Six Years of Grand Strategy!

Wednesday

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It is always a pleasure to mark another anniversary of Grand Strategy: The View of Oregon. While I remain a thoroughly marginal figure with very few readers, my efforts have not been entirely in vain. After all, you’re reading this.

A surprising number of blogs appear to be about nothing but blogging, statistics, attracting an readership, responding to comments, and so on. This is incredibly tedious, and I don’t know how they’ve gotten the subscribers and comments that these sites usually feature. (Maybe it’s mostly friends and family, or maybe its some unseen connection to the mainstream media.) There is nothing quite so tiresome as to hear writers talking about writing, or to hear the resentful talking about their resentments. Sometimes the two are one and the same. Thus I limit myself to one post per year in which I vent on the mundane details of writing this blog, so as not to presume too much upon my readers’ patience. My previous anniversary postings include:

● Grand Strategy Celebrates One Year!

● Grand Strategy Celebrates Two Years!

● Grand Strategy Celebrates Three Years!

● Four More Years!

● Five Years!

That I have continued my efforts is a reflection of intrinsic interest; many blogs are started, and most fizzle, whether or not the writers gain an audience. Given that 95 percent of blogs are abandoned, that fewer men than women blog, that most blogs are written by individuals in their 20s, I am something of a statistical anomaly by dint of pure perseverance. I continue to produce posts, albeit at a slower rate than before, and because I still have plenty of ideas I don’t see myself running out of things to say any time soon.

I don’t blog because I expect a book deal to come out of my efforts, or because I expect to have a million hits a day, or because I think I’m going to be interviewed on television or by the New York Times (though, honestly, I would prefer the Financial Times). On the contrary, blogging is much more likely to bring ridicule than fame and fortune, as others express consternation as to why one bothers at all.

It is interesting to compare the nay-sayers at opposite ends of the spectrum. There are the working class nay-sayers who can’t understand why someone with a full time job would use their spare time to write a blog rather than to enjoy the short space of leisure to which their employment entitles them between the end of the work day and the onset of sleep. On the other hand, there are the privileged nay-sayers, those who have already come into a position of influence, fame, or money, who cannot understand why those on the bottom continue to struggle for some recognition when — obviously — they are doomed to eternal anonymity.

Nay-sayers aside, it is with a certain Schadenfreude that marginal individuals like myself can look upon the near catastrophic failure in the publishing industry today, even if the mainstream media continues to dominate public opinion on the internet now instead of through print. Those who assumed that the publishing industry would go on as it has always gone on have been forced to face hard truths about newspapers and magazines in a digital age. Media outlets that can come to be social institutions have had to change their way of doing business, and, as I have remarked elsewhere, no one should cry for the papers.

I write not to fill column inches or to sell soap, but because I have something to say. I earn nothing from my efforts, but I would be writing this material anyway, without regard to readers or remuneration, so by putting this material that I would have written anyway on a blog, a few people read it who would not otherwise have read it. A few ideas are shared.

A sincere “thank you” to the handful of readers who have returned, and for whom I now write. There is more to come.

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Five Years!

Tuesday

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Today I celebrate the fifth anniversary of this blog. I hope you will join me in toasting the end of another year and the beginning of a new year of blogging and ideas.

When I started this blog it was something of a spontaneous amusement, an impulse. My posts were short, simple and required little or no research. I purposefully wrote about matters that interest me while avoiding the “important” ideas I kept in my notebooks for book projects, which I saw at that time the primary beneficiaries of my intellectual effort.

Over time, the blog posts expanded, became longer and more detailed, and required more research. I still save aside material I plan to put into manuscripts, but the topics with which I began — mostly strategy and civilization — now have a much higher profile in my thought and are at least equal beneficiaries of my intellectual effort. In retrospect, I’m glad that I started to write about civilization here, as these thoughts have expanded over time and have pushed me unexpectedly in interesting directions.

With my posts getting longer, I have been posting far less often — once or twice a week. I’ve also been blogging at Tumblr, which has a very different demographic (meaning that I reach a different crowd there than I do by blogging here on WordPress). Also, in the past year I’ve had posts appear on the Transhumanity blog and on Paul Gilster’s Centauri Dreams blog (where, by the way, another post by me is scheduled to appear this coming Friday).

