of reading a once-enjoyable blog and watching it slip slowly away from you. I bet you cheered when you clicked in today and saw this blog was grey again.
4) Some of you jump to conclusions too quickly.
Several commenters this week jumped to the conclusion that Grid London was real. Er, no. Do please try to develop a healthy scepticism, because unquestioning belief in everything you read on a blog can be extremely bad for your credibility. And some people evidently believed that I had in mind specific blogs and websites upon which my week-long withering assault was based. Let me assure you that this was not the case, and that my focus was very much on a broad soulless genre rather than particular individual exemplars.
5) Some of you are new round here.
And you newbies may have taken my apparent change of direction more seriously than most. I've got into trouble before for not being up-front about my sarcasm. I often play my blog straight, when in fact I'm taking the piss mercilessly. I've debated whether I ought to use an "irony flag" to signal satirical spoofery, but instead I prefer to rely on the intelligence of my readership to spot the difference. You'll get the hang of me eventually. Unless you've already buggered off pledging never to return, that is.
6) If Grid London were real, and paying me per click-through, I'd be rich.
Usually when I post a link on my blog, only a few of you click on it. Maybe about 5% of readers, that sort of proportion, and rarely more than 10%. But my prolonged and shameless promotion of Grid London this week has whacked that percentage up to more like half. I've inspired nearly 2000 target site conversions since Monday, and for that level of interest I'm sure a healthy Paypal balance would have been coming my way. And you lot are a discerning audience for heavens sake, not a bunch of easily-led muppets. Maybe monetised blogging could pay, after all. But, trust me on this, I have no intention of starting down that path.
7) Even lazy content attracts comments.
Wednesday's "end of the world" post was in fact exactly the same text I'd have posted anyway, even if I hadn't been having a scary green week. Admittedly it wasn't quite the cut and paste I claimed, but I bet that reproducing the genuine Daily Mail article would have gathered a similarly large number of comments. No effort on my part whatsoever, but generating the illusion of intelligent conversation. Whereas Tuesday's "trouser-buying" post took ages to write, and yet not one of you commented specifically on my purchasing adventures. Why did I bother?
8) Even detestable content attracts visitors.
"It would be interesting to see how visitor numbers to this blog have declined this week," commented Michael yesterday. And yes, I was expecting exactly that. But no, quite the opposite occurred. Visitor numbers this week are actually up by approximately 15% on last week, and my total number of RSS subscriptions is at a record high. Maybe some people actually appreciated the well-targeted humour. Or maybe they only kept coming back to see if the content could get any worse. Beats me.
9) The only constant on diamond geezer is change.
This is not a blog about London. I know it felt like that last month when I droned on and on about the same short stretch of road for two weeks. And I do talk about the Olympics a lot, and the Underground, and lots of alternative London-y stuff. But there's plenty of other content here too, much of which is not even vaguely geographical. diamond geezer is a blog about whatever takes my fancy, which is not necessarily what takes yours. I write about what I like, not what you want. Get used to it.
10) When you click to read this blog in the morning, you never quite know what you're going to get.
And, after six years, that's still the way I like it.
Grid London - Lessons Learned
to signal satirical spoofery, but instead I prefer to rely on the intelligence of my readership to spot the difference. You'll get the hang of me eventually. Unless you've already buggered off pledging never to return, that is.