Over the past year the hits to my blog took a major hit, and I have gone from an average of nearly two thousand hits per day to an average of around four hundred or fewer per day. Interestingly, most of the lost traffic seems to have been image searches, so the few of you who come here to read and to reflect is perhaps about the same number as in earlier years.

I guess you could say that I write for my handful of subscribers — those few who return to read, spending precious and irretrievable moments of life to find something in what I have spent precious and irretrievable moments of life to write. That is a fair bargain — a part of my life for a part of your life — and as there are few fair bargains in the world today, I should count myself fortunate (which I do).

Nietzsche wrote, “…everywhere else I have my readers — nothing but first-rate intellects and proven characters, trained in high positions and duties; I even have real geniuses among my readers. In Vienna, in St. Petersburg, in Stockholm, in Copenhagen, in Paris, in New York — everywhere I have been discovered; but not in the shallows of Europe, Germany.” (Ecce Homo)

Nietzsche could perhaps speak in the plural; I must speak in the singular. I may not have readers (in the plural) in these celebrated cultural capitals of the world, but I do know from my statistics (which show repeat visits) that I have a reader in Invercargill, Southland, New Zealand, and in Mercer Island, Washington; in Washington D.C. at the Catholic University of America, and a reader in Groningen in the Netherlands; I have a reader in that ancient center of Western civilization, Greece, and in the ancient centers of learning in Paris, France, and Oxford, England; I have a reader in the Balkans, in Belgrade, Serbia, and elsewhere in the Balkans in Skopje, Macedonia; I even have a reader in Hillsboro, Oregon, just minutes away from my office, as well as a reader elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest, in Vancouver, British Columbia.

To all of you — those who return, and those who stop by only a single time — my thanks.

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Four More Years!

Monday

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Today marks the four year anniversary of Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon, so I would like to invite my readers to celebrate the occasion with me. And I have been given a gift for my four year anniversary. In the US, the traditional four year anniversary gift is linen and silk (elsewhere in the Anglophone world, it’s fruit and flowers in the UK). Well, I didn’t receive linen or silk, fruit or flowers, and, no, I didn’t get the brand new Maserati GranTurismo MC Stradale that’s on my wish list, but I did have my statistics for visits recently pass the one million hits mark, which is the best gift for which I could reasonably hope.

You know you want one, so don’t try to pretend otherwise.

My hits on Statcounter turned over a million on 28 October, while my hits on WordPress turned over a million on 30 October. Statcounter obviously counts a little differently, as I started it a year after I started this blog. I racked up about 30,000 hits the first year, so the Statcounter tallies don’t even include this first year’s worth of hits.

Also, Statcounter shows that my Tumblr blog only gets about one percent of the hits that my WordPress blog receives. I don’t doubt that there is a big difference in traffic between the two, but I know that a lot of Tumblr hits go uncounted because there are times when a post gets “liked” or “reblogged” on Tumblr when Statcounter has not recorded any hits to the post in question. On the other hand, the hits that Statcounter does record to my Tumblr blog come with a lot more detail than the recorded hits to my WordPress blog. For example, Statcounter will sometimes show me what search engine was used to find a post, what search terms were used, and what position in the search returns my post had. This has been a fascinating feature to me, and a surprising one. Some Tumblr posts that have never tallied a hit earlier through Statcounter come up at the number one search return for a particular set of terms.

What does a million hits really mean? Well, about 90 percent of all hits that this blog receives are the result of Google image searches, so it’s mostly people looking for pictures. So a million hits means that maybe a hundred thousand people visited for something other than a photograph. Of that hundred thousand, probably only one in ten stayed to read something, so a million hits probably means about 10,000 readers — about one percent of the total. Still, that’s not bad. As I’ve mentioned before, when you start from zero, everything above zero is pure gravy. I am a long way short of those websites that get a million hits in an hour, but I am a long way ahead in readership compared to before this blog.

For the “one percenters” out there who paused to read, possibly to reflect, occasionally to respond, and perhaps also to point and laugh, you have my thanks and my gratitude. I’ll keep writing, and I hope you’ll keep reading.

Fate willing, I look forward to four more years.

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